Done! Sixteen weeks of giving myself time to explore new, or in a deeper way, diverse dimensions of my life. In this post, I cover what I did, how it felt when it ended now and leave clues to others thinking on doing a break… or myself if the idea pops again in the future. For those who are seeing only this post, I kept a blog-like journal where you can find many in-depth exploration fragments on Life Planning, Sabbatical Organization, Books, Sustainability or System and Self-Awareness.

As I describe in the sections below, my Sabbatical was a kind of Quest, born out of a positive challenge to have more time to find my role in global challenges. I completely disconnected from work but, to smooth in and out transitions, I kept much of my living place or routine and level of support to family and friends. I use planning and organization methods that told me I allocated 50% of the planned weekly time to Quest activities, letting other stuff like sports, friends and family consume some of the freed time. Anyway, I got out with a lot of new outcomes, learnings and relationships:

• Many conversations about life-long planning connected me in new ways with existing or new relationships
• Visited companies and initiatives close by to open my perspective to different ways of organizing work.
• Helped friends or community projects, getting to know other local realities
• Studied new code languages on Complex System Dynamics to simulate human interactions.
• Read books on Global Challenges and possible solutions
• Improved data tracking of my actions from sports to books and others.
• Test on personal habits, on how to ease the tracking and focus on key ones
• Household and routine improvements to have a more positive-to-live-in environment to me and my family.
• Created a framework to link global challenges to individual life-long planning strategies.
• Created a blog (this one) with several posts that helped me explore in structured ways and connect to others.

So looking back: was it worth it? Would I do it again? Did I find my role in the global challenges?
Totally worth it and I would do it every year if possible, even if I did not find a clear role, I found something maybe even better: immense richness. I leave the Sabbatical with much more than I got into it: more friends, more ideas for posts and explorations, more dimensions in my life, more data, more knowledge, more methods, more tools.

And even more importantly, I came out with the concept that while I am coming back to work, I can keep the gained diversity. I can have both a diverse rich life and be committed to work and family. The trick looks to be plastic or elastic, to acknowledge that there are phases or rhythms in the day, week, month, year and life where you will be more focused on one particular dimension of yourself. The balance is like a dance where all the dimensions you value are present and you pick them as they need your attention or your need their energy.

I advise anyone interested in a Sabbatical or just a work pause to invest some time to understand why it makes sense and try to design a custom solution. I know that I was very privileged to cope the pause with finances, family and work but there are an increasing number of other cases out here that have done it and employees are also more and more open. Go for it if it makes sense for some time now!

A context of science, entrepreneurship and family

While I am writing this it is Summer 2023, I live in Lisbon-Portugal, I am 43 years old and a father of two kids aged 5 and 10. I studied Physics for eleven years, from 1997 to 2008 including a Master’s and a Ph.D., mainly at Lisbon Universities and half a year in Jena – Germany. I loved, and still do, the complex theories, the month-long experiments and the worldwide collaborations, some with Nobel prize-winning groups.

In 2006 a new dimension entered my life, when I accepted the challenge of a fellow researcher to co-found a startup on Solar Energy. It all grew very fast into another eleven years block, this time of entrepreneurship, management and innovation where I founded a series of initiatives in Energy Retail, Social Innovation and Sports Analytics. To understand what I was doing, since I had zero training, I did in this period some very nice courses in Harvard, MIT and London Business School.

I have been very lucky in terms of family and growth environment, being part of very large and happy families, having contact with nature while young, and living in a safe country with excellent education available. I have tried to pass that luck to my kids and in late 2017, just before my second kid was born, I grabbed the opportunity to sell or and close some initiatives and leave the focus-consuming role of founder and manager.

Since 2017 I have been a Consultant or Employee. I am now a fulfilled Director for Data Services Platform at Eviso, an Italian publically traded Tech & Energy Company that I helped to found in 2013. I lead a three-year-old team of programmers who support the company in scaling and digitalizing its processes.

Needed time to find my role in global challenges

From these various and intense life cycles, I have come to feel, since around 2017, that the challenges we face as groups or society are becoming more complex and changing faster, on a scale that we individuals struggle to cope with and understand. Using my mix of scientific and management approaches, I have been trying to study, experiment and collaborate on these topics for example:

• Carbon emissions: Learning, joining a pilot study and tracking my personal footprint.
• Communities and Activism: talking to several movements, joining some and reading about others.
• Collective Intelligence: learning it and applying it help restructure Eviso’s way of working
• Inequality and Development: understanding status quo and new economical theories.
• Instability and Continuous Crisis: reading new economic theories and approaches
• Complex Systems Science: study its theory and tools and join international groups.

The more I learned and experimented together with others, the more it felt urgent, critical even, to find my place or role in the worldwide effort to understand and test solutions for those complex societal challenges. This search needed also time to become more self-aware, also because, on a more personal dimension, I was feeling that I needed to organize myself better and connect in richer ways with my close family, friends and the local community.

An important insight I had at the time was that my contribution would be focused, by using technology, data and methodology, to link the choices and plans we do at the personal or the family level, with the global challenges and movements.

