Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Betweening
When you’re in between contracts, it’s easy to feel like you’re stuck in limbo. Professionally adrift, spiritually buffering, half-dressed in last Thursday’s joggers. You refresh LinkedIn. You reword your bio again. You stare into the fridge like it’s about to make you an offer.
Somewhere around day four, with no stand-ups to attend, no Jira tickets to nurture, and a growing sense that time had lost its formatting, I decided that the only rational move was to make a list of things to do.
Feel free to use it as a checklist, a comfort blanket, or a Rorschach test.
Alphabetise your spice rack. Add “Cumin Management” to your CV.
Bake scones. Eat them at 3:47pm. Pretend you’re in a National Trust drama.
Annotate a page of The Secret History like a Talmudic scholar.
Hold a one-person retrospective. Blame the facilitator.
Try intermittent fasting. Get very cross by 11:17am.
Take a photo of the dog every day at golden hour. Title the series A Dog’s Embrace of Dusk.
Brew a pot of tea strong enough to reckon with.
Rearrange your bookshelf by emotional damage.
Practise saying “I’m resting between engagements” in an unnecessarily posh voice.
Apply for a job you are wildly overqualified for. Get ghosted.
Learn the NATO phonetic alphabet. Overuse it when ordering coffee.
Change your LinkedIn headline to “Digital Prophet. Resigned From Time Itself”.
Sit on the stairs and realise you’ve been sitting there for 17 minutes.
Research indoor plants. Accidentally buy something sentient.
Create a home “hotdesk rota” for yourself. Enforce it strictly.
Try bullet journalling. Spend six hours designing an index page.
Learn how to say “I’m available for new opportunities” in five languages.
Build a model of your career using Lego. Keep running out of the right coloured bricks.
Compile a mixtape called Songs For The Man Between. Include Elbow. Always Elbow.
Rebrand your consultancy as a cult. Design robes.
Submit a PR to OpenTelemetry titled “just vibe it”.
Rename all your devices after doomed ships. Bluetooth will never connect again.
Go into an Apple Store and loudly demand they restore iWeb.
Write your memoirs. In crayon. On toast.
Digitise your MiniDV tapes and weep at your former hairline.
Walk the dog somewhere new and pretend you’re in a Scandi noir.
Paint the hallway a colour your family will regret instantly.
Add a post-it to the kettle that says Do NOT Boil Without Cause.
Walk round York city centre pretending you’re in a Ken Loach film.
Spend six hours naming your side project. Forget what it does.
Put your GitHub on your car. Claim it’s for networking.
Print out your Kanban board. Feed it to ducks.
Attempt to become verified on Threads using only semaphore.
Write a Medium post titled How I Found Myself Through Backend Refactoring.
Order new business cards that say “I’m a vibe, not a resource”.
Update your CV, then immediately doubt your entire career.
Make a macro that plays the Succession theme whenever you open VSCode.
Start a blog post entitled Why I Hate Scrum and accidentally write a novel.
Listen to 69 Love Songs. Rank them in an Excel spreadsheet.
Try watercolour painting. Accidentally invent a new shade of beige.
Do 10 minutes of yoga. Pull something essential.
Teach the dog to bark in iambic pentameter.
Create an alternative CV written entirely in passive voice.
Open a new Apple Note titled Books to Read. Add 87 titles. Read none.
Get the dog a LinkedIn profile. List her as “Bark-End Engineer”.
Build a Lego modular and pretend it’s your startup’s new HQ.
Open VSCode. Close it again. Open a book instead.
Write speculative poetry about cloud computing.
Meditate for ten minutes. Spend nine of them planning a new Kanban board layout.
Watch Newsnight and murmur “Jesus Christ” at regular intervals.
Text an old boss and use the phrase “glorious return”.
Say “back-end developer” out aloud and wonder why it sounds like an apology.
Email a tech recruiter just the word “why” and a gif of a screaming seagull.
Ask ChatGPT to refactor your personality.
Create a board game called Sprint Poker: The Dysfunctioning.
Learn a new keyboard shortcut. Use it excessively for one day.
Become briefly obsessed with urban planning.
Attempt a new haircut. Discover why you hadn’t done that before.
Rank your favourite stationery items. Argue with yourself over gel pens.
