I’ve found that it can feel like I need “permission” to do certain professional development things that I can actually pursue independently, mostly due to having a brain conditioned by previous retail/admin work to never start or improve anything unless specifically instructed to do so. I can relate to your nerves and think that some of what you need is a shift in mindset and the other half is some set of “goals” to work toward and feel satisfied as you do them.
Mindset-wise, I think it’s important to stop thinking of yourself with this imposter-syndrome “I’m an analyst but not really so I can never look for a new job and I have to hide my downtime lest someone expose me as a fraud” narrative. It’s going to make you more anxious than you need to be, and it’s clearly not serving as a healthy motivator for your work or professional development. So take some time to think over what you are good at that your manager and colleagues have praised you for, consider that many jobs have busy and less-busy periods, and try to find a sweet spot of “I am capable of performing important work” and “My company values sustainability and doesn’t want me biting off more than I can chew” to build your confidence. Learning and practicing more skills in your field will naturally segue into wanting to try and improve your existing projects, so don’t feel bad about using that time on personal development even if you don’t have a straightforward “I am learning X so that I can do Y” narrative.
Alright, into the nitty-gritty of what to do during those slow days. There are loads of resources out there and it can be pretty overwhelming to consider them all. It sounds like you’ve spent a lot of time with Excel, Salesforce, and Tableau so let’s set those aside or at the very least consider new angles to approach them.
If you’re regularly working with data and visualizations but you never had formal training in statistics or data science, it could be worth catching up on the tools and basics of the field. I wanted to learn more about R as a tool so I downloaded it and followed along with the free online book R for Data Science. Whenever I ran into a statistical concept I hadn’t learned I looked it up and tried to use free resources to understand it better. It’s slow going when you don’t have a teacher, but there are a lot of people in the field that want to improve the general public’s understanding of statistics and offer free resources and help online. You don’t necessarily need to start with R or SQL, so consider a topic or two that feels compelling and work-related to you.
This kind of self-study can be pretty taxing mentally, and I would say you should try out different routines to see what cadence makes it work best for you. Does committing to 3 daily sessions of 45 mins to 1 hour seem better than focusing for 3 hours straight, or vice versa? Do you need multiple topics to stay interested, or is diving deep into one area of study more your style? It’s important to not replace all free time with self-study, because you’re likely to get really burnt out that way. Just think of adding it to your day as a way to keep things interesting and have a clear answer if someone asks “What have you been up to between projects?”
Since you seem motivated to build up your relevant work skills, that would be my biggest suggestion. With shorter stints of time, maybe look into industry listservs or academic journals that you can read and consider. Your local library might let you download PDFs from academic journals or texts, so consider adding relevant reading to your usual routine.
Lastly, there are a lot of nonprofits and research projects that need help with data entry or cleaning, so when you’re feeling like your brain is already too full of New Concept Learning, why not consider helping out the National Archives as a volunteer transcriptionist or contributing to a project on Zooniverse? Or you can do something internal with your company that’s just a quality-of-life improvement for yourself that doesn’t need to be maintained all the time if something more urgent comes up. Do you have a list of your most frequently asked questions? A smaller directory that just displays your commonly used contacts? A “to-do-list” template that feels organized and pleasant to look at?
I think that you deserve to give yourself a break from the guilt and see if reframing this time as a gift rather than a burden helps you open up your horizons. Good luck, and remember to share what you get up to here so that I can learn from your experience too!
