Push, progress, exhaustion, escape, guilt, restart — I finally mapped the loop I keep falling into, and found the one number that is actually improving.
Day 18 of the journey to find a new job.
Today, I don't really want to talk about how many questions I solved, how many hours I studied, or how many recruiter calls I received.
I want to talk about something that has been bothering me for a while.
Why do I keep falling back?
Over the last couple of days, I realized that I had slipped back into my comfort zone again.
And the frustrating part is that I've seen this happen before.
I push myself.
I become extremely attentive.
I remove distractions.
I start taking preparation seriously.
For a few days, everything feels right.
Then something changes.
Maybe it's the third day. Maybe the fourth. Sometimes the fifth.
The momentum starts disappearing.
And suddenly, I start looking for something else.
Something easier.
Something more comfortable.
Something that gives me the feeling that I'm doing something without forcing me to confront the discomfort of what I actually need to do.
Then I realize what I've done.
And I have to start again.
I've started thinking about this as a loop.
Push → progress → exhaustion → escape → guilt → restart.
And I don't think the problem is that I don't know how to work hard.
I clearly can.
I've worked extremely hard before. I've spent entire days working, solving problems, building things, learning things, and pushing through difficult situations.
The problem is that I haven't yet figured out how to make that effort sustainable.
There is a difference between being able to push yourself extremely hard for a few days and being able to maintain a meaningful level of effort for several weeks or months.
And this job search is teaching me that difference.
Earlier, I thought productivity meant maximizing how much I could do in a day.
If I could sit for eight hours, that was a productive day.
But I've slowly started realizing that sitting for eight hours doesn't mean I was actually working for eight hours.
Sometimes four hours of focused work is more valuable than eight hours of sitting at a desk while constantly fighting yourself.
So I've tried the opposite approach too.
Start slowly.
Set small goals.
Don't overwhelm myself.
Build momentum.
And that has helped.
But even then, I eventually fall back.
The difference is that something else is changing.
The interval is increasing.
I'm able to stay focused for longer before falling back into the same behavior.
And maybe that's a form of progress I wasn't measuring before.
We often measure progress by looking at what we accomplished.
How many questions?
How many hours?
How many interviews?
How much work?
But there is another measurement.
How long can you maintain the behavior you want before returning to the behavior you're trying to change?
That number is increasing for me.
And that gives me some hope.
I still don't have a complete answer.
I know I want to work.
I know what I need to prepare.
I know that there is an interview waiting for me next week.
And yet, after a few days of pushing myself, I start searching for something that takes me away from the preparation.
Sometimes that escape looks like distraction.
Sometimes it looks like relaxation.
And sometimes, strangely enough, it looks like productivity.
That's what happened with the project I've been building.
The project started with a genuine idea.
I wanted to create something that could help me manage my own job search.
It was useful.
It was interesting.
And most importantly, I enjoyed building it.
That's the dangerous part.
When you're building something yourself, the feedback loop is incredibly fast.
You get an idea.
You write some code.
You see something working.
You get another idea.
You implement that.
You see the result again.
Every small improvement gives you another reason to continue.
And before you realize it, two and a half days are gone.
The project is almost complete now, but those two and a half days came at a cost.
My interview preparation suffered.
And then yesterday, I had an interview that didn't go as well as I expected.
That made me look backward.
Not to blame the project.
Not to say that building it was useless.
But to ask myself:
Was this actually the most important thing for me to be doing at that moment?
And the answer was no.
That's a difficult realization because the work itself wasn't bad.
It was good work.
It was useful work.
It was even enjoyable work.
But it wasn't the right work for that moment.
I've been thinking about this using a very simple analogy.
Imagine you are at point X and you want to reach point Y.
There can be hundreds of different paths between them.
You can go left.
You can go right.
You can take a shortcut.
You can explore something interesting along the way.
You can even take a completely different route and eventually still reach Y.
But there will always be a shortest path.
And right now, I know what my shortest path is.
