So, I couldn’t just leave the last post alone. I was brainstorming some other blog post ideas and I realized just how well a whole bunch of them would fit in here. Now, I could put together a whole post or even a series on self-education, or on decluttering, or on volunteering for that matter, but in the meantime how could I not add them here?
There is literally so much you can do over spring break, over holiday break, or over whatever break you have to keep yourself motivated and feeling accomplished. Now, college students have an advantage over those of us who work, because if you can be productive over a long weekend or a week off, imagine what you could do with two months over the summer.
But fear not! No matter who you are and how much time off you’re blessed with, between this list and the last there are definitely enough ideas that you can use to stay feeling like you’ve made the most out of your break.
I’ll hold off on any more of an introduction since I had one in the last post. Anyway, here you go! 6 more productive things to do with your time off!
P.S. If you haven’t gotten around to reading my last post, you can check it out here: 6 Productive Things to Do On Your Day Off
Table of Adventures
Educate Yourself
For many of us, seeing “educate yourself” seems like the absolute worst way to spend our vacation time.
However, hear me out. This doesn’t have to be scholastic education if you’re not feeling that. Educate yourself about literally any topic that you want to know more about – yeah, that could be an academic subject, or it could be some other Marie Kondo “this sparks joy” interest you have.
Say you’re into things with motors, anything that runs (cars, trains, planes, oh my!), but you don’t really know how they work, you just think they are interesting. So… find out! Or maybe you do know how cars and planes work, but you don’t know anything about how SpaceX’s new, hopefully not going to explode this time, space shuttle works.
Sure, you could tweet to Elon Musk and NASA asking a few things, hoping for a hilarious and informative response, but there’s also plenty of reading material beyond just scrolling through Wikipedia, although if you’re a beginner at a subject that isn’t a bad way to start.
You may eventually want to learn how to piece together a motor on your own or you could find that your new life goal is to become an aerospace engineer after reading all about rockets and spaceships. And if you’re not into reading, audiobooks are a great alternative.
You could learn how to bake, cook, or how to tie a knot with one hand. Whatever it is, educate yourself and learn how to do that particular something, so the next time you get the opportunity, you can show off your new skill to your friends.
To put a little bit of myself in here, I want to dive deep and understand the mechanics of cake decorating. I know how to bake a cake, but think Cupcake Jemma and Rosanna Pansino and how the cakes and cupcakes they make just look amazing… I want to do that!
I admire their work from afar, but I’m always coming up with an excuse not to try one of their bakes. My number one reason? It just won’t have those beautiful clean lines that I expect when I see a cake.
But with practice comes perfection. So, maybe that might be something I work on during my next holiday break. My to-do list is certainly long enough already, but how to pipe and smooth frosting onto cake surfaces is definitely something I would love to know how to do.
If you’ve got a longer break (like summer), diving deep into something can be a great way to pass the time, especially if it’s a kinesthetic type of learning hobby. If it’s something you do, then do it over your break. It’s fun, it’s a hobby, and it’ll teach you way more about the subject than you would have learned if you didn’t get your hands dirty.
Work On Yourself
This one can be a bit of a doozy for some of us. Fun fact, ‘rona sort of put all of us into a rut, and coming out of the pandemic, we’ve all got about a year’s worth of laziness to retrain out of our brains.
That isn’t unique to the pandemic though – a bad breakup, the loss of a loved one, or even just a particularly rough semester can tip you off that it’s time to pay a little attention to yourself and make sure you’re happy with the you that you are.
Working on yourself, especially when you’re bouncing back from something (like a pandemic) can help you rebuild your confidence and it can help remind you of what is honestly important in your life.
For a lot of people, myself included, there’s a physical component to this. After all – I want to look like Beyoncé, and yet, I do not. But beyond just vanity, taking care of your health and your body is important; you do only get one!
So if you’re heading to the gym, or to the park to jog, or just going out into your backyard to skip rope, do some jumping jacks, and the like. That’s a great way to immediately feel productive, burn off some excess energy, and help maintain the most important thing you’ve got in this world: you.
Now, one thing we are not going to do is let the deserve to improve our bodies turn into negativity and self-shaming, right??
