These are the final weeks of my sabbatical - which means I will soon have less time to write. All the same, I am going to try to resume my habit of publishing a post every day, even when it feels like I have nothing to say. If you want to keep up to date with these you can subscribe to receive emails every time I publish a new post.
One way I might choose to keep this habit up once my work resumes is to try to ship more writing at work too. This would mean that towards the end of January I stop sharing as many posts here in favour of writing up things to share internally with my colleagues. On my mind in general is how best to transition from one mode back to the other.
But first, today I wanted to reflect on some of the advice I received when starting my sabbatical. Most of this advice needed to be directly solicited by me from others. People were often curious to hear about how I planned to make the most of the time, but they were not so quick to share their own thoughts on how to make the most of it - even when they had relevant experience taking similar periods of time to work on specific bits of writing.
I reckon the reason people weren't so forthcoming is because a lot of this advice can be quite personal - in the sense that what works and doesn't is highly idiosyncratic to the individual. I'm glad I probed though, because the advice I received when I did has been very helpful over the last few months.
If I were to cluster the generally applicable advice I received into four themes they would be:
- Figure out what kinds of things naturally motivate you and then organise your life so that those levers of your motivation are directed towards your goals.
- Bias towards early outputs, and use them to check whether you are making progress.
- Spend time with other people with similar goals.
- Exercise.
I followed all of this advice, and I think I am much happier with how I spent my sabbatical as a result of doing so. Examples of following it in my case looked like:
- Enter an essay contest, take part in a "write a blog post every day" challenge.
- Share early drafts of work with friends, realise that the "write a blog post every day" challenge is actually a "publish a blog post every day" challenge.
- Co-work with friends with similar interests, travel to be with them if necessary.
- Exercise twice a day, even if that's just stretching in the morning and taking a walk in the afternoon.
People take sabbaticals for a variety of reasons: mental or physical health, family commitments, education, etc. In my case it was values-based decision: I had a handful of concrete topics I felt it was important to write about, and they were outside of the scope of my job. The purpose of my time off was to create the space required to pursue that relatively self-contained writing project. All the same, I reckon the overall principles here likely apply quite broadly to other kinds of career break too: understand your motivation, make progress in small steps, think about what kind of people you want to be surrounded by, and look after your body.