Does Your Time Off Complement Your Work?

There are a couple ways of looking at your time off. Some people believe that time off is time off, and it’s none of your business what I do with it. As long as it isn’t illegal or immoral, I should be able to do what I want with my time off. I don’t argue with these people. If you have this point of view, that’s fine, you can tune out now. I’m not going to try to infringe on your right to make your own choices.

There are others who believe stuff is connected. Work is connected to every day life because I picked this field because I enjoy it. So yes, I enjoy my work, because work is part of life, and I think I should enjoy every part of life, or as much as I can. So, since work is related to life, and time off is related to life, by the associative property, work is in some way related to time off. I’m not suggesting that every vacation is a trip to the Ford museum or the Smithsonian Institution, you can be more subtle than that. I think your work can spark your imagination for your hobbies and vice versa.

For example, you may have heard that there is a mathematical component of music. Beside the rhythmic bit, which is undeniably mathematical divisions of time, the physics of sound helps you calculate the frequency of each pitch, and even devices like cell phones can be used to measure the frequency and analyze intonation.

Music can also be thought of as language, and kind of a parallel to a writer’s work. You may not know this, but I spent a couple years in music school and four years in the Navy as a full-time musician. I still play and even write music. I find in many groups where I have played that one of the most represented professions is engineering. Music, in addition to being a creative pursuit is also an extremely analytic field. If you have ever worked with real professional musicians, you may have noticed that they are sometimes frighteningly analytical, especially for people who are supposed to be creative.

Creativity can be an outlet. How many engineers take up some sort of creative pursuit that involves building? It’s very satisfying to design and build something yourself. You might think of this as more engineering related because of the building part, but design is creative.

Creativity can also feed back into your engineering tasks. Problem solving is inherently creative, and this is something engineers do as a primary task. The problem solving we do is often highly constrained in the types of solutions that will actually solve the problems, but it is still creative.

Possibly even more than creativity, I think the part that can be important to engineers is expression. In our work, we are sometimes discouraged from expressing certain things, like emotions, or strong opinions. But in our avocations, we can take up these restrictions which might require some sort of release from time to time. For me personally, music and writing are about expression, even more than creativity. Engineers are real people, after all, and even though we have a tendency to be quiet loners, it doesn’t mean we’re all like that, and it doesn’t mean we’re like that all the time. Even quiet loners need to express themselves here and there.

So what am I saying? It is so easy to get burned out at what you do. It’s easy to start to resent your job, or people at your job if they prevent you from fulfilling basic human needs that we all have, just because of the expectations of your day job. We all need a release. Sometimes that release is in parallel with your daily work, and sometimes it might be anti-parallel. Keeping the tension from building up is a great way to keep work fresh and interesting every day. I’m not turning into a work psychologist, I just know that a lot of things in a person’s life have to go right in order for them to do their best work on the job. I really like to work at the highest level I can possibly attain, and to do that, everything else has to be in place.

So if you’re a young engineer, find a creative or expressive outlet that helps you release tension in your off hours. If you’re an older engineer, avoid bitterness and frustration by building birdhouses, painting, singing in the church choir, taking up the banjo, playing in a trombone quartet, barbershop quartet or sweet adelines, even stuff like gardening, and other things I wouldn’t imagine – if doing it makes you feel renewed in some way, it will help you with your day job. Notice that some of these are social and some aren’t. You can adjust your hobbies to fill gaps as needed.

Sorry for going soft on you for this one post. Next time I’ll have to bash millennials for something, or return to a cynical topic like people who get emotionally attached to CAD programs.