No negative self-talk. I can want to look like Beyoncé, you can want to look like whomever, you can have 10 pounds to lose, 50 pounds to lose, want to put on some muscles, etcetera, etcetera, et-freaking-cetera. These are goals, that’s it. Beauty doesn’t come from that, it comes from within, and you are already beautiful. So take it for what it is and don’t get sucked into negative self-talk.
You gotta think of yourself like a gardener with this: you’ve got a garden, your body. You’re trying to change the garden and cultivate it so it matches this picture you have in your head, but it doesn’t need to match that picture to be a beautiful garden. You don’t need a “Megan booty” to have a nice butt.
Working on yourself can take a lot of other forms too – maybe you want to revisit the first section from part one, where I talk about meditation? Alternatively, have you ever heard of a gratitude journal? Well, if you haven’t, they are these journals that have inspirational and encouraging goals and quotes for you to reflect on, and they have prompts for you and places for you to write down small things that you were grateful for in the day.
Gratitude is such a powerful form of positive energy that we often overlook because we’re so busy all the time. Just being thankful for something changes your whole mood, so getting your brain in the habit of recognizing what you have to be thankful for is a great way of rewiring your mind to focus on the positive.
For example – you woke up this morning. Did you have something particularly tasty to eat today? Did you get to pet a doggo? Or a cat? Was the weather nice outside? It all sounds simplistic, but if you simply take a moment to appreciate small things like this, your stress levels will drop almost immediately.
This topic could be so much longer, but I’m only really able to scratch the surface here. After all, a lot of personally rewarding things you could work on to improve yourself are skills-based, and they’re all important to the person doing them, but the list would be impossible to make.
Are you a dancer? Maybe experiment with a new style, or with ice dancing (because yes, Queen!), or put yourself out there for an audition.
Do you play chess, like Queen’s Gambit? Learn a new opening.
Again, this could take forever if I went through all the different skills someone could have – my point is that you could try leveling up your skills a bit, as a way of reminding yourself that you’re good at stuff. And if you try hard enough, you can be really good at stuff.
Develop a New Habit
Habits take a while to form, so most people wouldn’t think that a day off is the best time to start a new one. In certain cases, though, I think it’s the perfect time to start something new that you’ll be excited to incorporate into your daily or weekly routine.
Pick out the new habit you want to cultivate and remember you can start small and build from there. When I started climbing, it was only about once a week that I climbed recreationally. By the time I was climbing 4-5 times a week, I was stronger than I had ever been and if I wasn’t sore by the end of the night, I knew I hadn’t gone hard enough, ha!
My point is that you can start a habit small and build from there. Find something that you’re excited about changing about your life; some new, positive habit. On your day off, you can start the habit and also spend some time planning for how you’re going to remind yourself to keep the habit going during your work week when life gets hectic again. Maybe a phone reminder will suffice, or maybe you need some sort of reward to encourage you.
One idea I heard is to take a Post-It notepad and use it as a progress bar. See, every day when you complete your new habit, you take a Post-It note off the pad. Then, I don’t know, use the note.
Write an encouraging note to yourself every day and post-date it so you can see how far you’ve come to build the habit.
But that part isn’t really important. The point is that when you get to the end of the pad and you’ve firmly established your new habit, then you treat yourself to something, like a new outfit or a night out on the town. Reward yourself for your good behavior!
So whatever your new habit is… maybe you need better sleep, or you want to start writing letters to people or sending out seasonal cards. Whatever it is, now is your chance! Go get ‘er!
Just remember – it takes 21 days to develop a new habit.
So don’t give up.
Create a Challenge
I feel like a lot of people don’t take the time out to challenge themselves during a break and honestly there isn’t anything wrong with that. I completely understand the urge to potato. I think it can be a real treat, though, if you try for it, especially if you’re of the competitive nature. Competing with yourself can help you to reach goals after all.
You can create a challenge for yourself or for a group of friends. Maybe you could discover a new hobby and go all in to learn as much as you can in an allotted amount of time. You could try to work on a project together. How about you and your friends start YouTube channels and see which of you can gain the most subscribers in 30 days?
Or participate in a challenge. There are tons of them on the internet; use Google to your advantage (try typing in [activity here] + challenge). There are thousands of bloggers out here trying to help everyone out and I’m sure that there’s something out there for everyone. And if there isn’t? Create one.
