My three-month sabbatical

I spent three months not working. Today is the last day of AFK, already mentally preparing to get back to work, starting tomorrow.

Automattic has this fantastic benefit that for every five years of tenure, you get a 3 month vacation that you can take all at once. You can’t split it, and you can’t work while taking it. Just sign off from everything and do whatever.

I had big plans for the sabbatical. You know, stuff I want to do, can do, busy things that would’ve eaten up most of the AFK. Thankfully, I didn’t share the big plans here, as that would’ve committed me to following up. I did a little bit of planned activities but mostly had a vacation.

My grand plan was that I’m going to master experimentation. I was under the growing feeling that something about my understanding of how experiments should run is wrong, and built myself a study plan with six books. I read four, though not four of the original six because I changed what I want to read next twice.

So, if not doing the grand plan, what did I do?

First two weeks were pure unwinding. It’s a feeling that’s really difficult to explain, I’ve had one sabbatical before and didn’t experience it. Doing any type of work is stressful and each morning, your body wakes up thinking about it, and willing to face that stress, and expend energy there. This stress accumulates and puts some permanent weight on you. Remove that and it leaves a void of some kind. The body still wakes up, ready to face the challenges of the day, but there are no challenges. So, two weeks of slowly adjusting to the feeling I don’t need to worry today. Around the end of these two weeks, I understood that my grand plan won’t happen.

What I did instead

• Played football with my kids.
• Went to Musala (twice) and Vihren with my family, three successful summits.
• Had joint reading sessions with the kids. As a result, the little one read six books about the Ninja boy, and is at the end of Alice. The big one read the Dungeon Crawler Carl 1 & 2, and most of the Three Musketeers.
• Did math classes with the kids. Little one understood some of the second and third grade math and got stuck with text problems. Big one went over most of the material for his next grade. Not sure how much he understood, but I feel like we both improved.
• Kept walking, kept doing pull ups almost daily.
• Watched lots of YouTube. I now know how engines are disassembled, how to solve higher degree polynomial math problems, and a lot more about local AI setups. I watched a guy repair a Bugatti, and another one waste endless hours to online scammers, and a third guy fix broken video cards.
• Visited my parents more often.

I think the reading with kids was probably the most impactful thing I did. I feel the AI revolution is negatively affecting them, lowering the quality of the text and video they’re exposed to. Learning and improving still requires reading and understanding advanced text. Books don’t come naturally to their lives, like they did in my, when I was their age. So I’m happy that they read some books and will be a bit more prepared for their next grades.

I’m very thankful to Automattic for the Sabbatical benefit. I feel I used it well.