How to be your Best Job Huntress (or Hunter) without Losing Your Soul
Part 6 in a series of tbd.
For previous installments see part 1 (networking) or part 2 (the cover letter), and part 3 (the CV) and part 4 (the job interview), and part 5 (advice givers)
Installment #6 — Job Hunting and the Elusive Concept of Free Time
Or — can you have both too much and too little time?
Time takes on a strange new form when you are on the job hunt. They say “looking for a job is a full-time job”, which honestly is only partly accurate. It’s true, looking for a job is highly demanding, taxing for your mental and emotional resources, requires a lot of creativity, legwork, practice, and quite often hutzpah and stepping outside of one’s comfort zone. So in many ways, looking for a job will be one of the more challenging jobs you’ve had, though likely not the most rewarding.
Surprisingly though, all of the tasks job hunting requires, even for those of an extremely proactive approach, will not fill a whole workday. Even if you stretch out all of your tasks and compose Shakespearean cover letters, you will likely be done with everything within a few hours.
And then what?
You can add another yoga sesh in the morning, a comforting siesta, meditate morning and night, take time to cook homemade meals, spread your errands over different days (an errand a day keeps the crazy away etc.), and still — you’ll find yourself with quite a bit of time on your hands.
This is where the job-hunting time paradox really kicks in. Searching for a job is an unnatural state of being in a world which revolves around earning your living. (Try this exercise for example — what would your life look like if you were born into huge money, Succession style? What would you do every day? What could you possibly aspire for?). In a mostly capitalist consumerist world, we value ourselves based on our productivity, our sense of importance, our monetizing potential. Our egos are tied in with how busy and sought after we are (The most lucrative excuse will always be “I’m going into a meeting”). Free time is something you earn, to be savored and enjoyed, and Instagrammed. Rich people and pensioners earn their free time. Until you get there, you must toil for it.
So being an active job hunter puts you in a time paradox. On the one hand, you’re on the negative end of the productivity spectrum. On the other, you’re relentlessly preoccupied and busy, as if you were the CEO of a medium-sized company. On the one hand, you set your own schedule, no involuntary early mornings, you ‘work’ from home, stay in your pj’s, and have multiple breakfasts and naps. On the other hand, your free time isn’t really your own: you’re always waiting for an answer that will upend your life and happy nap schedule, you can’t afford to fill this time with hobbies or trips because it’s not really yours to fill and you feel too guilty to enjoy it too much (that’s where errands come in — they’re the new going out).
There are no easy solutions to this time paradox situation, also because by its very nature, it is temporary (or so you hope). So an undeterminable temporary temporal problem, if you will. My advice is, first of all, cherish it if you can — one day you will find a job (yes, you will, maybe a shitty one, but you will), and you will miss getting up late and napping after lunch every day. So for the time being, see if you can separate the circumstances from their context — sometimes a nap is just a nap. Second, create your own schedules and stick to them. Organize your hunt and set clearly defined tasks that have a beginning and an end. But also don’t be too rigid with your schedules — they’re here to anchor you in a time of uncertainty, not weigh you down with more guilt. Last, use these schedules to slot in actual free time and keep it that way, whatever that means to you — a morning swim, a free evening to binge-watch, or allowing yourself a meeting with friends to drink, or even working together at a cafe.
Guilt and life will make you think you can and should always be doing something to promote the job hunt, but I say, doing all the time doesn’t always mean doing more. These days, job hunts can last a long time, be prepared for a long haul, which means you’ll need to take a breath from time to time, for the sake of your mental health and your job hunt — all that creativity and hutzpah require well-rested energy. You know, the kind you get from a good afternoon nap.