Organise your cables. End up in a philosophical argument with a USB-C.
Take a long bath and reflect on your moral character.
Rewatch Inside No. 9 until you suspect your life may be one.
Try to be helpful in a local Facebook group. Rage-quit after the third reply.
Rearrange your bookshelf by melancholy.
Create a UML diagram of your current emotional state. It has circular dependencies.
Invent a new cocktail called The IR35 and make it unpalatable.
Revisit Infinite Jest. Nope, still too much tennis.
Make a Spotify playlist called Background Music for Existential Angst.
Host a one-person “brown bag lunch and learn”. Invite no one.
Take up sketching. Accidentally draw the void.
Bake a loaf of bread. Compare it to your personal growth.
Use a Trello board to track your Netflix viewing.
Spend four hours choosing a new calendar app. Miss your dentist appointment.
Do a mock interview with your dog. They’re unimpressed.
Create a sequence diagram for making a sandwich.
Submit a talk to a tech conference titled “How I Pivoted Into Leisure”.
Refresh your email. Again. For no reason.
Visit the British Library website. Download one thing. Pretend it’s 1998.
Install a new dev tool. Spend six hours configuring it. Use it never.
Try oil painting. End up finger painting.
Listen to One Day Like This and pretend you’re emerging from a tech keynote in slow motion.
Open your pension statement. Gasp softly.
Install Linux on something. Just to feel again.
Join Mastodon. Realise you have nothing to toot.
Stand by a window during rain and whisper “monolith”.
Go to the cinema alone at 11:15am. Eat a hotdog. Feel like a god.
Try to write an About Me page that doesn’t induce nausea.
Remove the word “passionate” from your CV. Replace it with “resentfully excellent”.
Turn on your webcam and say, “Can everyone hear me?” to an empty room.
Look up your name in old GitHub issues. Whisper “I remember you.”
Read a whitepaper and get weirdly emotional at a good diagram.
Add “resilient systems architect” to your bio. Wonder if you mean yourself.
Rearrange your furniture and claim it’s for “flow state optimisation”.
Reread old Slack messages and wonder if you were ever truly understood.
Build a bot that texts you, “You’re doing fine”. Block it.
Attempt to meditate. Remember that time you broke prod on a Friday lunchtime.
Walk past your old office. Don’t look in. Don’t give it the satisfaction.
Consider buying a new domain name. Just one more.
Ask yourself if you’ve pivoted or if you’ve just wandered off.
Read job specs like riddles. Guess the organisation from the tone.
Label your electric toothbrush as “CEO of Hygiene”.
Sit in your garden and try to feel time passing.
Watch University Challenge. Get four questions right. Consider yourself reborn.
Clean a bathroom tap like it owes you money.
Try to build a simple serverless app. End up provisioning six Lambdas and a quantum regret.
Write a list of everything you’ve ever wanted to learn. Tape it inside a cupboard.
Build a test harness for something that does not exist.
Imagine what kind of bug your career arc would be. Probably a race condition.
Consider becoming a plumber. Again.
Start a new journal titled Things I Might Believe In Again Someday.
Switch from Safari to Chrome. Regret it.
Invent a startup that doesn’t solve a problem, just vibes.
Compile a ranked list of your past clients in order of passive-aggressive email signature length.
Sit in silence until the fridge clicks off. Call it “deep listening”.
Rewatch a 90s tech drama. Judge their font choices.
Browse conference CFPs. Whisper “not this year”.
Make a bingo card of startup clichés. Shout “pivot!” alone in the kitchen.
Schedule lunch with someone clever. Listen more than you speak.
Watch a documentary about jellyfish. Envy their detachment.
Rewatch Grease and remember your youth was more Byker Grove than Rydell High.
Write a sitcom pilot set in a dysfunctional Agile ceremony. Call it Scrum Down.
Go to B&Q and pretend you have strong opinions about MDF.
Write “available for interesting challenges” in a Moleskine notebook. Underline “interesting” eight times.
Go to the woods. Talk to no one. Pretend you’re scouting locations for a BBC Four miniseries.
Invent a new breakfast. Give it a name no one else would dare.
Create a mood board for “dystopian British semi-rural contractor ennui”.
