My sympathies...I have restarted work after more than a year (but shall we say 6 months of serious looking). It sucks!

1. Prepare yourself for the long haul, I am not saying to give up hope or anything but plan around the fact that you may have 6 months without working.

2. Jobsearch for max 4 hours of your day. You get burnt out really fast if you think you must look all the time...its actually counterproductive. Have one thing that gets you out of the house each day

3. Lack of structure and lack of human contact during working hours are the two biggest enemies of the unemployed. Solve this by getting into a routine everyday,Ie get up, have a nice brekkie, job search for 3 hours, do some excersise/volunteer work, or just hang out, do another hour or so of job stuff in the evening. On the human angle, there are a lot of people looking for work or have followed partners to Zurich, find them, meet them in real life, do stuff together.

4. Find a way to learn something new while unemployed...yaya its good for the CV and all that but the real use is that it keeps you sharp and makes you feel less like you are wasting your life. What you learn depends on your tastes and if you have a budget for it or not.

5. Invent a project to take up some of your time. Like making a website for yourself, translating weird articles on wikipedia, reasearching something you are interested in or something whacky like interviewing the druggies in ZRH. It should be something that will take 2-3 months part time to complete.

6. You will have ups and downs, its par for the course. Do what you can when you feel good and dont beat yourself up for the days when you just dont want to get out of bed. IF you find yourself really sliding, get out of Zurich, preferably out of Switzerland and shake yourself up. Find a cheap flight to somewhere (cheap and) different, or visit friends elsewhere.

Ok so none of that is really pratical on what to do in Zurich but surviving unemployment is not (just) about filling time. Its about keep sane....