Finding Your Third Space: The Importance of Hobbies and Getting Out and About

Years ago, after returning from Japan, and settling into my first week of grad school, a mentor told me that I had to find my third space.

She reminded me that the third space had to be somewhere that “was not home but also not work”. In her case, a local yoga studio helped her to press reset at the end of a hard day. It was a space where she could drop the responsibilities and obligations and take on another identity.

As this summer is starting to wind down, I have started to think more about creating other third spaces. The fine line between working at home and on campus was often blurred for me, and there were times where I easily spent 16-18 hour days on campus. While fun, I found that the space between my “work and home circles” was not as robust as I wanted. Over the past 2 years, volunteering and meeting other local professionals during book clubs, meetups, and workshops has helped me to define another space that wasn’t just work or home. Not only that, they provided spaces for me to build new skills and learn from a variety of people from diverse backgrounds.

Japanese cooking and container gardening have turned into great hobbies for me this summer, along with my usual tech meetups!

If you feel as though you are stuck in a cycle of work and home, consider exploring local volunteer options around you. These third spaces do not always have to be career-work focused or involve meeting up with people in person. Taking classes in a new craft, or attending online webinars hosted by other professional organizations can also foster your creativity and enthusiasm I would often tell my students and mentees that they needed to have a holistic education. Classwork work is not enough!

Here are some other spaces to consider if you feel stuck:

• Meetups and online webinars are often hosted by different technologists or professional associations in your area. Look up information networking opportunities online if you are shy about attending on your own!

• Most cities have a local Arts Council or studios which offer courses for a wide range of practices. This also includes exploring courses offered by local community colleges or univer, both in person and online, to build skills in digital art, programming and project management!

• Explore online message forums and subreddits; many have communities which host their own Discord, YouTube or Twitch channels where you can interact with other people.

Have fun exploring a new space as summer ends, and think about the types of learning you can bring to your coworkers and learners, that will help them have a holistic education too!

SMART GOALS and Summer Productivity!

Productivity!

I am still learning that this term encompasses so many different ideas, which makes it such a great example of a “glittering generality”. Productivity can mean any and EVERYTHING to a wide audience. It doesn’t matter if you are in the middle of the tenure track rush or if you are embedded in corporate life. We are all fighting against the limitations imposed on us by that term, and it can be especially frustrating when those limitations are self-inflicted.

When I worked at a collegiate level, I used to fear that I wasn’t productive enough — not enough grading done, the assessment methods weren’t thorough enough, the learning objectives weren’t clear enough or that my own research projects weren’t receiving “enough” attention. This type of negative thinking is exhausting, and while I did have the chance to go the “extra mile”, I had to accept that I shouldn’t have to use this fear of enough as the gasoline for my motor.

Bullet journal (bujo) are also great for visual learners

While it was not a quick fix, a few years ago, I was introduced to the concept of setting SMART goals as a way to make the ambiguity around productivity clearer. After the end of my last semester, I decided to continue to set my plan for each day or week using the same SMART goal methods. Each evening or first thing in the morning, I like to make some coffee and then update my google spreadsheets to track my main goals and set priorities for the day. In some ways, my spreadsheets have turned into mini-journals and reflect the “work adjacent work” that helps me set my own definition of productivity.

This is a great technique not just for tracking your own work, but could also be adapted to help your learners track their own skills or career goals over time or to track their own measures of productivity for various projects. You can even color-code the tasks and use data-validation methods to make it even easier to find a workflow that works best for you!