I’m on a 16 week sabbatical and to ensure I don’t utterly squander it I’m writing biweekly retrospectives.
I spent my first two weeks not doing much of anything (purposely) and “emptying the tank” in preparation for what might come next. Weeks three and four were largely the same, with some slight tweaks.
What did I do?
First, let’s review a handful of the weekly metrics I collect on myself, just to get an initial sense of how I’m doing. Each of the following metrics below follow the format of (Week 3 metric/Week 4 metric).
Average hours slept per night: 7.05/7.77
Average “quality” hours slept per night: 5.08/5.62
Average deep hours slept per night: 1.9/1.9
Average sleeping heart rate: 48/50
Average steps per day: 13,570/15,842
Total miles cycled per week: 0/11.6
Average weekly weight: 207.1/208.3
Days exercised (out of 7): 7/6
Days read (out of 7): 7/5
Days written (out of 7): 3/3
Days meditated (out of 7): 4/2
A couple things are worth expounding on a little bit. The Steps number from Week 4 is definitely artificially high (and you’ll see why later). Weight is still trending upward, which isn’t ideal, and has been going up consistently enough to trigger some action on my part. Lastly, it’s surprising to see I missed two days of reading last week. I’m really not sure how that happened (or if that’s truly accurate) but it’s rare for me to miss one day, never mind two.
With some basic personal metrics out of the way, let’s check-in on how else I’ve been using my time over the past two weeks. First, books:
Started The Count of Monte Cristo (Apple Books/iPhone) by Alexandre Dumas
Started Code Girls (physical book for reading in bed) by Liza Mundy
Started Empire of the Summer Moon (audiobook) by S.C. Gwynne
Started and finished The Adventure Zone: The Crystal Kingdom graphic novel
Re-read Deep Work by Cal Newport
Finished The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (audiobook)
Next, video games, TV, and movies:
I’ve played at least a couple games of Starcraft 2 competitive ladder each day
Picked up Hearthstone and Card of Darkness on iOS a little bit after having not touched either one in over a year
Tried Magic The Gathering: Arena on iOS for a little bit (I used to love actual MTG when I was a kid so playing the digital version was a good and weird combo of novelty and nostalgia)
Dabbled with Alto’s Odyssey again for just a couple minutes (I’m on the last achievement but I haven’t played it in so long I think I’ve lost all the skill I’d need to actually beat it…)
Continued to do the NYT Mini Crossword and 3 games of Up Spell with Emily every night
Started watching season 2 of Ted Lasso(!)
Watched the second episode of season 2 of Tiny World
Watched the first episode of Succession
Watched the second episode of season 1 of I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson
Re-watched Bo Burnham’s “Inside”
Re-watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Emily had just finished the book)
Finally, just a grab bag of other things I’ve been doing over the past couple weeks:
No travel this week so mostly hung out at home in Virginia (and the apartment’s pool)
Tried to do a week of very long walks. Did 20 miles on Monday of Week 4 but absolutely destroyed my feet with blisters and basically had to abandon the whole endeavor. I did manage to eke out 8.6 more miles on Tuesday and a couple shorter walks the rest of the week, but for all intents and purposes I basically bailed after Tuesday.
Got dinner with a visiting friend at The Duck and the Peach in D.C.
Got dinner with another visiting friend at Founding Farmers in D.C.
Emily and I had our second salsa lesson and we got dinner afterward at Founding Farmers (and I wonder why my weight is going up…).
Started rebuilding my informational ecosystem from scratch after having “emptied the tank” over the previous couple of weeks (much more on this soon)
Went to the driving range a couple times and further learned that I’ve lost all semblance of being able to hit a golf ball consistently
Made progress on our wedding website
Continued to avoid eating a ton of raw vegetables (i.e. salads) to see if perhaps that has been triggering my intermittent yet acute intestinal distress. That hypothesis is currently supported by the evidence…
What went well?
Considering I had very low expectations for myself over the past two weeks, I’m tempted to ignore these two evaluative questions entirely. If I had to point to a couple things that felt like they went particularly well over this period:
Re-reading Deep Work last weekend was good timing. I feel primed and ready to dive back into some substantive work now.
I think I did a good job not thinking about work (and not feeling guilty about it)
Emily and I practiced salsa a couple times prior to our second lesson and the second lesson itself went really well
The fact that I finished a couple books and made progress on a few more is good
I also spent a couple hours one afternoon re-populating Things. That app is such an important part of how I work so it felt good to take it from empty (which was kind of scary in and of itself) to filled up with good things that I’m excited to dig into
What didn’t go as well?
Again, I’m holding these lightly as the whole theme of the past two weeks was low expectations and guilt-free existence. That being said:
Keep moving and get out of the way. Photo by me.
I missed a couple days in my very simple Sabbatical Log that I keep in Day One. It’s literally just a daily bulleted list of what I did but it completely slipped my mind for the second part of last week.
As I alluded to, my Week of Long Walks experiment was kind of a bust and my heels still hurt.
Even with zero expectations and a guilt-free ticket to do whatever I want, I think I’m spending too much time on my phone reading Twitter and Reddit in the morning.
My weight has been heading, albeit slowly, in the wrong direction for a couple weeks. Too much delivery and restaurant food, not enough mindfulness around portion sizes.
What’s the plan for weeks 5 and 6?
If the first four weeks of my sabbatical were about unwinding, emptying, and floating then the next couple weeks are about deliberately refilling, channeling my attention in more productive directions, and starting to wake my somewhat atrophied concentration and writing muscles. My intention isn’t to go from zero to one hundred. But I do want to start setting aside a substantial chunk of each day to deliberately work on meaningful projects. To start, I think that’s going to mean restarting my usual morning routine and putting in 3-4 hours of focused work every morning. I think I’ll keep my afternoons will be a bit more unstructured and will allow myself to follow my nose a bit more.
Other than the overall intention to shift from a purely restorative mode into a slightly more productive mode, I know we have a little bit of travel coming up at the end of Week 5 (6 hour drive to Buffalo for a family wedding, a couple days of celebrations/obligations, and then a 6 hour drive back on Sunday). Travel always introduces more variables but I don’t anticipate it changing my plans very much.
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