Somewhere around the middle of November I tipped over into the second half of my career break. Fewer than six months remaining. Time is very much on my mind.
As I write this, it is but five days before Christmas. My daughter has been giving me a daily countdown, of variable reliability, since 1st November. For about a month, I felt like Scrooge. “I’m not ready for it to be Christmas!” I kept telling my family. “Turn off Mariah Carey!”
It wasn’t a lack of festive cheer, or a hatred of mince pies that was driving my reluctance. No - it was that I had turned Christmas into a deadline. I would have the first draft of my novel finished by Christmas. I had a plan. It was on a spreadsheet.
And I also knew that when the clock strikes 2025, I will be thinking about the end of this career break.
Ten years ago, at the halfway point in my first career break, travelling the world, I’d done so much, seen so many things. I wrote a post summarising my experiences and learning. It was a very different career break to the one I am on now. In 2014 I was packing my days with varied experiences; there was little routine. In 2024 I’ve been doing the same thing, day in, day out; routine has been essential. And yet, reading that post back, I find remarkable the similarities between my reflections then and now.
Here are three quotes from that post I wrote over a decade ago:
Travelling, in other words, is a lot like the rest of life. There are highs and lows. There are good days and bad days.
We travelled really fast in the first five months, and it takes a toll. You have to have down time. After a while of spending two or three nights in a place you start to crave continuity.
It’s still hard to make time to do all the things you want to do, even when staying in a hut on a tropical beach.
This year, despite being in the privileged position of being able to do whatever I want between 9 and 5, there are still highs and lows. Days when I’ve been frustrated and annoyed. Impatient. Feeling like I’m not achieving what I want to do. That there’s just not enough time to do it all. That it’s raining and the dog needs walking and the dishwasher needs emptying again and I’m going to be late to my daughter’s football training again.
Equally, there have been days when I’ve lost myself in writing and looked up from my keyboard and hours have passed but I feel like I’ve poured something good out of myself; and then I’ve picked up my daughter and we’ve shared a joke and I’ve marvelled at how much more sorted she is than I ever was aged seven; and then I’ve walked the dog on the moor and the sky is raked pink, the clouds gossamer-thin, I’m the only person there and it takes my breath away.
Time, notoriously, despite being measured to the second, is not experienced in a uniform fashion. Packing new experiences into your days makes them feel longer. Doing the same thing each day for six months makes that period flash by in the blink of an eye. In neither scenario will you achieve all the things that you imagine. And whilst living in either “fast time” or “slow time,” you tend to crave the advantages offered by the other.
So here are some learnings from the past six months, layered over the learnings from that six months ten years ago. They apply equally to life and to work.
Do Fewer Things
I’ve talked about this before, and it’s a mantra stolen from Cal Newport’s work on Slow Productivity - but doing fewer things, and doing them well, means that you actually achieve more. I won’t labour this point, I’ve written about how I used to salami slice my time - but with three to four hours a day of focused work on your big project you can achieve a great deal (creating the environment that allows you to do that is a whole other subject, and for discussion of that point I’d direct you to Newport and Burkeman’s work).
Finish Things (Unless You Don’t Want To)
Related to the above point - finishing things has a power all of its own. Having done things has a power of its own. This works on a big scale: taking a year off a decade ago to go travelling is something that I will always have. Whilst there’s always more travelling to do, if I died tomorrow I’d feel like I’d experienced a good chunk of the world.
But it also works on a small scale: I recently made pumpkin pie. I’ve been meaning to make this dish since I lived in Canada in my twenties; three years ago I bought a tart dish specifically for this aim, but never used it. But in November I decided it was time. I made pumpkin pie. It was an enormous faff. Towards the end of the process I was wondering why I was doing it.
The truth is I did it for myself. Because I wanted to have made pumpkin pie. And now I have. It was tasty, but not fantastic. Will I do it again? Probably not. And that’s fine.
But equally: if something isn’t bringing you joy, stop doing it. If you’re not enjoying that book - stop reading it. If you’re learning to do card tricks and you’re sick of shuffling cards, just don’t. If you keep going camping because all your friends love it but you find it a grind, dip out. Life is too short to be miserable in a tent, or with a pack of cards, or with a book. Make an active decision, don’t let it drag on. You tried it, and it wasn’t for you. You learned something.
Lean into Things
A groundbreaking insight that I’ve had is that if I allow myself the space and time to get into something, then I enjoy it a lot more. Who knew? This is related to doing fewer things - if your life is packed and you’re constantly rushing from one thing to the next it’s difficult to enjoy the thing that you’re doing. Spending time before an activity thinking about it, and some time after, reflecting on it, increases what you get from it. Which leads me to…
Make Time to Savour
What’s striking to me about having spent a) a year travelling and b) half a year living arguably my best life, writing a story about a talking sword, is that it’s very easy to find yourself taking it all for granted. Perhaps you’ve had the same experience having landed your dream job? After a while it’s just work. It’s just living.
But there are always things that make you smile. As Rob Walker says in The Art of Noticing, “pay attention to what you care about, and care about what you pay attention to.” Making the time to reflect on what you’ve enjoyed - perhaps by writing it down - genuinely helps to capture that enjoyment in a way that I find carries on into the future. The simple act of making a daily “Done List,” rather than a To Do list, is also a form of savouring. Celebrate what you’ve enjoyed, what you’ve achieved. Take a moment to bask in the glory.
And those are my four pieces of learning. Sadly, one thing I apparently have not learned since my first career break is brevity. I make no apologies.
And have I hit my Christmas deadline and completed the first draft of my novel?
I have not.
For a while this bothered me. But then I got over it. I’ve written a lot. There’s more to write, but isn’t there always? And in another decade when I look back at this post, it won’t matter whether it was the end of December or the end of January when I finished the first draft. The important thing will be that I did it.
Which I will do.
After some mince pies.
Merry Christmas.
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INPUTS
What I’ve been reading/watching/listening to/thinking about…
- Novel: The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman. Given I’m writing a book about Excalibur, I had to read this one - it’s an Arthurian fantasy, about a knight that joins the Round Table just after Arthur has died. I was simultaneously reading Lev Grossman’s substack posts “A Season in Hell,” about trying to finish the novel. This, combined with my own novel writing, means that I have a peculiar relationship with The Bright Sword in that I find it hard to separate the art from the labour of its production. This makes it hard for me to be critical. But it’s great. I’d recommend. The ending is particularly strong.
- Podcast: On the subject of whether packing in experiences makes time pass slower - I cannot recommend enough this episode of Radiolab, where one of the producers packs her week with entirely novel experiences to test the concept. It has an unexpected sucker punch of an ending. Gripping. The Secret to a Long Life - Radiolab (also available wherever you get your podcasts from).
- Forthcoming non-fiction: I’ve had the pleasure of being the beta-reader for Jess Annison’s forthcoming book Smart Careers: How to craft your most meaningful work life. Shout out to Jess for her prompts in this book on savouring the meaningful parts of your job, which helped to crystalise some of my own thinking. If you’re interested in practical exercises to help your current or future work feel meaningful, I highly recommend signing up for notifications on the publication of this book. I’m excited to gift it to people when it comes out. Check out Jess’ blog for a taster of some of her writing on the matter.
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