I have developed a lot of little productivity hacks for myself in the past couple years.

It’s odd, actually.

Realizing that.

Odd.

For the first year of my career break I wrote about it all the time. The career break I mean. I was always writing about it. I was slightly obsessed with working through the whole thing in long rambling essays, very few of them published anywhere but in my own personal files, but all of them detailing my reasons and logic and emotions and everything to do with this whole deal of quitting a well-paying desk job (thanks stress and burnout) and spending the following months and months and months sorting through the effort of trying to rebuild myself professionally.

So many words.

It’s odd, because thinking about it right now I realize that I haven’t written much about career breaking in nearly a year now. And yet, no, I haven’t moved on, nor found myself breaking through the far side of that career break quite yet, but then too all the tangled complications of the last year have sort of left me a little less introspective on this thing that I did nearly two years ago now. I think about it. Write words. But those two haven’t really intermingled recently.

Yet, it was the first thing I thought to write about now, just sitting here looking at the keyboard under my fingers, and I guess that means it still comes up, particularly when I start introspecting on some of the changes and habits that manifested in the meanwhile of my not quite but kinda still a career break era.

Like, I’m typing on one of those productivity hack things as I write this.

Yeah, the keyboard.

About a year ago I bought myself this little portable mechanical keyboard.  Well, in fact I bought two of them, each for very different purposes. First, I bought a really nice one that is amazing to type on and which I carry in a little bag along with my iPad when I go off to a cafe to write. It’s wonderful. Clicky. Solid. Durable. And no I’m not selling them. But then I also bought a cheaper, smaller keyboard. It’s not quite as nice, though still pretty nice, and its a lot more plasticky, and it tends to live in the glove box of my truck. It is a little trickier to type on, I will admit, mostly because it is lacking about twenty of the more familiar keys like number digits and punctuation marks, and when I need them I need to access those with little function key combos that also make it a bit cryptic to type on, but I use it even more than I thought I would, squeezing in a session of writing before work or, like now, sitting in a park at a picnic table waiting for the run crew to arrive and taking these twenty free minutes to pound out a blog post.

All of this is tangled together, of course, because this whole career break has given me this little new productivity skill of forcing myself to be much more free and effective about my writing. Impromptu. Spontaneous. Picnic table in the park free-ish. 

Oh, and that’s the other thing I should mention. If nothing else comes of this career break, I am emerging from it feeling a lot more like a writer than I ever did prior. I’ve always fashioned myself a writer, but right now I feel it inasmuch as I would not hesitate to put it on a resume and defend it as a professional skill. 

In fact. I’m a writer in the same way that I’m a runner, because I practice and practice and practice it a lot. I’ve just logged the time, you know?

So, here I sit in yet another gap of free time writing on a keyboard in the park on this little keyboard. And the culmination of this anecdote is that I know damn well that I was not a type in the park on a little keyboard kind of writer before the career break. 

That is the little productivity hack. 

The hack is that I just write anywhere and everywhere now, shamelessly, even though as I’m sitting here in the park and cyclists and dog walkers and kids on skateboards are passing by looking at me with this idle curiosity, some weirdo at a picnic table typing away like a nut. That’s just what this looks like, I suppose.

And that is a cool realization for me, fumbling and tangled and unfocused as I feel in the emergent spring. If nothing else, I’ve been productively hacked.