I am a fan of unstructured time. Unstructured time is notable for that feeling in the morning that you have a clean slate. It is also notable for the sheer lack of pressure, of stress, of conformance.

I had a fair amount of unstructured time when we first moved to Beijing nearly six years ago. In fact, I had so much of it that I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. By the time I had started to figure it out, it was time to start working again and enter the daily grind.

I’ve now decided to stop working for a while and people at work and outside of work have been asking my why I’m stopping. After all I am quite committed to my work, I am working for a great company, I am pretty good at what I do, and I am well liked and respected by my bosses, peers, and employees. In response to the “why?” question my answer is “there is no why” but I don’t say that out loud. Instead I have an answer that I mostly believe about this job not being the place I can do my best work, the work that I am the most passionate about.

But if I peel back the logic the truth is simply this, after five years on this job my whole self just said “that’s enough”. I am fortunate that we are at a place financially that I can listen. At least for a while. At the risk of being too rational, let me explain “that’s enough” a bit. My job requires me to do three things that feel unnatural and overtime took a toll on my physically and mentally. The first one is the simply the wear and tear of he travel. Each of my trips to the states averages about two weeks and it takes about a week on each trip to start sleeping through the night and really the entire two weeks to feel normal again. At which time, it is time to return to Beijing and have another two week adjustment cycle. So basically a month where my body isn’t at an optimal state and I would typically take four of these trips a year. Furthermore, for the time I was in the states the work did not stop back at home so while I didn’t end up doing quite 2x the work for those periods, it sure felt like it.

So that’s the travel part of it, four months a year not feeling great physically while the workload piles up. The second thing that felt unnatural is the amount of explaining needed to get any actual work done. If I was a true blue for this job, I would have loved this aspect of it but I just found it a tax with limited return. One of my strengths is the ability to make good decisions especially in the moment decisions. However, I’m not so great at explaining my decisions or convincing others it is the right decision. Doing  so it took and inordinate amount of my energy and focus.

The final part of it might be the hardest to understand for those who haven’t actually done my job. Basically it comes done to this – I think building a great software product is software is something you discover as you build it. My job was to essentially design great software without actually building it.

So with that I am onto unstructured time.  For a couple of months at least. Time that I am sure I will put routines on. To write, to read (thank you kindle), to exercise, to hack, to family time, to tv time.