Assumed audience: People interested in how I am spending this sabbatical, or interested in tools and approaches for making a sabbatical like this most helpful.
Part of a series on what’s next for me:
- Next: Role?: for those curious about where I am heading next… including folks who might want to hire me.
- Now: Sabbatical (this post): for those interested in how I am spending this sabbatical.
- Past: Leaving LinkedIn: for those interested in why I am on this new path.
Since leaving my job at LinkedIn at the start of October, I am taking a proper sabbatical through the end of 2023. I am spending these months resting, composing, writing, reading, learning things I have not had a chance to learn on the job, and hanging out with my family. Over the course of the rest of the year, I hope1 to:
- make a bunch of progress on the large orchestral work I started back in 2021;
- learn Racket, including Typed Racket, and use it to learn how to build programming languages, starting by working through PLAI;
- finish a couple in-flight essays;
- write a decent bit of code, e.g. for my next-generation personal website builder and perhaps some related to one or another of those in-flight essays;
- and read a lot of books.
That might not sound like your idea of a sabbatical, but it absolutely sounds like mine. For one thing, I find myself most able to rest in the sense of getting back energy when I am learning and exploring. For another, parts of that will not be work-like at all. Last but not least: I started by taking all of the first week to “veg”, and all of the second week entirely away from computers etc.: only books, paper journals, etc.
My goal in starting out with that kind of basic physical and mental rest as a foundation was to make the weeks which followed that much more energizing. So far, that has proven out! I am just about ⅔ of the way through PLAI and having tons of fun with it. I am also most of the way through a draft of one section of that symphonic work. Along the way, I have also written a bunch of shorter blog posts, made some tweaks to my current website, and started planning in earnest for the next iteration of the website.
At the halfway point, I feel much, much less mentally and emotionally tired and stressed than I did starting out. The space has also yielded some of the fruit I hoped for in terms of thinking about my next role: it is hard for me to really imagine something new while deep in the grind of a current role. As I came into November, though, I found myself imagining a lot of fun alternative approaches to my chosen career. Whatever comes of those, it has been helpful to have the space to come up with new ideas, and to set aside the assumption that things must be as they have always been.
Over the rest of this sabbatical, I also intend to spend some time actively working through the exercises in Designing Your Life, which I listened to on audiobook over the summer. I am hoping, in conjunction with the considerable amount of reflection I have done as I wrapped up at LinkedIn and the conversations I have been having with Jaimie and other family and friends, those exercises will help me chart out a good next step career-wise.
I also reserve the right to look at any given day or week in that stretch and nope right out of doing projects (in addition to my standard rule of not doing work — whatever that means at any given time — on Sundays)! There has been a day each of the past few weeks where that was what I needed to do, and I am really glad that I made the commitment ahead of time to allow myself that kind of flexibility on this. It makes it easier to really push hard on doing the work on the working days to know that on days when I want rest, I can just rest.
One additional note: for the sake of making the most of this time, I have been leaning heavily on Freedom to structure my time. I recognized that it was easy for me to end up spending hours chatting with folks on Discord, or browsing various news aggregators. Given the incredible blessing of being able to take three months off and spend time on side projects and learning I would not normally be able to do, though, I do not want to spend hours and hours on chat or social media or Hacker News. A little goes a long way. Accordingly, I have set up a fairly aggressive schedule for access to those during the work week, in addition to my existing habit of blocking all social media on the weekends and additionally blocking email and chat on Sundays. At present, I am only allowing myself unrestricted access from
I do miss having more of the social-intellectual interactions from some of those chat contexts. Unfortunately, I feel quite keenly the tradeoff here: I have limited time on this sabbatical, and every second spent in a chat is a second not spent writing orchestra music or learning how to build programming languages. I think I need the intellectual community provided by some of those groups in my life; I also know that it is good to have seasons where I step away and “put my head down” to get things done in a more focused way.
This experience has also highlighted for me just how much I would like to do something like the in-person version of Recurse Center at some point in the future. Learning Racket and using it to build programming languages is good; it would be much better if I were not largely alone doing it. My experience is that being around other programmers is really valuable for things like this, even when they do not have any experience in the specific thing I am working on. (Rubber duck debugging!) Likewise, I am feeling more and more that I need to find some kind of community for feedback on my music: there is only so far I can go working totally alone and without robust input from other musicians.
All of this has me mulling on how valuable in-person community is for these kinds of things, and on the intersection of that reality with jobs. I remain deeply committed to remote work, not least because I am able to work so much more effectively from my home office than anywhere else when I really need to concentrate and get some hard problem solved. At the same time, I feel the lack of even the kinds of social interaction I had via Slack and Zoom calls (!) at work; I feel even more the lack of the quarterly meet-ups. Embracing flexible and remote work cultures does not mean abandoning in-person interactions; it does not, that is, require a kind of remote work maximalism.
I am, to say the least, grateful for the opportunity to take this sabbatical. It has been wonderful. I encourage you to figure out how to make it work if you can. (Really: employers should build in regular sabbaticals as part of a retention plan!) I am excited to see where the second half of this takes me, as I am to see where I go with my next role in 2024.
Notes
I write “hope” rather than “plan” because the meta goal for this sabbatical is to rest and reset. Holding any of those plans too tightly would be a recipe for ending up frustrated if I failed to end up accomplishing them: rather the opposite of the point of a sabbatical! ↩︎