Take a sabbatical year

Worst part about time off? Spending my last two weeks recovering from a nasty cold. All those plans for the last few things I wanted to do went right out the window.

On the plus side, I got to go to my sister’s wedding! :-)

My sabbatical year’s almost over, and I’ve got my next job lined up. I’ve been thinking through what lessons I learned during the time off.

1) Don’t treat time between jobs (and during the job search) as a sabbatical. The time during the job search was completely different from the time before. The job search was filled with interruptions and times I was waiting for phone calls, and was an emotional roller coaster because of my own hopes for the job and being judged by others. If you’re taking time off, make it your time as much as you can.

2) Make sure you have enough to cover living expenses for the time off, plus for extra time in case the job search afterwards doesn’t go well or the housing market collapses or major banks go bankrupt or something. For me (experienced engineer in high tech), I ended up doing two rounds of job searches; each took around two months from sending resumes to receiving and accepting an offer. I’d assumed the job search would go faster, but luckily I’d been a bit conservative (which was good considering how the economy looks.) I also started cutting my expenses to the bone as soon as I figured out I wasn’t going to fall into the perfect job immediately.

For me, the job search was also longer because I didn’t want to jump at the first job that came along, but was trying to make sure I’d find a place where I’d be doing the work I’d be most interested in, where I’d have a great team of folks to work with, and where I could try to keep as good a quality of life as possible. I found a great job and great team in the first round of the job search, but the commute would have been miserable. I was really grateful that I wasn’t in a situation where I had to take that offer.

3) Make a list of big and small items you want to do, and keep checking on your progress during the time off. My list kept me focused on getting to do the things I most wanted to do. When I knew I wanted to do metalworking, it was easy for me to spend entire days on projects. Without the list or with interruptions (such as during the job search), it would have been too easy to have days that just sort of evaporated. The mix was important, both so I could find things to do when I only had a free day, and so I could do longer projects that would never get multiple-weeks of effort when I was working.

4) Keep up with friends and colleagues. Not working when everyone else is working can be isolating, so going off to lunch with friends gave me a way to keep being social while also keeping up contacts when I started back at work. Friends kept me up to date on whether my former employer was hiring; others pointed me at potential leads. Some friends just kept me thinking about computer science during long, wandering chats. I tried to have lunch with someone every week. I didn’t always make the once-a-week rule, but just having the rule made sure I tried to make it part of my routine.

5) Find social groups that meet regularly, and attend them to keep some sort of rhythm in your week. Once again, being home when everyone else is working can be isolating, so finding ways to keep up the socializing is great. I found a group that got together every Friday for lunch. The combination of the routine and the socializing made a huge difference for me. We also started meeting my sister and her beau for dinner every week for the same reasons. Just having the scheduled events added some needed rhythm and regularity to my week.

6) Keep a diary, just so you can remember what you’ve accomplished and what you still want to do. I found it easy to get fixated on a project; a couple times with the metalworking, I found I’d spent three weeks putting in multiple hours a day on the project. At some point, I started looking back to realize the amount of time I’d spent, and realized that I didn’t want to spend the whole time machining. The metal projects got pushed to a back burner and I picked up some other projects I knew I wanted to finish. Now, at the end, I keep running through the diary to remember all the things I did achieve, and how I was feeling during those relaxed days.

7) Do silly things, and spoil family rotten. For me, it was occasionally taking my wife off for cocktails in the late afternoon. It was decadent, and it was great fun, and it made for some wonderful memories. We’d never get to do this when we were both working.

8) Keep up with career and work knowledge, and find ways to show that you didn’t lose skills during the sabbatical (or, better, that you gained skills.) Interviewers will ask you what you were doing with the time off, and having a good story is important. Having a story that makes them think you’re excited and interested with the work at the potential job is even better.

It looks like the job search is almost over, so I’m coming to grips with the fact that I will have a lot less free time really, really soon. My big problem now is how do I want to spend my last few weeks?

I’ve started making my list: family stuff, finish a couple projects that deserve uninterrupted time, cleanup chores around the house, get quotes for repainting the house (or just repaint the places where paint’s beginning to crack myself), pack mother-in-law’s storage unit of boxes into a smaller storage unit, replace a fluorescent light fixture, get the car checked, connect with friends, etc.

The list is longer than I expected, and I’m unlikely to get everything done.

So my big question now: what really counts as the stuff worth finishing in the next few weeks?

As I’ve been interviewing for my next job, it’s been interesting seeing how interviewers react. I just interviewed with someone at my former company, and he got it. Of course, he had to tell the story about spending a year working on a certain high visibility project where he got three weekends off during that year. During one meeting with his boss, she declared how happy they were with what he’d accomplished, and gave him a pretty nice bonus. He said “thanks”, but not very enthusiastically, and his manager joked about how he didn’t seem that excited.

“I’d rather have time off.”

