By Daniel Glasier
我的生活快照：下午时间，我正试着决定是否去酒吧整理今天的邮箱作为对自己的奖励，还是对今天不做任何整理。
Snapshot from my life: it is mid-afternoon, and I’m trying to decide on whether to offer myself the treat of heading over to the pub to do some light clarifying of my inbox,or offer myself the treat of doing no clarifying at all today.
一些背景：我在间休年，这是我32年来的第一次。上一次是我18岁的时候。
Some context:I’m currently taking a gap year, my first in 32 years. The last one was when I was 18.
我完成了一个大项目，花了将近六年的时间来完成这项工作。
与其四处寻找下一个项目，我想我会借此机会暂时休息一下。
I finished a major project, which had taken close to six years to get over the line, and rather than reflexively scrabbling around to find the next thing – I thought I would take the opportunity to do a bunch of nothing for a while.
并不是说我想重塑自己; 如果我一年后，我最终还是做了我现在能做的事，那休息一下也没关系。我只是想利用休息的机会来打开我一个新的可能性。
It’s not that I’m trying to reinvent myself; if I end up doing something a year later which I could have started straight away, that will be fine. I simply wanted to use the opportunity of the break in my work to open the possibility that I come out the other side a different person.
当然，这是一个有点令人生畏的，但随着我年迈50，我认为休息是探索的肥沃土地。
That is a slightly daunting prospect of course, but as I move into my fifties I’m thinking it is fertile territory for exploration.
事实证明，对我来说，没有每月的薪水带来的比限制自己视野要更多。以前，有薪水意味着我必须把注意力集中在特定背景下的一种特定活动上。这意味着拒绝许多迷人的可能性，仅仅因为它们不符合公司战略，或者我自己的个人或职业发展目标。
It turns out that, for me, the cost of not having a salary is more than outweighed by the benefit of not having to restrict my vision of the world to a particular lens. Previously, having a salary meant I had to focus my attention on one particular kind of activity in a particular context. That meant turning down lots of fascinating possibilities, simply because they didn’t fit with the corporate strategy, or my own personal or professional development goals for that period.
现在，我能够追随眼前看到的任何闪亮的东西，了解它会指引我去哪里。
Now, I’m able to attend to whatever shiny thing I have in front of me and see where it leads.
我一开始天真想象GTD®的技能不那么重要，因为我不那么忙，但事实上我发现情况正好相反。
I had naively imagined that the techniques of GTD® would be less important now that I’m less busy, but in fact I’m finding the opposite to be the case.
GTD标准并不具有固定性，对于我们中的许多人来说，在全职工作中很少有机会定期清理你的收件箱，或完成清单上所有的事。但在一个间休年，这种可能性确实存在。工作流程的减少意味着有时我能够坐下来，知道一切平凡的事情都得到照顾和控制。
GTD standards not with standing, for many of us in full-time work there is little chance of regularly clearing your inbox, or of actually getting to the end of the list.But in a gap year, that possibility actually does exist. The reduction in workflow means that sometimes I’m able to sit down, knowing that everything mundane is taken care of and under control.
然而，间休年项目产生了更重要的风险。
琐碎的管理工作 - 支付税款，账单，整理房子周围的东西，这可以扩展到填补所有可用的时间。
这将抵消今年的重点。
This generates a much more serious, even existential risk to the main point of the gap year project however. The trivial admin – paying taxes, bills, sorting out things around the house – can expand to fill all the time available. And that would cancel out the very point of the year off.
因此，在这种情况下，我发现我的GTD习惯比我忙时更有益。
我真的可以每周一个下午去做管理方面需要完成的所有事情。
我每隔三四天就采取一次理清的节奏，而不是每隔一两天。
我的检视大多是每周一次，但在这里我也允许自己放松一下。
So, in this context, I’m finding my GTD habits to be even more beneficial than when I was busy. I genuinely can take one afternoon a week to do all the things that need to be done on the admin side. And I’ve taken my clarifying rhythm to once every three or four days rather than every day or two. My reviews are still mostly weekly, but here too I’ve allowed myself to loosen up a bit.
保持这些原则给了我真正的探索前方的只有。
我非常好奇会有什么惊喜等着我。
Keeping these disciplines has given me genuine freedom to explore untrodden paths. And I’m very curious as to where this period of planned spontaneity will lead.
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