SABBATICAL LESSON #1: BOUNDARIES
2025-01-21
Today was my first day back at work after three months of paid leave (My
employers' sabbatical benefit is truly an epic perk.). I'd meant to write
about the overall experience of my sabbatical and the things I gained from it
before I returned, but I'm glad I didn't because one of the lessons only
crystallised this morning.
IMG A French Bulldog wearing a teal jumper pulls away at her red lead as she walks down a dirt path between gardens. Freezing fog hangs in the air up ahead.
My typical work schedule sees me wake up some time before 06:30 so I can check
my notifications, formulate my to-do list for the day, and so on, before the
kids get up. Then I can focus on getting them full of breakfast, dressed, and
to school, and when I come back to my desk I've already got my day
planned-out. It's always felt like a good way to bookend my day, and it leans
into my "early bird" propensities (Mysteriously, and without warning, at about
the age of 30 I switched from being a "night owl" to being an "early bird",
becoming a fun piece of anecdotal evidence against the idea that a person's
preference is genetic or otherwise locked-in at or soon after birth. As I've
put it since: "I've become one of those chirpy, energetic 'morning people'
that I used to hate so much when I was younger.".).
Over the last few years, I've made a habit of pulling out my phone and
checking for any new work Slack conversations while on the way back after
dropping the kids at school. By this point it's about 08:45 which is
approximately the time of day that all of my immediate teammates - who span
five timezones - have all checked-in. This, of course, required that I was
signed in to work Slack on my personal phone, but I'd come to legitimise this
bit of undisciplined work/life-balance interaction by virtue of the fact that,
for example, walking the dog home from the school run was "downtime" anyway.
What harm could it do to start doing "work" things ten minutes early?
IMG Dan, wearing a purple t-shirt, looks at the camera while pointing at the centre of three computer screens which share a cluttered desk, each of which shows a stylised image version of the Automattic Creed.
But walking the dog isn't "downtime". It's personal time. When I'm looking at
your phone and thinking about work I'm actively choosing not to be looking at
the beautiful countryside that I'm fortunate enough to be able to enjoy each
morning, and not to be thinking about... whatever I might like to be thinking
about! By blurring my work/life-balance I'm curtailing my own freedom, and
that's bad for both my work and personal lives!
My colleague Kyle recently returned from six months of parental leave and
shared some wisdom with me, which I'll attempt to paraphrase here:
> It takes some time at a new job before you learn all of the optimisations
you might benefit from making to your life. This particular workflow. That
particular notetaking strategy. By the time you've come up with the best
answers for you, there's too much inertia to overcome for you to meaningfully
enact personal change.
>
> Coming back from an extended period of leave provides the opportunity to
"reboot" the way you work. You're still informed by all of your previous
experience, but you're newly blessed with a clean slate within which to
implement new frameworks.
He's right. I've experienced this phenomenon when changing roles within an
organisation, but there's an even stronger opportunity, without parallel, to
"reboot" your way of working when returning from a sabbatical. I've got
several things I'd like to try on this second chapter at Automattic. But the
first one is that I'm not connecting my personal phone to my work Slack
account.
LINKS
HTML About Automattic's sabbatical benefit
HTML Blog of my coworker Kyle