Item — HN Reader

Sounds like prison, but the result was interesting. When I was laid off, and decided to take a month before looking. There were a lot of "life housekeeping" tasks that I decided to do. Looking back I'd recommend to anybody looking to change jobs to try your best to take some time between them, it gives you a different perspective on life when you don't have to worry about a job. It's like a short early retirement. I think you would need a minimum of 3 weeks to really realize the effect.

Something else about those tasks they mentioned, this is how I procrastinate. When I'm really disengaged with something I really don't want to do, I end up mopping the floors, doing laundry, or some other mundane task I don't like doing. Only to feel bad about the procrastination later. When you're intentionally taking time away from something that consumes so much of your life like work, priorities rearrange pretty quickly. I stopped drinking as much on weekends, and my sleep schedule adjusted in a way where I was waking up much earlier because I wasn't staying up all night trying to squeeze as much "free time" before work the next day.

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I took off 6 weeks between jobs recently. It was my first time switching jobs after 13 years with one employer, and the longest time I've spent not working or in school in my life. My goal was to get bored: do everything I could and then run out of things to do. I failed! I had so much more I wanted to do before my 6 weeks were up.

I tried that; first I toyed with the idea of taking a 6 or 12 month sabattical, but then life happened and I couldn't afford to lose the income for that long. Then I settled on a month between jobs, but the new job was desperate so we agreed on me going there one day a week.

But the one day workweeks were still nice; I got a big lego set as a going away gift from my previous employer so I spent a lot of time on that.

I have the same tendency to fixate on small, relatively unimportant tasks when faced with unrewarding difficult work. The technique I’ve used to channel this to my benefit is to “take a break” from such work by accomplishing mundane tasks, which tends to help me feel more overly productive about a work session.

This doesn't work for everyone. There is nothing that makes me worry more about a job than not having one. :)

That's why you have the other job lined up and the start date signed. It's the hang time while you're swinging between branches, it's not jumping off a tree to nowhere and thinking that'll be relaxing.

Yeah, after I found a job I pushed out my start date as far as possible. Had another 3 weeks with absolutely not a care in the world