Gainfully unemployed

Yeah, so, I came back from our trip to the USA to find I no longer had a job.  Retrenched, redundant, downsized.

I'm not distressed.  It's a bad time of year to be looking for work -- not just because of Christmas, but because Australia seems to have an additional holiday immediately afterward known as "January" (similar to the one in Europe known as "August").  But there still seem to be jobs to be had out there.  If I find something before Christmas, great; but if not, I'm not going to sweat it.  I'm just trying to get my ducks in a row -- rework my CV, skill up, canvas lists of companies, etc.  My days are full and I'm a far sight from unhappy.  And of course the dog is happy to have me.

The time off also gives me time to get my life in order a bit.  People write entire self-help books about it but here's what works for me:

• Actively using an online to-do list site.  I use todoist.com (but there are lots of others); I've been on it for a long time but not actively until these last two weeks.
• Only schedule for tomorrow.  In the evening pull in a short list of tasks you think you can get done.  Leave everything else unscheduled.
• Make sure you have at least one simple task in the day's to-do list.  If you don't have a simple one to pull in, make one up.
• Do the simple tasks first on a given day.  This gets the ball rolling and starts the feeling of accomplishment.  And the harder, more important tasks will be a lot easier to concentrate on when you have fewer tasks hanging over your head.
• Make sure there's something each day that gets you out of the house!

Still, I'm finding it curious that (like everyone else it seems) I'm capable of putting in eight hour days for forty-some weeks of a year doing stuff for other people, but the idea of doing a solid eight-hour day doing stuff just for myself seems onerous.  I'm continually breaking up my tasks by running Hamish up to the cafe or something.