I did yes! But what I do during my time off is usually not what others would consider nice or fun, like spending most of my day re-doing my professional journey as a tube map.
Mondays
I have not been in a office for a long time now, but still remember the dreaded question in the morning: “Did you have a nice weekend?” to which I had to escape by either saying “yes, what about you?” (if I’m lucky the person mostly wants to tell me about their own weekend and don’t really care about mine) or just say something like: “nothing much…”
Online it’s easier as there are usually a few people in the call and some will have plenty to say.
In quite a few roles, I was only working 4 days a week and picking Monday as my non-working day. Problem sorted 😉
My weekends are usually what others would considering boring: cleaning the house, food shopping, laundry, maybe a bit of gardening but mostly, I do things that people would consider ‘work’.
Outside work
What I usually do outside work is ….different kind of ‘work’. Doing a tube map, writing blog posts, preparing a presentation, catching up on recordings of design or accessibility events I’ve missed are the type of things I enjoy doing during my free time. It usually doesn’t make good material to answer the “did you had a nice weekend” question.
It has not always been like that. When my kids were younger, most of my time outside work was kids related. Not anymore. I used to read a lot, mostly crime books. But since I started to switch from a software developer to a designer role, I had a lot of things to learn and it was done outside of work. So my evenings and weekends were spent reading and learning about design. Since then, I’ve never really stopped.
From design, I started to learn more about accessibility, then inclusion and these days, I’m also looking at power, design justice and system thinking. I enjoy all that. There is some unlearning to do as well and reframing.
Curious about the tube map?
I’ve been updating that map for a while now but it’s the first time I’m adding a new line for accessibility on it, so I had to move things around to make some space, then doing the gif for it took time as well.
To create the map, I have a tutorial for this: Tube map make your own (this is the blog post most people read and driving most of the traffic to my blog). Once you’re done your map, you make a copy of the file and work backward, removing the latest steps in the journey and exporting the result as an image for each step.
This gave me 22 images, which I then uploaded on ezgif.com, a free tool, simple to use to create a gif and tadaaa! You have the gif at the top of this blog post.