Clean and Declutter
For a lot of us, we’ve been indoors for a really long time and our homes feel less like a home and more like a prison.
Well, inside of those four walls you call prison, I mean home, can be a beautiful place again.
I’m sure you may have accumulated one too many things and you need to get rid of some of it. Take the time to clean and declutter your home. Channel your inner KonMarie. If you have a lot of stuff, grab a PODS portable container, some friends, and throw things out (or donate them if they’re in good shape). If you can start fresh by paring down to a minimalist life in the areas that you can, you’ll feel more open and refreshed.
In a clean home, you’ll smell your home better too, so you can light up those candles and wax warmers and enjoy the scents as they slowly float around your home. It won’t feel like they’re just covering up other, older smells anymore, but rather enhancing your home on their own. You’ll feel lighter. It’s weird, but it’s true! We cleared our bedroom of things we didn’t need any longer and it was like shedding weight; I swear! Try it for yourself if you think I’m lying.
Experience the World Around You
But if you just can’t bring yourself to clean your house, then why not escape it a while? Get outside and explore!
This might seem a bit redundant with ‘leave your house daily’ from the last post, so let me clarify: I mean leave your town.
Leave your state.
Leave your country.
Obviously, travel can be somewhat expensive, so your mileage may literally vary, but traveling and gaining experiences in the broader world opens your eyes up to new possibilities, and there are plenty of ways to travel that are less expensive than parading down the malls in Monaco.
Why not skip the common, touristy destinations and try something a little more off the beaten path? There are some beautiful locales in East Africa, like the island-country of Mauritius, which is just off the coast and has beautiful beaches; there’s also Madagascar, where rare lemurs frolic in the tropical forests. Or you could try Marrakesh, up in Morocco, or some other underrated destinations, like Palau, Azerbaijan, or Cairns, in Australia.
The world is wide and wonderful, so expanding your travel to-do might be just the thing to make your next vacation your best one yet.
Except what if you want to stay domestic?
Between national parks and monuments, you can explore, there are so many sights to see just here in the United States alone that you could stay busy for years just exploring our own backyard!
There’s the infamous continental 48 road trip around the USA and if you’re looking at this for summer then you’ve got at least two months to travel, then you’ll be able to see almost every state in the union. Of course, you’ll have to take another trip to do Alaska and Hawaii, but 48/50 in one summer isn’t bad at all.
If you’re not from the US, let me know! I’d be happy to take a look at some of the sites and possible adventures where you’re located or to hear your stories of exploring your home country. The point of traveling isn’t just to travel, it’s to find new experiences and expand your worldview, and there are a lot of ways to do that without actually going that far at all.
For example, you could try to learn a little bit more about your hometown or the surrounding areas. What are the places that locals around you would deem quintessential to someone coming into town? Have you ever actually been? It’s like how so many New Yorkers have never gone to see the Statue of Liberty because it’s always right there – take a moment to appreciate how close to history you live, and what that history is.
Random fact – In New Haven, CT, there’s a place called Judges’ Cave. Back in the 1600s, there was an English Civil War, and a bunch of judges voted to execute the King Charles I at the end of the war. A few years later, King Charles II was like “yo, you all killed my dad, so…” and ordered them all hunted down. Two of the judges hid out in a little cave for a few weeks in New Haven, trying to hide from the British soldiers, and… to me, that’s pretty random and cool!
You can visit Judges’ Cave, which is located in a park near New Haven at the end of a hiking trail, and you can read the story about these fugitives and hang out in a 400-year-old hideout.
The moral of this story is: get to know your hometown! Get to know your state, or county, and all the cool historical landmarks you have. You’ll never know what inspiring, cool, or crazy story you’ll learn from the past!
So, How Can I Spend My Holiday?
Spend your holiday however you choose, truly.
I’m hoping that this post (and the last) have given you much to think about in terms of productive holiday goals for yourself. Honestly, these lists could be so much longer, but I’d rather not inundate the post with too much information.
Maybe you do everything on this list during a nice long break. I’m sure you can, although you don’t want to burn out on vacation, when you’re supposed to be recharging. Maybe you only do one.
But whatever you do, my desire is that you found one thing here that resonated with you. I wish you luck on whatever challenge you decide to tackle. You’ll have one hell of a story to tell.