Life in Professional Limbo as a Doer

You know, the worst part about being “in professional limbo” as a doer is the fact I could make or save a business hundreds of thousands, if given the right resources. Instead, I’m sitting here, percolating, waiting for my time to shine.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy the time to sit and percolate my ideas but my brain (and my wallet) really doesn’t like it when I’m not making the dollars to contribute to my expenses.

But here’s the thing. What does an underemployed doer like myself do when things aren’t going my way?

I want to share my blueprint for staying productive, creative and sane during underemployment. Maybe it’ll give some ideas to someone also struggling with underemployment.

The Daily Structure that Keeps Me Sane

I think this is the most important for me. Keeping the same routine has helped me make sure I don’t spiral. If I keep myself busy I’m sure something will come of one of the projects I work on.

Morning

Usually start the day by spending an hour reading. Right now, its Material World, a fascinating book about the state of the materials we use on a daily basis. Sometimes the book is non-fiction, sometimes I read a book recommended by the Unsupervised Learning community.

Next, I’ll usually spend a couple hours on personal improvement. Right now I’m following my Learning Plan which has three categories, certificates, tools and real-world experience (in the form of podcasts, or projects). I’ve been focused on the certificates aspect, especially on the ISO 27001 Internal Auditor. Tools, are usually cybersecurity tools, or helping set up a home lab, or some other tinkering in that area. Learning something new is important to me.

Sometimes I’ll write blogs, just like this one, usually a couple hours researching or writing and prepping it for post.

Afternoon/Evening

Come the afternoon, I spend 30 minutes to an hour exercising, usually walking, thinking or talking through ideas with my buddies if they have the time. Otherwise its spent listening to podcasts, usually Unsupervised Learning, Hacked, Darknet Diaries, Cloud Security Podcast by Google, Risky Business, GRC & Me, just a few different podcasts, heavily focused on cybersecurity.

Next, I spend the afternoon to late evening either working on the small jobs I have, looking for work, or working on personal projects, of which I have many. Usually this leads me way into the late evening.

Nine Projects that Keep My Skills Sharp

I love working on new projects. Probably to my detriment. The amount of unfinished or unpolished projects I have floating around is the worst. I have a list of at least 50 ideas of things I want to do. Some in various stages of completion. If you’re a future employer, don’t worry. If we have a well defined task, end goal and date, I’ll get it done, even those little tasks that seems to get forgotten. I’ve been told by previous employers that even the little things that was told to me in passing get done too. Mainly because it sits in my to-do list until its done. Just look at my portfolio and my motto. Listen. Plan. Deploy. Evolve.

Here’s what my current project list looks like:

• Growing and Building Sparkbytes - Sparkbytes has been my dream from the get-go. Even in college I’d be working my butt off to create this business, serving dozens of businesses across the USA. Look our our portfolio to see what we’ve done. We’ve had good years and meh years. It’s been a bit quiet year and a half so trying to find new paths to grow, and redefine the company. Either way, if it becomes a moonlight job again, that’s fine. It’ll have its time to prosper at some point.

• Growing and Building Olleh - My second company, I’ve been trying to find ways to reach out to people to sell a really cool tool the Sparkbytes team developed to help glass (and other dimension based installers) with their book of pricing based on a complex list of products they may need to price for.

• Compliance App - This ones been kinda in progress for a while. I think in the end it’ll just be a great learning experience as the industry has somewhat caught up, but the market proposition comes out of a lack of great GRC apps for small businesses. I mean like less than 100 people. There are still a bunch of companies that do GRC but for those that just want a semblance of an great basic policies or procedures or lack a mature GRC business structure, jumping into a massive GRC program don’t really hit the mark when just starting up. One thing I’ve learned in compliance and cyber, is its the road of progress rather than the destination that is the most important.

• OSS Tools - Open source is a really cool place to test out new technologies. Some OSS are great and provide great value, others are just the freemium of an enterprise tool. Either way, I’ve been setting up some of these tools on my private server to test them out:

  • N8n

  • Wazuh

  • Flowise

  • OpenVAS

• Substrate - I’ve been SUPER interested in this project. Daniel Miessler created a great foundation (substrate) for how humanity can break down some of the core concepts of data, humanity, progress, innovation and more. I’ve been creating some sql data structures (with the help of AI LLMs) to figure out how best to provide data to this structure given the requirements of what Substrate is trying to achieve.

• Claude Code - This is a generalized tinker project. Figuring out how to thoughtfully integrate my data using MCPs and RAGs together so I can get actionable data from truthful sources to reduce hallucinations and provide better actionable information for what I’m trying to achieve rather than what it thinks I’m trying to achieve. I’m also trying to create workflows with n8n, Flowise and other tools to bring the amount of data tools I use on a regular basis under one roof. I get tired of trying to remember which app is what and where I stored a note I knew I had.

• Scripts - I’ve been building my small but helpful set of scripts I’ve been finding useful along the way in both my IT and generalized laziness I struggle with (well not “lazy” just “not gonna do it twice”).

• Futures Enigma - Its a podcasting/blogging project I’m trying to get off the ground with my brother where we talk about really cool future projects and technologies and the uncertainty and future each idea may provide. Really slick project, in my opinion.

• Investor Slide Deck - I’m also creating investor slides decks for some of these ideas I have. I think I’ll share them when I have some of them created. Who knows, some may land others may not. Either way, still a cool project.

While projects are a big part of my life, part of my experimentation is via creative outlets.

Creative Work

Finally, the creative outlets.

• Blogging - Probably my most favorite experiment so far. I’ve kept at it for almost 5 years, with the last year being the most active, obviously because I have the time and bandwidth to produce. It’s an exciting way to express my ideas and thoughts to the world.

• Photography - Probably the most fun I’ve had in a long time. I’ve been doing shoots on a regular basis, just getting out and shooting cars and motorcycles that look cool in the community. I have a pretty big backlog of photos I wanna edit and has led to some other ideas I want to produce. Like why does no professional cameras have depth sensing technology so I don’t have to cut out the subject out of each picture manually? Anyway… Thats a project for another day.

Finally…

Well its quite a list. No I’m not saying I’m working on them all at once. I have ideas all the time. I wish I could work on them all at once without worrying about my wallet. But thats not in the cards for now. I guarantee I’m gonna be 80 and still coming up with ideas I want to work on, its just my mind as a doer.

I'm currently between jobs and dedicating my time to creating content here on the blog and my other creative outlets. If you've found value in what I'm sharing, consider buying me a coffee to help keep me fueled while I continue writing and job searching. Every contribution, no matter how small, means the world to me.

https://buymeacoffee.com/blastingbytes

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