Hello there, friends! Some of you may know that I recently switched jobs, and in between, I gave myself 3 weeks off and decided to make it a sabbatical. I shared a bit of the journey at the time on my Instagram page, but today on the blog, I’m sharing more details about what I learned from this important time off.
I’ve switched jobs a lot in recent years, but I’ve never taken a whole 3 weeks off in between. I think the closest I’ve gotten previously is just under 2 weeks. I was also never intentional about my time off, just using the break to rest, relax, and recover.
Before this break, I had heard DJ DiDonna interviewed about the topic of sabbaticals on the Sparked podcast*. Up to this point, and coming from academia, I had really only heard of sabbaticals in one context: something a Professor gets after years and years of service to their university. I had no idea that regular people in normal, non-academic jobs also took sabbaticals.
DiDonna has a book in the works, which I can’t wait to read, but right now the content lives as a website all about The Sabbatical Project, and this is what they were discussing on the podcast.
They talked about how sabbaticals are more than just vacations; they’re a practice for figuring out what you want to do differently in life. You can use sabbaticals to explore and get inspired, to invest in yourself/your future, to create the foundation for change, and to make or enhance meaningful connections (among other things).
When listening to this podcast, I realized that sabbaticals basically give you intentional time to work on lifestyle design. And further, I realized I had already done a lot of the work for myself that gets done on sabbaticals.
When I took my paycut editor job back when I was fresh out of academia, it gave me so much more free time than I was used to having. I was able to explore and get inspired about things that called to me outside of my paying job. Doing that exploration and letting myself get inspired by things I never even knew about gave me purpose, helped me create a foundation for change in my life, and led me to my current goal to eventually shift to part-time work so I have even more time to explore.
After listening to this podcast, I realized I could utilize my 3 weeks off in between jobs in a really intentional way. I could start to explore what I wanted for my future even more than I had been able to do previously.
I decided to structure my 3-week sabbatical as follows.
Week 1 would be all about rest and relationships. For the first 4 days of my sabbatical, I had no agenda. I just let myself go wherever the day took me. The next 3 days would be all about intentionally spending time with loved ones I don’t get to spend as much time with as I’d like (after all, the theme I set for myself for 2023 was prioritizing friends and family).
So, I headed to my childhood home in New Hampshire. I spent one day with my mom for her birthday, one day with my dad, and one day with my childhood best friend and her family.
Then, weeks 2 and 3 were all about 3 main goals: getting our mother-in-law suite ready to list on AirBnB, getting ahead on this blog, and getting outside as much as possible (I had a couple of hikes I really wanted to do).
So, how did those 3 weeks turn out? What did I learn about myself during my sabbatical? Here are some of my main takeaways.
I really like being in charge of my own schedule.
Being in complete control of my day, every day, is life-giving for me. During these 3 weeks, I felt SO FREE. I felt more like myself than I have ever felt.
I remembered this feeling from long ago. I had it for the short time that I worked as a freelancer between when I left academia and when I took the paycut editor job.
It was good for me to remember this feeling from before. It was incredible to see how powerful that feeling still was for me. I realized that I haven’t been as happy in my day-to-day as I was when I was freelancing, when I had complete control (well, the most control I’ve ever had in my working life) over my schedule.
This will be important knowledge for me as I move forward with my plans and goals.
With this knowledge, I can make future choices that are aligned with my values.
I constantly struggle with the pull between freelancing and full-time work. But I’m currently in a W2 job because I like the steady paycheck, and I’ve set good boundaries to make it more enjoyable. I appreciate the benefits they offer, and the simplicity of it all. There is an element to not being my own boss that I like, too. These are some of the things that matter more to me right now than more control over my day-to-day.
But on my sabbatical, I think it was really good for me to be reminded of how much I enjoy being in charge of my days. I can keep this knowledge in mind as I travel along on my financial independence journey. Maybe some day the benefits of a W2 job won’t outweigh the freedom that a freelance career would provide. And it will be easier to know when that day has come if I can remember how I felt when I was freelancing, and how I felt on my sabbatical.
And although I remembered how much I like having total control of my day, my sabbatical also taught me that…
I need some structure to my day.
That is, most of the time. Even if it’s just a basic structure.
