How Have You Kept Yourself Sane While "In Between" Jobs? 1

[Beggar]

It's been 4-1/2 months since I was laid off.

I've been job hunting and doing the support activities but it's turned into a waiting game with only a few hours per week now required.

I'm bouncing off the walls lately and it's hard not to have much meaningful work to do on a daily basis.

So, to those of you who have coped with an extended period of unemployment, what did you do to pass the time productively?

I'm obviously looking for work and I'm taking care of some things around the house (though the money's not there to do much, now) but I'm making a list of things to occupy my time and I'd like to see what anybody else has done.

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[KENAT]

3) Hanging out with my 5-year-old kid while she still thinks I'm smart and cool. ("Daddy, I know why you're happy you don't have a job anymore. Now you can spend time with me...")

That's worth a star, not sure if for you or your daughter!

I spent a lot of time looking at the news on the net or researching anything that popped into my head too.

The couple of design projects I worked on (just crazy ideas I had) helped keep my engineering edge and gave me something to talk about when I did get a couple of interviews.

 

[debodine]

Spent six months jobless after 9/11. After taking care of each day's quota of job searches and making contacts and sending out resumes, I managed to get hooked on the game Everquest for six months until a job came along. Took up my excess time, but was not productive except it allowed me to occupy my mind when wife was at work and kids at school.

NOTE: I am NOT recommending getting hooked on a video game. Keep in mind your post asked "how did I stay sane", not "did I use the time wisely", because I certainly did not.

It was fun but again, not very productive. However, I did manage to do some research, reading and skills improvement but I am sure I could have done a lot more if I had stayed away from gaming.

 

[BJC]

Go a little insane, it may prepair you for the next job better than any thing else you can do.

 

[whyun]

I was off for about 3.5 months between jobs about 10 years ago. I quit due to burn-out so I didn't actively job search for over 2 months. I have to admit I got quite lazy during that time. Grew a full beard, few hours of TV daily, cleaned up junk files on the computer and programmed lots of design tools, spreadsheets and so on. There wasn't much housework or home improvement project as I was in a two bed condo at the time. Oh... I spent quite a bit of time analyzing the performance of all the 401k and mutual funds and read lots of books too.

It was quite refreshing to take time off like this which I can't afford to do anymore.