A Review of the first Six Months of ‘Not Working’

As of Jan 1st 2009 I have not been working for 6 months.

The one question that I get asked over and above everything else is:
How are you spending your time?

It is mildly disappointing to admit that I am doing nothing radical, just spending my time doing the same things I enjoyed while I was working, but lots more of it.

I miss (many aspects of) work. I have posted before about the intellectual stimulation and interactions that I miss. At some level it hasn't sunk in fully that I am not working. Often, it feels like I am on a 2-week vacation and that I have to get back to work on Monday.

Travel featured very prominently in these past six months. We were out on the road for well over 50% of the days with a few trips out of the US. Planning for and recuperating from these trips took up time. We tried out a cruise (Alaska's Inner Passage) and liked it so much that we went again for a Caribbean cruise.

Thanks to not having to be at work, I got to spend a week traveling in Singapore and Malaysia with my parents. I am very glad that I got to do this.

The Books that I read in last six months happened to be solely non-fiction, many of them travelogues and travel anthologies. Though I read whenever I could, I was not able to average more than one book per week in these six months. For the whole year 2008, I read 37 books, which works out to 3 per month. (These are the books I read fully. I end up finishing only about 1 in 4 books that I start. I skim through several because there simply isn’t enough time to read them all.) Yes, 37 is a decent number, but I am hoping this number would be higher in 2009. Getting to read to my heart’s content is a big reason for why I am sitting at home and not at work.

The Movies that we watched were mostly documentaries and foreign films. We are focusing on seeing movies that we imagine would be difficult to obtain in India. I averaged over 2 movies per week for 2008. I am happy with anything higher than 1 a week. We are also ending up going to the movie theater a lot more. (When we were working, we had to actively make time to go to a theater, and popping in a DVD was easier. But now, since the opportunity cost of my time has come down, the pleasure of watching interrupted in a theater outweighs the ease of a DVD.)

TV: I was never big on watching TV, before or now. However, during the Olympics and the run up to the Presidential election, I did watch a lot of TV.

I had assumed that a 6-month hiatus would be sufficient and that I would get bored, but it doesn't at all feel adequate. I can easily take 6 more months. In the coming months, my wife and I are looking to setting up a base in India and dividing our time between the US and India. That is the general plan for the 1st half of 2009.

I am fully aware that not everyone gets time off, at least in this stage of life. And though it sounds corny as I type this, not a day goes by that I am not grateful to have this gift of time.