Prepare → interview → improve → interview again → get the job.
That's it.
Everything else is secondary.
The project can be built later.
The ideas can be explored later.
There will always be new things to learn.
There will always be another interesting problem to solve.
But if I keep branching away from the shortest path every time something interesting appears, I might spend months moving without actually getting closer to the destination I care about right now.
And that's something I need to become better at:
choosing the right path, not just a productive path.
There is another layer to this that I don't completely understand yet.
For the last year and a half, working in a startup environment, I think I became accustomed to operating in a constant state of urgency.
Everything felt important.
Everything needed attention.
There was always something else that could be done.
And when you're in that environment for long enough, your brain starts treating everything as equally urgent.
Now I'm in a completely different situation.
I need to prepare.
I need to focus.
I need to prioritize.
But my mind still wants to respond to everything.
An idea comes in — I want to build it.
Something interesting comes up — I want to explore it.
Something feels uncomfortable — I want to avoid it.
Something feels easy — I want to do more of it.
And that creates branches everywhere.
So perhaps part of this journey isn't just preparing for interviews.
It's learning how to direct my own attention.
I even started thinking about this through Newton's second law.
An object at rest doesn't change its state without a force acting on it.
I think that's surprisingly relevant to what I'm experiencing.
When I'm not in preparation mode, I need an external force to get moving.
Sometimes that force is an interview.
Sometimes it's the fear of falling behind.
Sometimes it's simply me deciding that enough is enough and sitting down to work.
Once I start moving, things become easier.
One question leads to another.
One system design problem leads to another.
One hour of focused work makes the next hour easier.
Momentum starts building.
But when I stop for too long, I have to generate that force again.
And that's exhausting.
So perhaps the goal isn't to keep forcing myself from zero every few days.
The goal is to build enough momentum that I don't keep returning to zero.
I've seen this pattern before.
When preparing for competitive exams or solving problems earlier in life, sometimes I would skip steps because I already knew them.
I knew the intermediate logic.
I had solved similar problems before.
So my brain would automatically jump ahead.
And that's exactly where silly mistakes happen.
A minus becomes a plus.
A condition gets skipped.
A small assumption goes unnoticed.
The problem isn't always lack of knowledge.
Sometimes it's simply lack of attention.
And I think interviews are showing me the same thing now.
I don't necessarily need to learn everything from scratch.
I need to slow down enough to respect every step.
Build the fundamentals.
Practice React properly.
Do machine-coding questions.
Strengthen the muscle memory for writing code under pressure.
And with DSA, the logic is already getting better. Now I need to develop the ability to translate that logic into code quickly and accurately within the time available.
The same principle applies to the larger journey.
Don't skip steps.
Don't assume momentum will always be there.
Build it again.
And again.
And again.
This is probably the biggest thing I'm taking away from Day 18.
I used to think consistency meant:
Never break the streak.
Now I'm starting to think differently.
Maybe consistency means returning to the path every time you leave it.
If I can work for three days, fall back, recognize it, and return — that's better than staying lost for weeks.
If next time I can maintain it for five days, that's progress.
If eventually I can maintain it for ten days, that's even better.
The goal isn't perfection.
The goal is to make the falling-back period smaller and the focused period longer.
Eventually, I want staying focused to feel normal.
I want the preparation to stop feeling like something I'm constantly forcing myself to do.
And maybe that's going to take time.
That's okay.
I have another interview scheduled for next week.
The project is still there.
The job search is still there.
The preparation is still there.
And so am I.
Tomorrow, I don't need a completely new strategy.
I just need to get back on the path.
Make the goals smaller if necessary.
Take them one by one.
Build the momentum.
Then keep it moving.
Because I'm slowly realizing that this journey isn't only about finding a company that will hire me.
It's also about figuring out how I want to work, how I want to think, and how I want to stop running away from difficult things just because something easier is available.
Maybe that's the real job I'm trying to get.
A better version of myself.
Day 18 done.
I fell back again. But this time, I understood the pattern a little better.
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