I was not bored. That was actually the problem.
The cross-country ride was done. I had gone overseas for a bit, come back to New York, and started answering messages again. I sent one note that said I was back in the United States and starting to think about new projects.
There were plenty of things I could do. I updated my scheduling link, restarted old conversations, took calls, and asked a former Wahoo teammate if I could pick his brain about EDI systems. I was interested in learning. I just was not interested in manufacturing a job for myself so I could say I was busy.
I said it more plainly in a message that night. I was already busy. If the right project showed up, I would put in the amount of work required to make it successful. I did not have much appetite to force myself into the wrong project and then pretend to be excited about it.
This was not a clean vacation-to-new-company transition. There were still handoffs.
That morning I went into the Apply office to deliver mail and finish transferring the royalty payout system. I estimated that I had put about 100 hours into it. The useful part was not that I had built it. The useful part was that our business operations lead could now own the whole thing without me.
The following day I moved the rest of my stuff out of the office.
I was also moving into Rockaway. Calls happened between boxes, truck runs, bike rides, and figuring out how the new place worked. The photo from that week is me outside after a ride, making a strange claw with my hand next to a bottle full of capsules. It does not look like a polished professional reset. It looks like what the week looked like.
There was energy again. I was learning, talking to people, and getting organized. I also had enough distance to know that picking a project because it was available would probably end badly.
So the calendar was open, but I was not desperate to fill it.