First Day of Life After Hackbright: Done!

Hackbright ended last Thursday, but today felt more like the official first day of "fun-employment" to me since it's Monday and everyone is at work/class and I'm not. I have not had unstructured free days to myself since...forever. College is probably the closest time I came to having huge chunks of time to myself but even then my weeks were still more or less whipped into shape by classes, side jobs, business org meetings, events, and more.

Now, I get to dictate what I want to do, and when I want to do it. I can choose to study, whiteboard, attend meetups, work out, eat, or even not do any of those things. It's liberating and nerve-wracking at the same time because for some reason I feel like I have more pressure to be productive more than ever. There's nothing telling me I can't continue studying because the material will be covered in later weeks, or that I need to go to bed early because there's an early lecture in the morning.

So what did I do on my first day post-Hackbright? Now that I think about it, quite a bit actually! I....

• Woke up at 8am and cooked some breakfast
• Studied and job searched
• Went on a run around the sunset reservoir
• Grocery shopped
• Cooked lunch
• Studied more
• Sent some emails
• Learned the concept of memoization for recursion(!)
• Attended an Algorithms & Interviews meetup hosted by Women Who Code at Demandbase (and saw a few of my cohortmates!)
• Listened to a great podcast on applying design thinking to my life 
• ...and will have blogged about my day!

One thing I do need to make sure I do better on is follow my calendar schedule. It's so easy for me to jump from coding on Hacker Rank to finding job openings on LinkedIn to writing emails when I should really be sticking to one thing for at least a half hour to an hour at a time. It's hard not to get distracted since this job search is a multi-pronged approach, but focus is key and I need to make sure I give all dimensions the attention they need.

We'll see how things fare tomorrow! As of now I pretty much have my evenings booked for events this week, so that just means I need to make sure I get more studying done during the day. Fingers crossed!