What's on Your Shelf? Finding Purpose Through Unemployed

How you can use your time during your job search to help you stay motivated and find purpose.

“Finding a job is a full time job” the adage goes. I’ve gone into details in another article about what to when you lose your job, and there’s something I touched on on that article that I want to go into more detail about today.

When I first started looking for a new role, I poured every hour of the day I could into it. Committing a ton of time to networking, scouring Linkedin, and interviewing for jobs when things came up. But the truth is, this isn’t a 40 hour a week endeavor. At least not every week.

Yes, you 100% should be using some of that time with family, taking your kids to the park, etc. Obviously this time should be a blessing for you. While it might be hard to see in the moment, zoom out. Your time unemployed is going to be a bump in the road on a much much longer fantastic career. Yes of course you should be committing your time to finding work, but you can’t do that all the time.

What I found early in my search is 2 things kept coming up. First, I had extra time. I identified that I had time where I was just scrolling on Linkedin not really accomplishing anything, or was around the house, on Tik Tok whatever, not doing much. And hey! that’s not a bad thing at all. It’s ok to actually just “putter around” at times, but after a few weeks, I was getting a bit bored. Second was that I missed having a creative output. I missed having purpose. Sure I was accomplishing things as part of my job search, but I was still feeling….. like I was missing something. That I wanted to use this time, but wasn’t really sure how. I didn’t wake up every morning with “things to do” for my job search.

And through conversations with other job searchers, and my own journey, this concept of your personal “shelf” came to fruition. Now this can be your mental shelf, a physical shelf in your house, or maybe it’s a binder you have somewhere. But this concept has started to take shape, and i’ve found it’s not only helped me, but helped others on their journey through unemployment. So lets dig in!