I’ve had the opportunity to take an 8-week sabbatical from work, and I took that opportunity this summer. Eight weeks feel both long and short – after a week, you’re more than 10% done! but then, you still have more than a month and a half off!
Overall, it was a great experience. It gave me time to travel to Pas-de-Calais in France, and to Iceland. Those two done, that was three weeks (both “already” and “only” 🙂 ).
And apart from that? Well, I enjoyed my free time. Processing the Iceland pictures did take a significant chunk of post-travel time, so there was that. I read a bit; I restarted reading The Expanse, I’m not done yet. I created an e-mail subscription to Serialit to read Notre Dame de Paris, and I’ve been reading that as well. I played videogames – including Expedition 33, which was also a large chunk of time.
I coded a bit – not that much – on some vague project that will potentially see the light of day maybe at some point – I currently envision it as a “to-be-read pile management clicker game”, but it has already changed shape two or three times since I started playing with the concept. It made me play with a bit of Typescript, some fancy CSS stuff, and handle a bunch of messy real-life data in the hope of being able to generate synthetic data (not with an LLM. Possibly somewhere in the realm of machine-learny-thing-stuff, but even that might be a stretch.)
I also spent some time preparing for Zug Day, to which we participated at the end of August – trying to get a maximum amount of points by going to various places in Switzerland, all by public transport. It was a lot of fun! (Also quite tiring 🙂 )
I handled a couple of chores, most notably filing the taxes – that was basically the first week (first year I’m doing that on my own in 15+ years – and the Swiss/Zürich tax form is no joke! And in German.)
I played some solo board games, an activity that I thoroughly enjoy but don’t necessary take the time to slow down for in my regular schedule. I still have a Welcome to the Moon campaign to continue, so that’s going to happen, and I’m grumpy at my Maglev Metro scores, so that will happen too, probably. The SPIEL fair in Essen is less than a month away; I might be on the lookout for stuff there too 😉
On the “gaming” side of things, I also made good progress with the amazing book that is The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book, which is an utterly amazing puzzle book with a bunch of language puzzles. It’s a GREAT collection that tickles my brain in just the right way; I’ve finished a good 70% of it.
Being out of the usual schedule also gives an opportunity to evaluate, improve and fix one’s “systems” – I did manage to setup a todo-list system that actually seems to work (and that also apparently survived the “back to real-life schedule”) with Todoist, and I did some tweaking of my Obsidian setup – maybe I’ll talk a bit more about that at some point.
I wanted to work more on AlphabeticalZürich, and that kind of failed; part of that was traveling, part of that was “I fucked up my knee somehow and I’m currently supposed to be resting it”, which makes me a bit grumpy.
I have now been back at work for two weeks. The first week was a breeze, the second one hit me much harder. On the seventh week of my sabbatical, I was starting to look forward to being at work, although I was a bit anxious about catching up with two months of stuff happening. That, however, went surprisingly well – I’m still missing bits of context here and there, but overall it’s all good. But, I’ve long had issues with balancing the (objectively mistaken) impression that I’m not doing “enough” with long-term sustainability; I had made good progress in the past year, but I see old anxious patterns popping their head again as I’m back at work. Hopefully this will settle down as things go back to regular routine – and if not, well, I’ve done the work once, second time should be easier. I’m not too worried, and I’m still very happy to be back!
Overall, these 8 weeks were very (very) close to an unmitigated success: I’m happy I took that break, I’m now refreshed and happy that the break is over, and I think I learnt some sorely needed “taking-a-break-and-relaxing” skills 😉
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