All was completely fine in week 1. I didn’t think much at all about the structure of my day. The first few days was all about letting my body do whatever it needed to do in terms of rest, and I could tell that was welcome and needed. The second part of the first week was all about spending time with loved ones, doing whatever it was they wanted to do. I was intentional about this. I wanted to go with the flow, to be open to their thoughts and needs (it was my mother’s birthday, after all).
But then week 2 came around, and it was just me. When I was solely responsible for my days, I noticed I needed a little more structure.
For the most part, I had something in mind that I wanted to do every day. Go on a certain hike. Get X, Y, or Z done.
But as I hit week 3, and I’d checked off everything on my to-do list, my days lost structure a bit. At first I thought this would be a good thing, that I could go back to the early days of week 1 where I let myself do whatever it was I/my body needed, but instead I found myself feeling restless and a bit lost. My body had already gotten the rest it needed. Instead, I needed a bit more structure.
Which leads me to my next realization…
I still need purpose.
By week 3, not only did I know Iād need more structure, I also knew I’d need more purpose. Total freedom only goes so far.
Which is something I had figured anyway. As I’ve made evident in many of my blog posts, I’m not on a financial independence journey to retire early and sit around and do nothing.
I have things I want to do. Passions I want to explore. Work outside my medical writing career that I think will make me come more fully alive. Experiments I want to do to see whether this is the case.
I was reassured of this feeling, this assumption I’ve had, on my sabbatical.
I started to get a bit down on this during week 3, when the days lost structure as I’d already accomplished so much. But then I remembered my intentions for my sabbatical. I knew from the start that I wouldn’t have enough time to fully experiment with any passion projects. I thought having a goal of getting ahead on the blog would be fulfilling enough, but it wasn’t. I realized that I have already carved out time in each and every day to work on the blog. It has become part of my day-to-day already. I don’t think that will change much when I decrease my hours at work. Maybe I’ll work on the blog a little bit more, but there are even more avenues I want to explore to gain purpose.
I knew I wouldn’t find much purpose in a 3-week sabbatical because…
3 weeks is not enough!
Although 3 weeks was enough to rest and recover (although it depends I think on how burnt out you are when you start your time off), to spend time with loved ones, and to check-off a bunch of to-dos that have been lingering, 3 weeks is not enough (in my opinion) to really experiment with what life would be like if you downshifted or stopped working.
If you really want to treat your sabbatical as an experiment for designing your life, to decide what changes to your life you want to make now, 3 weeks is no where near enough. At least for me, the time absolutely flew by.
To really experiment with some of the changes I would want to make in my post-FI life, I would need much more time. On the order of months I think. 3 months at an absolute minimum, 6 months seems like maybe a good sweet spot depending on your situation, and if you can, a year would be life changing.
It would have been so easy to think of this as a negative, but I also found that…
Intentionality helps so much with negative thoughts.
Negative thoughts are one thing I have always struggled with on my “normal” vacations. Right from the get-go, I start to have these annoying thoughts about how much time I have left of my vacation. Starting on day 1, this ridiculous clock begins ticking in my head, basically counting down the days left of vacation. It makes me bitter. It gets me on edge. And it’s super annoying.
Luckily, I happened to remember this countdown clock issue in the days leading up to my sabbatical. So this time, I was ready. I was intentional.
Because I went into this time off intentionally, and did a lot of reflection about what I wanted before I started, I was able to remember this annoying habit I have. For me, recognizing it was the key. Because I recognized that it might happen, I could be intentional with my thoughts. It felt like meditating. As soon as I recognized I was having the thought, I could put my mind elsewhere, or add another thought on top of it that made it go away, such as “I’m having a great time, and I have so much vacation left!” Or, at the end when I didn’t have as much time left, “I’ve had an amazing, full sabbatical that has left me feeling refreshed and renewed. It’s ok that it’s ending soon. I’ve learned so much and gotten closer to my goals.”
The tricky thing about negative thoughts, though, is that they permeate. They spread. They want so badly to be heard. They will do whatever it takes.
Even though I was ready for the negative countdown thoughts, other types of thoughts crept up in other ways.
Take this example when I was humming along in week 2. On one particular day, I was being so productive. I was checking things off my to-do list like mad. I felt like the Energizer Bunny.