Luckily, I wasn’t as bad off as he was, but the story shows that it isn’t hard for job and money to suddenly seem less important than quality of life.

I had a phone screen interview today, and the manager asked me pretty bluntly:

“So I’m curious why you left xxxxxxxxxxx and felt you needed to take a sabbatical, just so you don’t end up having to do that here too?”

Answer: return to talking points.

• I left because there was nothing I wanted more than time off. (Micromanager certainly helped my decision, but wasn’t the only reason I left.)

• Quote from former manager: “Oh, you’re doing all those things we’re supposed to be doing all the time but never do!”

• I didn’t give my other line: “If I’m only going to stay around for eight years before wanting some quality time for myself, that means I’d stay a lot longer than most employees.”

So yeah, expect folks to wonder why you took a sabbatical, and make sure to have a good answer for why you did it, what cool things you did, and why they’re so much luckier to catch you after the sabbatical than before.

Listening to the comments and questions others have about my time off makes me realize what they want to do or did do.

There’s the friend who said I’d be bored within a month because he was. Work was his main social venue, and when he didn’t have a job to go to, he didn’t have folks to socialize with. Yeah, it’s a problem, but being rabid about booking lunches with friends really helped.

Another friend made some comment about how great it would be to watch TV in the afternoon, and was surprised when I mentioned I’d barely watched any TV. Wow… I never would of thought of afternoon TV as a reason to take time off. Guess it’s a great symbol of freedom to goof off.

At lunch a couple days ago, a third friend asked what it was like to have been outside the software industry for so long. Actually, I don’t feel like I have been gone; I’ve been reading all the same internet sites, and looking at magazines. I’ve been going to industry conferences and having long conversations in the hotel bar. I’ve been having lunch with all sorts of friends that I wasn’t seeing enough when I’ve been working, and we’ve chatted about their current projects, my past projects, and all the cool things I’ve heard about elsewhere. I’ve worked on a couple personal programming projects. Nope, no getting away from software for me.

As I’ve been interviewing for jobs, I haven’t had similar questions during interviews; at best they ask what I’ve been up to, and I run down the list: see family, travel, do personal projects, exercise and hike, be social. Either they’re ok with this answer, or they don’t want to pry too deeply, or they’re unwilling to let me hear their biases and what they’d hope to do if they had a year off.

One of the problems I’ve had during my several months of sabbatical/time off has been finding ways to be social. I don’t have a day job, so there’s no place I have to be. I’m being careful about money, so shopping as entertainment or wandering over to the mall just isn’t much fun. Friends are working during the week, so they’re not around for play time. I’ve had enough personal projects to work on, so I haven’t had to go many places yet. All this means that I’m just not going out much. Sometimes just grocery shopping is one of the few ways I’m around lots of people. (I’m even starting to see the patterns in the supermarket during the day—moms with young kids around 9am, elderly and moms with new babies around 1pm, folks with jobs either at noon or just after work, college kids after 8pm. That 1pm crowd can really be frustrating…)

So I thought I was just being weird, or my anti-social tendencies were just coming out too strong. But tonight, we took a friend out to dinner. She’s finishing her Ph.D., and has been spending the last few months just writing, mostly at home. She tends not to go to campus because it’s just a distraction. She’s been finding the same problem—working at home, doesn’t want to spend money, not many avenues open for socializing. “It’s so wonderful that you both suggested dinner because it gave me a reason to go out and be social!”

I’m in good company, I guess. Though comparing myself to grad students at the most stressful time in their schooling’s a bit like being a hypochondriac and saying “well, at least I don’t have the plague!”

Tomorrow’s choice: big lunch with the hobby crowd, or hike out in the middle of nowhere?

I changed my job last year and now I think that taking a sabbatical year it is not so important now.

My objectives have change and I will need money for the new objectives, so it is not a good idea to take one year off.

I am very, very tired. I have been working very hard, and I feel that I am not living the life I want to live.

I have decided that it is time to start thinking in taking a sabbatical year. It would not be actually a year without doing anything.

Because it must be one of the best years of my life (I want to go to many places and do almost all the things I have not been able to do during the last hard working years), I have to save some money.

I have decided that having 36.000 € in the bank would be OK for, for example, spent 9.000 € during that sabbatical year.

Now I have 22.000 €, so if I save 1.000 € per month, I will need 14 months to save the required money.

My Sabbatical year is then 2008. I would put a calendar with the things I want to do.

That’s it. It’s been 12 months without a proper job and I’ve enjoyed it immensely.
The last 5 years I’ve worked my butt off and I finally realised that nothing was never going to change. The goals and resources were never there and even if my co-workers and I repeatedly told our manager that things didn’t work nothing happened. So I finally quit and it’s been great.
If you’re fed up with your job and feel you’re going nowhere I can wholeheartedly recommend taking some time off and spend some time thinking about what you really want to do.