After analyzing my 4th week time allocation, I have decided to follow advice from a friend and start a period of travel-like inside my Sabbatical time. During this period of at least two weeks, I have told everyone around me to consider it as if I am traveling and so, not available for social events and even limited call availability. This is an experiment to oppose the high impact of unplanned requests on my routines in these last four weeks… but is also a test of my self-setting discipline.

I see this decision as normal in my path and I would have done it again the same way. As said in a recent Harvard Review article, there are many kinds of Sabbaticals but the richest ones are the ones with different phases along the way. It’s a process! Anyway, this time, for the period until the end of March, I made a detailed plan – the first in my Sabbatical – on what I want to achieve together with what I must do (family, routines, etc).

Goal and Plan for March

I have divided the plan for March into five categories. For each category, I created goals, subgoals and tasks. I have also allocated an hour’s estimation to complete each item in the plan. The table below resumes the total allocation that shows my focus in the Sabbatical Explorations. The total encompassing estimation for all categories is 323 hours which already exceeds the available time for March (300h of not sleeping or mandatory routines) and still does not consider that some unplanned will come. The challenge is on. I am curious how much of this plan will be followed 🙂

The 153 hours allocated to the Sabbatical are organized into Reading Books, My Blog, Talk to People and Build the Life Align Framework. The full detail of the Plan down to the task level is shown in the image below. If I follow this plan I will end March with a much more complete website (not just a big one like now) and with a Framework for the Life Align Explorations I have done for the last years, that is ready to be shared. Looks good!

Looking back: Time Allocation on the Fourth Week of Sabbatical

This time was super clear. I was not applying enough discipline to my weekly planning. My plan was to do 40 hours of Sabbatical explorations (orange in charts below) and ended up doing 22 hours. Additionally, my plan included five periods of more than five hours which is the minimum time I have seen to efficiently explore and close ideas…and end up doing just one.

Looking at the evolution of Time Allocation over the last 4 weeks, one can confirm that the reason to the unplanned disruption I produced varied from Family, Friends, Household or Children but in any case the Sabbatical remained limited to around 20-25 hours.