There are 112 waking hours a week. It's healthy to spend maybe 35 to 40 of those working, which means doing things that are useful for other people. More than 40 hours won't hurt, either. Looking after young, elderly, or sick friends or relatives absolutely counts, of course, as does work in the community. It needn't be work in the ordinary capitalist sense.
The programme suggests we have an occupation (page 19). This also comes under the umbrella of service in Step Twelve. To practise these principles in all our affairs, we have to have affairs to begin with. AA service (including sponsorship) is an avocation, not a vocation: we need a vocation, too.
Good sense moreover suggests that, unless we have something to occupy ourselves with usefully, we'll probably think about ourselves too much and develop all sorts of disagreeable vices and preoccupations. A sponsor once said: unstructured free time is deadly for alcoholics. I think that's right.
Work will furthermore build a sense of belonging and accomplishment and will help us to become fully self-supporting through our own contributions.
The three magic words are: work, study, and volunteering. The aim is to fill 35 to 40 hours a week with these activities.
In preparation for these, when I was younger and had no skills, I put my time into preparing for work by studying, training, doing job placements, researching, volunteering, and undertaking other activities to fit myself for work. My experience and observation is that pretty much anyone can find a useful activity to undertake.
Here's a list that some friends of mine in recovery and I came up with for what we've done in the past to fix the problem of being without an occupation or not being self-supporting financially. If they helped us, which they did, they might help you.
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- Identify skills
- Identify skills gaps
- Identify opportunities for closing those skills gaps
- Read books on careers and on choosing / changing careers
- Read books on career development
- Talk to careers advisers
- Talk to everyone you know who is successful in their career
- Note down what they did
- Make a plan for replicating what they did, adapted to your circumstances
- Get professional or other advice on filling out job application forms and interviewing
- Do lots of interview practice with trained or experienced people
- Read prospectuses for colleges, training schemes, universities
- Talk to whoever is charge of these courses
- Talk to the admissions departments for these institutions
- Interview for courses
- Enrol on courses
- Attend courses
- Find people to provide advice on vocational / professional development
- Sign up with recruitment agencies
- Sign up temporary work agencies
- Bring a CV up to date
- Get the CV reviewed by human resources or recruitment professionals
- Go to careers libraries / accessing online resources about careers
- Go to careers fairs
- Find out about careers I've never even heard of
- Find out more about careers I have heard of
- Make lists of careers that are interesting to me
- Make lists of careers that do not (yet) appeal but match my skills
- Make lists of careers that do not (yet) appeal but are short of workers
- Make lists of careers that do not (yet) appeal but offer the opportunity to make money
- Research each of these careers with an open mind ...
- ... asking God to help me grow beyond the limitation of my personal reality
- Shortlist a dozen careers
- Establish the trajectory for going from 'here' to 'there'
- Review the feasibility of these various trajectories
- Make a shortlist of trajectories
- Start to proceed along them
- Reject options at the last feasible moment not the first opportunity
- Identify opportunities for volunteering
- Research them
- Discuss these opportunities with advisers and with the relevant organisations
- Take up these opportunities
- There are many, many ways for any human being to be useful to the world
- If I'm underoccupied, I'm saying 'no' where I should be saying 'yes' to one of the above
Specific actions to fix spending more than you earn:
- Record and analyse all spending and produce monthly and yearly accounts
- Produce monthly and yearly budgets
- Track actual spending against monthly and yearly budgets
- Identify variances, explain them, and feed the information into the next budget period
- Identify opportunities for savings and economising
- Have a one-year (annual) and maybe a five-year plan for income, broken down by month
- Review the plan for reasonableness and feasibility
- Track income against the plan
- Identify variances, explain them, and feed the information into the next budget period
- Identify opportunities for earning more money
- Where are the gaps between what I will earn and what am I spending?
- How can those gaps be filled with temporary stopgaps?
- How can those gaps be filled with permanent solutions?
- If necessary, acquire skills in budgeting & financial planning
- If necessary, seek professional help in doing so and / or read books or go on courses