The first week of my sabbatical felt like vacation – something I would enjoy but return from. This was especially true because I was actually on a vacation – an out of state family reunion. The second and third weeks were some combination of an extended vacation and extra long Saturday. We had a few trips – planned and spontaneous. When not on the road I spent a lot of time on important but non-urgent tasks I had been putting off for a few months – things like getting a recalled part of the car repaired or fixing/assembling items that had accumulated on my workbench. One month in and a new normal has appeared. We have more of a routine and I have less of a backlog. Things feel like they have reached an equilibrium. Being dual stay-at-home parents allows time to rest, but three children (and one in the
It feels more like a Saturday than the beginning of a long rest period. I no longer have access to my work email or any accounts – so I really can’t DO any work. My head is still filled with context though. I am still the most informed person on a number of projects I just handed off. So my guard isn’t totally let down as I know it is easy for someone to call or text me with questions. With time that will change though. The projects will progress and I won’t have project level context. Maybe at that point this nervous feeling will go away.
With the start of a new year, I take the time to set my focus for the coming year. I believe that by focusing on fewer goals, I can achieve results that are exponentially greater than the sum of the results from doing many things. I detailed my 2017 focus here (read that first if you want more context) & did a quarter year update as well. Here is how I’m progressing. 2017 Theme: Sabbath Year 2017 Challenge: Define & Launch A Sabbath Year My sabbath year will be launching on July 13th, 2017. After about five years of considering, exploring and planning, we are finally here. I recently wrote about our general sabbath year principles along with specific plans we have for this year’s iteration. With those completed and the launch forthcoming, it looks as if this challenge will be completed shortly. 2017 Habit: Time Outside With Family When I picked seven hours as the goal,
I previously wrote about principles that guide our family’s thinking about the concept of a sabbath year. Those principles were written to be generic enough that they could apply to all of our future sabbath years. While I’m sure we will iterate these ideas over time as we learn from experience, they represent the current thinking. The next step is to take those principles and apply them to our current life state in order to come up with a specific plan for our 2017 sabbath year. I predict that every sabbath year will look slightly different, because every period of life offers different circumstances. For example, having young children to take care of is going to make a year look much different than a year in which there are no kids to take care of. To start, here are some of our current life circumstances that we think will impact the
For 2017 I challenged myself to define & launch a sabbath year. This is a concept I’ve been thinking on for the past ~6 years but as the start date has been getting closer, my need for a clear definition been increasing. In the last month I’ve been talking with other people a lot about this upcoming sabbath. Two people have poignantly asked me, ‘what does success look like for you?’ Though I had a rough idea, I realized I needed to think on the concept more. Endeavors a squandered less frequently when they have a clearly defined and measurable goal defined before they start. While I can’t say I do this with every endeavor I undertake, it sees particularly important for one that will cost a year of time and over $100,000 between opportunity & actual costs. Here I want to explore the general concepts of a sabbath period
With the start of a new year, I take the time to set my focus for the coming year. I believe that by doing less, I can achieve results that are exponentially greater than the sum of the results from split focus. I detailed my 2017 focus here (read that first if you want more context). Here is how I’m progressing. 2017 Theme: Sabbath Year 2017 Challenge: Define & Launch A Sabbath Year The launch of my sabbath year is slowly becoming a real thing. I’ve taken the first steps to put it into action and begun to lay out logistics. After years of keeping the topic limited mostly to family & close friends, I recently gave my work concrete notice. I had roughly suggested the idea previously to my manager and one of the founders, but there was no firm timeline or next steps associated. There are still a lot of details
With the start of a new year, I take the time to set my focus for the coming year. I believe that by doing less, I can achieve results that are exponentially greater than the sum of the results from split focus. I have been fairly effective at it over the past four years and am now confident in my ability to achieve something pretty big if I focus on it for a year. If you would like to know more about the categories and how my yearly focus process has evolved, please see this recent blog post about the categories, or review the results from past years (2013, 2014, 2015 & 2016). 2017 Theme: Sabbath Year In 2012, for a reason unbeknownst to me, I started to feel really called to the idea of a sabbath year. This is a concept that dates back a few thousand years. In Leviticus 25
At the beginning of 2016 I wrote about my focus for the year. I’ve posted a few updates throughout the year but want to take some time now to do a final review. 2016 Goal: Write 50 Blog Posts Self Grade: 10/10 I was able to, thanks to a heroic effort in December, meet my goal of writing 50 blog posts. Here is a chart I found interesting. Blog posts per week vs miles run per week. While I got most of my running in during the first half of the year, I did the bulk of my blog posting towards the end. Though I hit the target number, this isn’t an ideal way to do it. Part of my reason for setting goals like this is to set a habit that I view as positive. I believed that if I focused on writing posts for a year, I would get
On November 6, 2016 I ran the New York City Marathon. I finished in a time of 3:11:37, about a half hour slower than my best marathon. Here is the race report. I debated writing this – I wasn’t sure it passed my litmus test of being a race – or of deserving a report. In my mind the goal of writing a race report is to document the ins and outs of an all out effort in order to learn from it and also to serve as way to remember a momentous event. I ultimately decided to write this because I think I have something to learn from it, and it was quite memorable. If you’re interested in the training I did leading up to the race, you can read more about it here. Successes What am I proud of from race day? Finished Was leading my heat for the first mile Solid
In 2012 I challenged myself to surf Mavericks and consume less. That was v1.0 of my yearly focus. Since then the process, one I call my ‘yearly focus’ has become more specific and better documented. Here are details on my newest iteration of creating a yearly focus. V 1.0 – 1.3 Since I haven’t succinctly documented the iterations anywhere, here is a quick run through of what I’ve done so far. I mentioned v1.0 above was having goals, that started in 2012 with a few Facebook posts. In 2013 I realized I needed to write down & report on my yearly challenges to create accountability for myself. That was v1.1. I broke it up into a challenge, goal & theme. I have been blogging about that under the category ‘Yearly Focus’ regularly since then. In 2014 I played around with the items a bit to hone the process. That was v1.2.