Make a Gantt chart for your midlife crisis.
Publish a single blog post. Receive a single LinkedIn message. Spiral into overanalysis.
Create a new user account on your MacBook called “The Other Ian”. See what he gets up to.
Ask ChatGPT for new company names. Reject all of them.
Stare at the Companies House website for hours.
Register a new limited company with a vaguely mathematical name.
Design a logo. Tweak the kerning until dawn.
Add “freelance vibesmith” to your bio and see who pretends not to notice.
Schedule a “thinking sprint”. Spend it Googling Dutch canal houses.
Reply to a recruiter’s email with “Let’s build something stupid together”.
Take the dog to the groomer. Envy her spa experience.
Apply for a job with a Google Doc titled hire_me_final_final_final_v3.
Spend £19.99 on a new productivity app. Abandon it by Tuesday.
Claim “thought leader” status. Offer no evidence.
Browse Hacker News and whisper “we’ve all lost our way”.
Add a skill to LinkedIn that no one can disprove.
Finally buy that Fender Telecaster. Realise your fingers are 49 years old.
Reread White Noise. Recognise your family in the supermarket scenes.
Consider joining Threads. Decide to lie down instead.
Build a Zapier workflow that reminds you to breathe.
Add “professional exiter of Slack channels” to your CV.
Buy a ring light. Never turn it on.
Give your skirting boards performance reviews.
Practice your “interested, not desperate” tone for recruiters.
Learn keyboard shortcuts you will immediately forget.
Remember that time you felt truly excited by a Jira ticket.
Take a selfie in your home office. Title it “CEO of Uncertainty”.
Walk the dog in the rain without headphones. Let the silence accuse you.
Watch the kettle. Actually watch it.
Go on a local ramble. End up in a tea room. Order something aggressively beige.
Build a hobby project you’ll abandon just before the interesting bit.
Write your autobiography, starting with your first VB6 application.
Join a local meetup. Lurk quietly.
Photograph the dog beside a sandwich. Caption it Lunch team alignment meeting.
Try a surrealist journalling style for a week. Confuse yourself.
Attempt an AWS certification. Get sidetracked by IAM hell.
Debate between Rider and VSCode for 72 hours. Use neither.
List your skills in an Excel spreadsheet. Add a “Feels” column with conditional formatting.
Wander around a garden centre whispering I am the resurrection to the begonias.
Attend a conference. Don’t network. Just take notes like a monk.
Time travel via your 1999 LiveJournal archive.
Text your daughter to see if she wants chips. She does not.
Draft an “I’m Available!” post for LinkedIn. Rewrite it 17 times.
Rename your WiFi to something deeply personal. Like “IAM-is-a-lie”.
Create a bash alias for
git blamethat just says “It’s you”.Let a pasty cool on the windowsill like a Studio Ghibli peasant.
Imagine starting a commune of freelance backend developers.
Record a podcast called Grown Men Who Hate Scrum.
Write a Lambda that does nothing. Call it
existence.js.Browse job ads that require eight years of Rust experience.
Apply for something with a five-page application form. Quit on page two.
Make a tiny brass plaque for your home office that says “National Infrastructure Built Here”.
Tell someone they helped you, even if it was years ago.
Watch birds. Wonder if they ever feel pressure to pivot.
Read the Financial Times cover to cover, even the bits about Brazilian bonds.
Write a blog post about Step Functions that accidentally turns into an allegory.
Watch La La Land again, pretending it ends differently.
Update your Stack Overflow bio. Realise no one cares.
Write a blog post titled From Monolith to Man.
Have a glass of wine before lunch. Call it “continental”.
Start a Coursera course on Quantum Computing. Get distracted by crisps.
Add an “Easter Egg” route to an API that returns Lana Del Rey lyrics at random.
Sketch a fantasy org chart where you’re Librarian of Forgotten Code Paths.
Register the domain
scrumtrulescent.guruand host your memoirs.Walk into a café and loudly ask for “one oatmilk flat white, one AWS certification please”.
Apply to a job with 19 acronyms in the title
Write an RFC titled Emotional Resilience as a Service.
Create a Wordle knockoff call “Snarl” where the word never resolves.
Eat soup and crusty bread at 4pm and call it dinner.