And BAM. All of a sudden, there were the thoughts. Out of nowhere. Telling me I wasn’t being productive enough. Telling me there was no way I’d get everything I wanted done before the end of my sabbatical. Telling me I was a failure because even if I was getting some things done, I wasn’t getting that much done.
I couldn’t believe it. And I actually didn’t even recognize what was happening at first. All of a sudden, I just started to feel super anxious as I was going about my day being mad productive. It wasn’t until I got so anxious that I stopped what I was doing to take a minute to sit with my thoughts and figure out what was going on, that I realized what they were telling me.
And guess what I did? Just another version of what I explained above for how I handle thoughts like this. I told myself, “are you kidding me? Of course you’re being productive! You’re getting so much done! And who cares if you don’t get to everything anyway? Life is too short to be hard on ourselves.”
I digress. It took awhile for the anxiety to go away fully that day, but I noticed the more I replaced the negative thoughts with positive ones, the smaller my ball of anxiety became.
And do you know when on my sabbatical I didn’t feel any anxiety at all? When I was spending time with loved ones. Which brings me to my last takeaway…
Time spent with loved ones is irreplaceable.
I’ve got to be honest here. I completely underestimated the effect that spending time with friends and family that I don’t get to see as often as I’d like would have on me.
I must have known somewhere deep down how important it was if I made my theme of the year prioritizing friends and family. But it really surprised me.
Typically when I see family, I’m at least a little anxious (family relationships are complicated, after all).
But this was different. I wasn’t juggling other life commitments. I wasn’t seeing them quickly on a holiday to try to fit everything in in a short amount of time off.
I decided to intentionally spend time with 3 people: my mom, my dad, and my childhood best friend.
I tried to stay totally, completely present with each one. When I was with them, nothing else and no one else mattered. I wanted to see how this would go. And it worked!
I had the absolute best time (and I did it all within a budget, with a mix of a little splurging (pedicures for me and my mom, her request, and a long walk as my main activity with my dad). I didn’t think about what else I could be doing to be more productive. I didn’t worry about work. I just showed up as my fully present self.
My friend and I talked on the phone 3 weeks after that visit. Out of nowhere, she told me how much my visit meant. She said it felt different than any other visit we had. I used to think all this stuff was woo-woo, and now I know it’s just magic. Well, intentional magic š
Closing thoughts: my relationship with paid work
As I mentioned, I chronicled my sabbatical journey a bit on my Instagram page. At the end of the 3 weeks, I asked my followers if there was anything they were curious about my sabbatical, that I could add to this post.
I loved the question that one person asked: “did your sabbatical make you realize anything about your relationship to paid work and paid work’s relationship to your identity?”
Ever since I can remember, I have been acutely aware that money is a necessary part of life. And for me, the way to gain money was always through paid work. That’s what my parents modeled for me. They both exchanged their labor and time at a job in order to make money to pay the bills.
Then, when I discovered the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement, I learned that money can also buy freedom. Money can help you buy back your time.
Through the FIRE community, I also learned that there are other ways to make money, besides exchanging time and labor for it. I saw all the examples of others in the community making passive income from their businesses and from real estate. And I met my husband who taught me more about real estate, which is how his family had made much of their money when he was growing up. Making money through real estate is what he had been most exposed to growing up, not the direct exchange of time and labor for money.
I had a hunch before, but after this sabbatical, I can definitely say that paid work is not tied to my identity any longer.
I didn’t miss work at all. In fact, this sabbatical made me even more excited for post-FI life. Not necessarily excited to retire from paid work, but excited to be able to do whatever work I want to do. Whatever work sparks me and makes me light up.
This is also why I’ve set the goal of working part-time, and I still feel that way even after my sabbatical. I know that hitting my FIRE number will take a long time, and I’m not willing to wait that long to be able to explore my passion projects. Part-time work will still provide me with the income I need while giving me more time to explore.
And we’ll see how that goes! Maybe my thinking will change again when I go down to part-time. And maybe going down to part-time won’t be enough. Or maybe I’ll start making money from one of my side projects/experiments. Until then, I’m going to take it one small step at a time towards my goals.
Have you ever taken a sabbatical? If so, what did you learn? How long was it? And if not, how long would you want yours to be? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear from you!
*I once had a question related to my goal of part-time work answered on the Sparked podcast! If you’re curious, you can listen to the episode here. I also wrote some reflections on that experience related to slow FI in this post.