TL;DR: This is an experiment in tracking my personal sabbatical time. I’ll write about what I do, read, and think. I welcome comments and critique. I believe I’ll learn from the act of writing this itself, even if no one else engages with it.
On 31st of Dec 2021, I quit my job, and a few days later put out a post on LinkedIn to let my friends and colleagues know that I intended to take some time off as a self-styled sabbatical. I was quite surprised by how many people reacted and left comments, and also messaged me directly to catch up. I suspect it may have had to do with the cat pic I included in the post. (Niki deserves her own post, we’ll get to it later)
Several of the folks who reached out expressed an interest in following along on my journey vicariously, as I figured out what to do with my new-found freedom of time. They suggested I do this in newsletter form.
Concurrently, I’d been thinking about keeping a journal of sorts to keep track of everything I was hoping to do over the next few months. Call me a strong J (on MBTI), but something about tracking and organising gives me innate satisfaction.
As I think more about it, I see several benefits to writing up a ~biweekly synthesis of my sabbatical time:
It’ll be a good trigger for regular introspection.
I can look back on how I’m spending my time and get to decide if that’s what I actually wanted to do. I’m thinking of this not as a scorecard, where I try to rate something on a goodness scale, but rather as a view from the gallery, stepping back from the daily dance.
Writing regularly should be a good way to maintain and grow my writing skills.
Maybe friends, colleagues or strangers will comment, critique or provide suggestions that will help me in my exploration.
There’s always the off chance that someone benefits from reading something that I wrote. If that’s you, please let me know!
And so, here I am. I aim to write at least once a week, for at least as long as I am not working full-time again. The content will be a mix of what I’m doing and learning, and occasionally some anonymised / sanitised notes on interesting conversations I’ve had recently.
If you are a reader, you can help me by letting me know if it’s worth your time, and what you like vs. not. If something I write sparks a thought, leave a comment, ask a question or share it with someone you think might want to read it. You never know, we might end up going deeper into a topic, working on something together, or simply making a friendly connection!