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by r00t4ccess 1626 days ago
I have been off for two weeks and I know how you feel. I have all this free time, but in the back of my mind I know I don't have that much time. In a fourteen day span its not really practical to pick up something that will be a long term time commitment seeing as I am back at work tomorrow. I just took things I was already doing and spent more time on them. I read a few books, spent more time with my wife and son, took longer walks, listened to more music, played some video games that had been sidelined.

By far the most arduous part was avoiding anything resembling my day job, avoiding tech news, avoiding anything that felt like work. Working in tech for sixteen years it is the least exciting way I can spend my free time, but habits formed over the years and the communities I participate in heavily sway my information flows into that space. I just started un-following people on twitter, removing myself from sub reddits, and deleted slack off my devices.

If I knew I was going to have more long term free time I can easily find ways to make use of it as I have hobbies that I only get to do sparingly, playing music, drawing, painting, watching horror movies, playing my back catalog of steam, switch and xbox games, doing investment research, doing yoga, and learning music production/recording. When work eats a third of my day everyday it makes it more difficult to do things I want to do, if you knew your job wasn't going to interfere with your life you probably wouldn't feel this way.

3 comments

>If I knew I was going to have more long term free time I can easily find ways to make use of it as I have hobbies that I only get to do sparingly

Yeah I think part of my boredom probably stems from realizing that I don't usually have much free time

this is it for me too, the longer the time off the more free i feel to rework/optimize and start bigger projects. without excess time i usually dont even get started. I think its because everything takes longer then i expect. over the break i got my 3d printer workflow going again, got a website up, reworked my resume, put up some shelves, etc. ALL of which took me longer then i initially anticipated
You could argue that work takes up half your waking hours