I started my break on September 27th and it lasted until October 8th — 12 days off in total. Today is day 11, and quite a lot happened during this time, so I figured I’d write it all down.

The 3 Days Before the Official Holiday

Since I took annual leave for the 3 days before National Day while my colleagues didn’t, I still had to check my phone and respond to work messages during those initial days off. This is pretty common in Chinese workplaces. Chinese culture often instills a competitive mindset — fighting to grab more from a finite pool of resources, rather than collaborating to create new ones. This shows up in many scenarios, yet everyone seems to tacitly accept these rules, creating what feels like a battle royale. Thinking about it is still a bit disappointing — when someone tries to create more value through collaboration, their own resources usually end up getting carved up by the other parties.

What I Did During the Break

I signed up in July for the PTE exam scheduled for late September. But a sudden increase in workload kept me busy the entire month of September, and my test prep got put on hold. To have uninterrupted study time, I postponed the exam to mid-October, which gave me the entire break to properly review and prepare.

After almost a month without studying, I started by reviewing the speaking question types I had prepped before. Once that was done, I moved on to writing while doing speaking mock tests on the side. On October 6th, I completed my first full mock exam and hit my target score — though some speaking questions were ones I’d seen before. I spent the remaining days doing more mock exams. I’ll keep getting up early to do practice tests before work until exam day.

Finishing “Atomic Habits”

This book had been recommended by classmates back in college. Recently, wanting to tackle my procrastination, I downloaded it and started reading. I’d gotten through the first few chapters during spare moments in September, and finished the whole thing on October 5th. It was very rewarding. Some of the frameworks resonated with things I’d already experienced, but what really clicked was the idea that the brain only consistently does something when System 1 and System 2 agree. Satisfy System 1’s short-term needs first, then let System 2 act as a feedback loop to keep things running. Now I’m learning how to “trick” System 1 into compromising with System 2 to execute on my goals.

Other Things

On the evening of October 6th (Mid-Autumn Festival), my girlfriend and I went out on the e-bike to grab late-night snacks. I got distracted while we were chatting and crashed into a pedestrian. Both of us got minor injuries. Since I’d never been in a traffic accident before, I called 120 (ambulance) first to check if there were any issues, then called 110 for the police to come and issue a report. Afterward, I went to the ER with the other person to get our injuries checked out. There’ll be follow-up visits to determine the final compensation amount. This accident reminded me that driving any vehicle always carries risk — you need to stay focused on the road at all times to avoid accidents caused by distraction. Fortunately, neither party was seriously hurt.

On October 4th, my application to the LinuxDo forum finally got approved. I carefully wrote up my introduction, and it was approved within 2 hours — made me pretty happy.

During the break, my girlfriend and I cooked lots of good meals. When we had time, we’d go out for walks and spotted plenty of cats along the way, which was a lot of fun.