Today I mark off an item in my bucket list: I'm taking a one month sabbatical! This caps 10 years working at Fresh Consulting and also making it through a particularly rough year. I have three simple goals for this: relax, recharge, and reboot.
Photo by Stefan Stefancik on Pexels.com
Relax
It seems like for the longest time the day to day of work has been a sprint. A really hard sprint. Check in, reply to email, reply to slack, update a quote, meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, review a little code, give a little advice, meetings, email, slack, email, slack, meetings, make list of things to do tomorrow that didn't finish today, stop. Then repeat. Wow, I got tired just typing that all out!
This constant sprint gets exhausting. While I'm fortunate to enforce a non-50 hour a week schedule, I'm literally back to back in things with no time for breaks in between. The mental exhaustion is real, and it begins to trickle out into home life because the stress begins to wear you down. It is time to breathe, it is time to move slower. It's time to...
Recharge
All of that is going away. Slack has been uninstalled. Work email account has been removed from the phone. Travel with family will start soon. Sleeping in will commence. Books will be read. Runs will be had. Yard work will be enjoyed. Coding will maybe be done. I'll admit that my hobby project needs some work (and an iOS build dang it), and my python skills need some leveling, but if it doesn't happen, no sweat! But most importantly, it is time to...
Reboot
The current operating mode for life is not going well. If one were to leverage the analogy that each decade of your life is a version of software, then the 4.2 and 4.3 versions had some algorithms that resulted in maxed out CPU and RAM usage, which is not beneficial to the long term health of the system. Sometimes the best way to do things is to reboot the system, since all the tasks in the queue simply get flushed out and you have capacity in which to start over.
...and start over I will! I'll be more protective of my hour by hour time. I'll provide space to step back, analyze, evaluate, and create (thank you Ella and Bloom's Taxonomy!). I'll get those runs back into my calendar and actually stick to them! Balancing this will allow me to continue to work smarter, not harder, and most importantly, bring back some much needed peace and balance.
What things do you do to relax, recharge, and reboot? I'm looking for all the advice I can find!