For all of the positive things I can say about taking a year off, there’s one negative thing that has become abundantly clear to me: I suck at time management.
I don’t completely know what goes into this. On the one hand, I really despise the obsession with productivity that reduces the value of people to what they do, rather than who they are. The people pushing this agenda seem to be constantly in a state of existential crisis in which they can’t accept themselves besides their productivity, and it’s super toxic. On the other hand, I have so many things I want to do and to learn, and the time to do them just slips away.
Take my daily routine for example. As a night owl, I stay up pretty late, and because I’m not working, this has created the habit of staying up until 2am. When I was working, this was closer to 12am. Sometimes I’m just wired at night and can’t sleep for awhile, but other times it just feels natural. Honestly, though, it’s not a good way to live, as I tend to wake up mid-morning (or today around 11am, bizarrely), and the day just seems to fly after that.
I usually eat my meals sitting in front of the TV watching YouTube. I don’t think this is a good thing. I always tell myself that I’m learning, and I think that I am, but it’s still unstructured entertainment, and I can easily blow through 2 hours watching various garbage. Sometimes it’s tech stuff, sometimes it’s security stuff, but it’s still…just…entertainment.
YouTube usually kicks off breakfast, then lunch is usually not far behind. It’s not uncommon to come to my senses at 2pm and realize that the normal work day is almost over and I’ve done nothing, not even showered. It’s kind of an awful feeling.
And again, I think it would be terribly sad to take a year off and feel stressed the entire time as if you had to be constantly productive. But it’s more like…this isn’t actually rest. And it isn’t actually work, either. It’s just junk. Dead space. Wasted time. And I feel that’s something I’d like to change.
It’s totally different if you’re going to watch a sports game and you know it’s going to be 2-2.5 hours long. You can block that time off, watch and enjoy the game, then turn the fucking TV off afterward and wait a few more days for the next game. That’s part of why I miss watching hockey with my family (though to be fair, my parents spend an awful lot of time watching TV).
When I look at the long road ahead for getting into and then growing in the cyber security field, I feel overwhelmed by how much there is to learn. At the same time, I don’t think it requires superhuman intelligence to learn, just commitment. I’m pretty worn out studying for certifications right now, and I miss the healthy kind of unstructured time that involves working on some obscure computer problem for hours before figuring it out after learning half a dozen things along the way. It doesn’t give you that addictive hit of tearing through 100 pages of a book, but in many ways it’s so much more useful because now you understand something internally. Link-local addressing is not enabled on Ubuntu Server by default because link-local addressing is a security concern. Also, service discovery running a 30 minute Nmap scan is hell, which is why we use DHCP. There is the concept of link-local address resolution that allows you to discover hosts using their hostname, but this is an even greater security concern, which is why we don’t enable it by default either. Learning this stuff the hard way is so worth it, but it’s difficult to put on a resume, and you can’t pass certifications with it, either. But it’s essential.
In the midst of these thoughts, I started wondering if the difficulty is not the problem, but rather the time management is.
And again, productivity does not define your value. But I could probably be on board with watching a movie or a sports game in the evening, if only I could cut out the savage laziness of flopping on the couch and clicking through YouTube all afternoon. Take a walk. Go snowshoeing in the mountains. Please, Risky, anything other than this. Anything other than this cheap, unstructured hell.
Sometimes I sit down at the computer to get some study done, only to spent hours checking various blogs, social media, and “researching” career options, rather than doing anything that might actually help me excel in my career. I wonder how much of my time I have wasted like this over the years, how much farther I could be. It’s entirely possible to have your fill and reach a point at which you decide to stop growing, but it makes more sense to do that once you’re already competent than when you’re at the beginning. Why didn’t I learn those penetration testing techniques that I wanted to learn years ago? What happened to my drive? Was that not 6 years ago? What happened to all of those years?
I’ve also learned that steady progress puts my fears at ease. It’s only when I’m not making any progress on my projects that they begin to make me anxious. And to be fair, it would be better to have fewer projects and actually make progress on those few, but the key anxiety comes from procrastination, I think.
I don’t exactly know where this is going, only than to say that I wish my work was more focused and my rest more restful. You can’t make up for lost time, but you can change going forward.