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MathiasZaman comments on Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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In the spirit of asking personal questions on Less Wrong I'd be pleased if some of the community's brainpower could be directed in my direction. (It's a minor problem.)
After about a year of being unemployed, I found a job (hooray), but it's not a job I want to do for a long time. This means looking for a new job, but due to the long and unpredictable hours of my current job I'm left without time to look for a new job. The time away from the job is spend, in decreasing order: sleeping, quality time with girlfriend, internet, food and personal entertainment/projects. As it stands, I don't feel like I can touch either of the non-work activities without going insane, or at least not to an extent where I can shave of an hour to allocate to looking for a new job (I know from previous experience that doing it for less than an hour doesn't result in anything) without going insane.
Current options (I can see):
Ideas, recommendations or "third options" I failed to see?
In So Good They Can't Ignore You, Cal Newport argues that the path to enjoying a job goes primarily through being good at that job, not liking the job when first starting it. I suspect there is much to be gained by devoting yourself to your current job and getting good at it. Even if you transition to another job, the self-control and emotional maturity you learn by doing this is likely to transfer.
(He also argues that it's better to be in a field where quality is detectable and valuable; if you're doing commodity work, than being especially good is unlikely to get you far. But I think there's a psychological component as well: it is highly likely your coworkers and employers can detect a shift from disliking the job to liking the job, and you might be surprised at how much that transition will get you in terms of respect and power on the job.)
Sounds like reasonable advice, but my reasons for not wanting the stick with the job have less to do with my enjoyment of it and more with it it not being something I'm talented at/uses the skills I'm good at, it isn't a direction I want to go with nor is it very high-paying. I like the job just fine and want to do it properly (to an extent), I'd just enjoy doing something else more.
Look around your current company and see if there's another job in there you'd like better (or which would suck less). Switching jobs inside a company is often easier than switching companies.
Ask someone to find a job for you. Family and close friends will often do this for free. Others might if they like you and they trust you'll remember you owe them a favor. Your girlfriend might, because it means you get more time together.
Learn how to slack and not get caught. If you're in an office, there are HowTos. If not, you can still determine which parts of your job are safest to slack off at.
If you haven't, become friends with someone who has the kind of job you want. If you have, deepen that relationship and ask to be introduced to similar friends. As long as you never directly beg for a job, it is perfectly alright to say you're looking for a job in that area.
All of this is assuming that one year of unemployment was entirely due to factors outside your control. This is very unlikely. You could almost certainly raise your employability in lots of ways that you haven't used. Move to a place with a better job market for example, dress better (to use the Halo effect), or whatever it is - basically remove some of the differences between you and the kind of person who gets the job you want.
For more advice, be a lot more specific about your situation. What kind of job do you want, why don't you have it, how much are you willing to sacrifice to get it?
Thanks for the advice. I love how Less Wrong is a place where you can say you want to slack at work and someone points you to a good resource for doing so :-)
Changing job within the company isn't an option, due to it being a small cultural non-profit that mostly works with freelance artists.
Will do. This should be possible.
If you're interested in IT, talk to someone in your area working in IT about the options for somebody without a degree in IT to get a job in that field. In the US at least, there are a number of mini certifications that would take a lot less than 3 years. Similarly, you should explore a variety of more easily obtained technical vocations. I am not sure what the options in Belgium are. 3 years spent towards only a slight improvement sounds like a negative return on investment.
Are you sure cutting 15 minutes from each of the four non-work things would make you go insane?
How many hours of sleep do you get per day, on average? That seems to me the most plausible option here to cut down on without suffering any psychological or emotional effects, although of course if you're not getting much sleep as it is, it's probably best not to go with this idea. At any rate, if you sleep roughly 8 to 10 hours a day, do you think you could cut down on sleeping for maybe an hour or so, possibly by setting an alarm, or is that unfeasible?
There're also biphasic and dual core sleep schedules which may reduce the need for sleep to ~6 hours total per day. I believe Yvain uses something like this. (ETA: It seems he does have a biphasic sleep schedule, but it's 8 hours total. (double ETA: source)) As I understand it, more extreme polyphasic sleep schedules are difficult to get into to say the least and aren't compatible with mainstream work schedules.
Excellent point, although you are correct about the difficulty of integrating such a sleep schedule into a regular work schedule. The diagrams in the Wikipedia article, however, seem to imply that sleep episodes need to be more or less equally spaced. Is this always the case? If not, it might be possible to "shift" a nap a little bit earlier or later in order to accommodate a full-sized workday.
Something like the Everyman would likely work if Mathias could take a nap during his lunch break. (If it's a short break, he could simultaneously try out intermittent fasting. :)) I also imagine the 20-minute nap biphasic would tolerate his waiting until the late afternoon to take the nap. I don't know about the others, perhaps someone with polyphasic sleep experience could weigh-in?
I sleep between 6 and 7 hours a day and that's already stretching my ability to deal with that. Biphasic sleep put too much strain on my relationship, so unless something changes in that area (and I hope it doesn't) that option is also out.