Ask HN: I'm taking a 2 months break off work. What should I do?

Linkable: https://medium.com/@p0larboy/renavigating-6f3632eec53

Get off the internet.

Traveling

Go diving. I had about 2 months off in the summer, so I was a dive bum. Was weird going back to work, wearing shoes etc. working for money instead of fills and beer...

Make part of the time off, electronics free. It is crazy to see how much time we devote to them, so learning to not check your phone every 2 minutes and avoiding the internet as much as possible is a freeing experience. At least for me it was, so much that I do it every year now where I spend a certain amount of time totally electronics free (1-2 weeks usually).

Travel seems like the other obvious to me personally.

The last is to talk to everyone and observe people doing their job around you. I love hearing about what issues people are facing, what things in their life are challenging them etc. I don't mean personal issues, I am more about finding problems to solve. To me that is fun, and it is cool to interact with people that I wouldn't necessarily meet in my everyday grind. You could easily come back with ideas of problems to solve that would be of interest to you. Of course, I personally find this fun, you may not.

If you live in California, you should do nothing but visit all the different state parks and the small towns in between. Take a car, some camping supplies, and maybe a laptop and just go. Travel light.

If you do things right, you can pretty much consume the entire 2 months doing this.

Definitely suggest travel. I guess where would depend on finances. I'd fully suggest at least a little time in Amsterdam, but with that chunk of time, you could go quite a few places and have recovery time.

I suggest minimal planning - possibly a loose idea of what you'd like to visit but the willingness to change if something else seems interesting when you get there.

Enjoy :)

You say you like side projects...

I'm the founder of a med-tech non-profit that helps residency program administrators schedule their residents within the hospital. Its pretty boring B2B stuff, but we really do get to improve the medical education system. We have an MVP and completed an alpha test this spring, currently we're iterating on the product for our spring 2015 Beta test.

If you have the urge to work on something during your time off, but want to keep some space from your normal life, perhaps you could help us out a bit? It could be a good way to challenge yourself to find that "willingness to perfect the execution". I could use help from anything to a few hour review of our layout to actual development. Since you're donating your time it'll all be internally motivated, low stress, work from anywhere, do what you feel, no long term commitments. All the code would be open sourced. :)

Other suggestions:

  * go camping
  * try sailing (people are always looking- just go down to a yatch club and say you want to crew)
  * get out of town for a month (your mom n dad would probs love to see you)
  * pickup an exercise regime, or challenge yourself to cook every day, basically add a healthy component to your lifestyle that will improve your 'normal' life when you return

If you're single, learn pickup.