Managing downtime
January 4th, 2006
It’s official: I am bored.
I have now been on winter break from business school for one month. (Still going to work full time, but no classes on the part-time schedule.) The folks at the McCombs evening program were actually quite kind to students: they scheduled 5 1/2 weeks of no classes over December and January.
At first, I really enjoyed the relative slowness of what used to be my normal schedule. Sleeping in Saturdays, going home at 6 pm on weekdays, not packing 2 meals before leaving the house on class days. A 40-hour work week, and the rest of the time was mine. It was really nice.
For about a week.
Now? I can’t wait for classes to begin. I have been desperately trying to stay busy in the past 3 weeks. I built a web site out of curiosity. I agreed to build my parents a website for their business. I’ve been so desperate to work on something, I’ve even considered migrating this site from Blogger to Wordpress 2.0, just for the experience. (I can already picture myself screwing around on some new WP plugin instead of doing work or finishing my assignments.)
I thought I did a pretty good job making time for school this semester. I made some sacrifices and changed some habits. Less TV, fewer blogrolls, less email. I was satisfied with my grades, so I know the changes worked — in other words, I managed my uptime effectively. But now, with the extended break, I feel the same bad habits starting to creep back in. I’m watching a lot more TV and reading a slew of new linkblogs. In spite of my best effort to stay busy, I don’t feel like I’ve managed my downtime effectively. Instead, I feel a tiny bit of guilt that my time’s been wasted watching “24″ or reading digg.
If anything, this break has been a learning experience. There will be another weeks-long break, that’s pretty much guaranteed. I just need to be prepared for it, lining up projects and prioritizing things to do. That sure beats debating yourself on the merits of busywork for the sake of boredom.
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