Being unemployed as a newly graduated engineer is no fun. You have spent years of your life and most of your youth specializing in an interesting field to be able to use your craft in a professional environment. You know that you are capable of doing great things, but after endless applications and no responses, you start to doubt yourself. Trust me, I am there right now. I have not kept track of all applications I have sent since I started, but I have done it in periods, and I am sure that I have sent around 300-400 applications and been on around 10 interviews. What a return on investment, right? Now I will not rant about that, but it is still something that sucks. However, I want to highlight something that I think many people underestimate, including myself, and that is the power of treating your days as workdays.
The trap that unemployed people fall into: the feeling of having much more time
One of the "perks" of being unemployed is that you do not have any obligations or commitments. You can wake up at 9, have breakfast and start your day slowly. You don't need to rush to get to the office, you can start working whenever you want to. This works for some people that have a later daytime cycle, but I think that this is a feeling that other people think is nice, but it is actually hurting their productivity. I thought this was nice, but then I started my days by having a focus block between 7 and 9, and I have never felt more productive in a good while.
How it started
For the past 7 weeks, I have been going to rehab 2 days a week to have focused days where I exercise in areas that my body needs. This is nice, however, I felt that these days just went to rehab. I just had to prepare to go to the rehab in the morning, and when I got home, I was so exhausted that I just wanted to relax, and the job searching process and other projects were pushed aside to the next day. I was feeling like I lost 2 days of my week due to this. Of course, me going to rehab is important, especially for me with Cerebral Palsy, but I felt that I was not getting other things done those days. Then I just wanted to try getting stuff done in the morning and start my day at 7 am. And I am not going to lie, it is a game changer.
Getting up is the hard part
We all feel the pain of getting up. When the alarm goes off, you really want to throw that phone at the wall and go back to sleep. But that is the hardest part. Once you are up, your brain starts to wake up, and you start to feel more awake. I find that if you start to do something productive once you're up, you can just keep going.
The best thing to do is to have something to do that you can just jump into without thinking. You skip social media and emails, you just start to work. I start with applying to jobs, and while that used to start with me looking for jobs, I have outsourced the initial job board scan to AI, so when I wake up, I can just start to apply to jobs. While AI does not find all the jobs that are a great fit, it lowers the barrier to starting the job searching process. I still do some scanning of job boards afterwards, but it is easier to do it when I am awake and have already started to work. When I am done with the job searching, I usually have 60-90 minutes left in the morning to do some other things. In that time, I can do some coding projects (right now I am working on releasing an Android app called Mitt schack which is a chess app for Android) or edit some videos for my social media channels. This is a great way to start the day because even if the rest of the day is not productive, at least I know that I have done something that day. Being unemployed is rough, but getting things done is a great way to feel that your days are meaningful, and despite not having a strict commitment, you still have a sense of purpose.
And when you treat your weekdays as workdays, you can value your weekends more again. If you are just winging your days and do not treat them differently while unemployed, you will not enjoy your weekends as much. You can actually despise them as you know that you will probably not get any answers or replies from your applications on the weekends. But if you get stuff done during the week, you can actually enjoy your weekends more again as you did during your studying days.
Give it a try
Now everyone is different, and what works for me might not work for you. But I think that you should try it out and see if it works for you. I now get why people that are productive usually start their day early. It is a great way to kick off your day and get things done. To start something is the hardest part, and once you start, you can just keep going. Give it a week and try it if you can, because I think you will be surprised by the results.