Replace all your passwords with obscure Lana Del Rey lyrics.
Learn one Vim command. Add it to your CV.
Insist all standups happen at dawn. In a field. With a conch.
Send an invoice to your dog for emotional support services.
Sign up for Duolingo. Ghost the owl.
Learn to type faster. Immediately injure a finger.
Bake something unnecessarily complex, like a croquembouche.
Say yes to a coffee, even if it feels pointless.
Create an Agile persona called “Dave” who ruins everything.
Write a tiny shell script that brings you joy.
Read the OWASP Top 10 like it’s scripture.
Nap at noon. No shame.
Sit on a park bench in a suit holding a cardboard sign: “WILL DMN FOR QUICHE”.
Ask ChatGPT to estimate your deliverables. Reply “that’s too optimistic”.
Invent a wildly implausible SaaS product. Pitch it to a goat.
Translate your CV into emoji.
Publish your availability as if it were a concert tour poster.
Rewatch Hamilton and mutter “I am the one thing in life I can control” during the interval.
Give each of your houseplants a job title and a performance review.
Build a simple REST API. Cry when it turns into gRPC via EventGrid with DMN glue.
Realise your most transferable skill is “calm during outages during a pandemic”.
Use a highlighter to track which jobs require “energy”. Discard them all.
Watch a tutorial about something cool. Immediately Google “is this even used in industry?”
Wear your conference lanyards around the house. Call it “networking”.
Add “scrum-resistant architecture” to your skillset.
Accept that you’re not always productive. That’s OK.
Rank your all-time favourite songs by “sadness per minute”.
Create a conference talk titled How I Learned to Stop Estimating.
Read job specs like they’re horoscopes.
Start a secret blog reviewing sandwiches.
Walk outside barefoot with a mug of tea. Pretend you’re in a Cormac McCarthy novel.
Watch the job market like a hawk with a monocle.
Add a “frequently murmured phrases” section to your CV.
Join Bluesky. Immediately forget your password.
Find comfort in the fact that no-one has it all figured out.
Send yourself a calendar invite titled “Doomscrolling and Cheese”.
Create a whimsical footer for your email signature.
Name your feelings using HTTP status codes.
Build a GitHub repo titled Museum of Abandoned Side Projects.
Buy a whiteboard. Draw nothing but spirals. Call it Agile planning.
Say “not for that rate” out loud to no one in particular.
Compose an operetta about asynchronous messaging.
Whisper to yourself, “I made national infrastructure during a pandemic. I can bloody well do this too.”
Add whimsical footnotes to your old CVs. e.g. “[1] God, what was I thinking?”
Draft a resignation letter for a job you don’t have.
Let yourself miss things. It means you cared.
Build an Excel spreadsheet to compare take-home across five different payment structures.
Give your printer a name and a tragic backstory.
Start a podcast called Meetings That Could’ve Been Sandwiches.
Read the entire Terms & Conditions for iTunes. Experience spiritual crisis.
Try to invoice the universe.
Invent a productivity method involving biscuits and guilt.
Post a photo of the dog post-salon. Caption it Better groomed than my backlog.
Open a packet of Mini Cheddars like it’s a ritual.
Trust that something will come.
Add a “CEO of My Own Time” job to LinkedIn. Endorse yourself for everything.
Declare a new Agile ceremony: The Reckoning.
List your career highlights in haiku form.
Laugh at a job ad that wants “entrepreneurial mindset” for £375 inside IR35.
Buy a domain name you don’t need. Feel powerful.
Light a candle. Write “technical debt” on a slip of paper. Burn it.
Comment on a Medium post “this isn’t how databases work”.
Let go of the calendar.
Practise saying “I don’t do JavaScript” in a range of regional accents.
Sit in your office with the lights off and whisper “eventual consistency”.
Read a Kazuo Ishiguro novel and stare into the middle distance.
Write a choose-your-own-adventure CV.
Stand still.
Email a former colleague to say thanks.
Host a daily stand-up with your Lego minifigs.
Run an A/B test on your sense of self-worth.
Consider a sabbatical in a hut with only Markdown and tea.
Develop an app to track how many apps you’re not developing.
Begin again.
Cover Photo by Rodrigo Curi on Unsplash