A Sabbatical born out of positive challenges

For all of the above, at the end of 2022, it felt this was the time to invest in new dimensions in my life, so I framed the idea of a Sabbatical like this:

Why do it?

• Need unallocated time to grow internally.
• Challenge the feeling that I need to change my personal strategy to Sufficiency, rather than Efficiency as before. 
• To continue to lead others, I feel I need to invest in being more centered.
• Part-time is not an easy option for leaders of organizations, so a 100% work leave looked like the solution.
• It’s not burn-out-related, is aspirational and improvement-related.
• Feels right and important, as it has already been for several semesters.

To do What?

• Creative: engage in planned personal projects
• Learn: Read, take courses and connect with other realities.
• Life Phase Assessment: look back and forward with method.
• Lifestyle Refresh: kill old and create new habits
• Connect: be with and support important people around me in new ways.
• Unexpected: leave room for “whatever feels right”

Before going further, I must recognize the leap of faith done by Eviso, my employee. Being a young, fast-changing company still, it accepted the challenge to let one of the executive directors be the first to experiment on such a leave.

Additionally, I was lucky enough to have the support of my wife and family in this decision. This was a non-paid leave so I actually reduced by one third my contribution to the family annual budget.

What kinds of Sabbaticals are out there and what kind was mine?

Looks like the origins of the word Sabbatical are linked with a pause “recurring in sevens or on every seventh” which seems consistent with the Sábado (Saturday in Latin languages) and Sabbatical year being one in every seven years. I like this recurring idea of Sabbatical. A period that you can wait and accumulate topics for, knowing that will come. Check more in this article or in the ChatGPT answer.

If you want to explore more, I advise this short video “The Sabbatical Project” or read this study “The Transformative Power of Sabbaticals“ which includes tips for both employees and workers and divides Sabbatical into:
1. Working Holidays: to make a deep energizing pause;
2. Free Dives to break internal narratives or experience adventure and;
3. Quests that start slow but are the most transformational ones.

In my case, I did a Sabbatical with zero work while doing it, non-paid and short, since normally they range from three to twelve months and mine was four. On the Sabbatical type, I think it was of the Quest type, since I started slow and aimed for transformation, not to energize or break narratives.

A key aspect of doing a Sabbatical these days where sometimes you already have a work-life balance, is that you still could need it. Not to rest or travel but because you need to add dimensions to your life and also to test and improve the delegation of roles and tasks in your work functions. Other key decisions are:

Routine: do you want to change also places or rhythms?
In my case, I did the same schedule and place. Felt strange sometimes, like not changing enough, but was easy to get in and out of the Sabbatical.

Justification to others: what to answer when people ask why are you doing it?
In my case, I framed it quite deeply, even with a blog and a text. But even with that preparation, it was sometimes stressful and difficult to manage the surprise and almost concern from family, friends and colleagues.

Non-Work Activities: the Sabbatical is only for work, or also for other life dimensions?
In my case, family and kids take me even more time than work (as they should) on a weekly basis. So when I decided not to lower that life dimension, it scoped clearly the expectations for me and those around me during these four months. Other cases could include deciding on pause or not: seeing friends, regular sports or leisure routines.

How did I plan and really allocate time during the Sabbatical

As you can see in the charts below, I planned to do a total of 640 hours for Sabbatical activities, targeting 40 hours on an ideal week. The time I really allocated was 310, so less than half of the plan, the main reason being time stollen for more activity with Family and Friends, regular Sports and also some occasional meetings for Work.

In the month-to-month and weekly charts below is clear that the time allocated to Sabbatical and the reason for not reaching the planned hours varied a lot during my Sabbatical. Looking back I can identify three phases:
– the first half of the Sabbatical in February and March where I was doing a routine and quite strong weekly planning.
– April was disrupted by family holidays and almost no stable routine.
– May when, even with less planned I made an effort to finish some topics and tasks.

More than looking back as a failure vs success, what I extract from my experiences with time planned vs allocated is that having more time to family and sports maybe could have been part of the sabbatical activities. They are part of better living and connecting to my inner self. Also, I stated beforehand that I was not reducing family support, so maybe the plan was not realistic with 40 hours per week.

The diversity of periods, some with more sports, others completely for family holidays and others with a lot of focus on Sabbatical, is not chaos or negative. It is actually a feature I was not aware of. A flexibility to accommodate for and alternate between different dimensions, allowing for a richer life. The video below shows how the time allocation over time looks like a dance between the different dimensions. I like it!

Methods and Tools I used during my Sabbatical

Being a tech and management person, it is important to me what methods and tools I used. Also, I think is important to start with this since I will probably refer to these methods further in the post.

• Time tracking in Google Calendar of the full 24h to reserve slots ahead and to assess time allocation. See post that has more info on this.
• Task and goal management tool to set the month and keep track of what I accomplished. Post with more on this.
• Blog-style website to organize my explorations, write them and share them with others. See here how I did it.
• Monthly and Weekly cycles to decide what to focus on and to have internal phases. Check this example.

I also used, as support tools, Grammarly to write better, Excel to make charts and Newsletters to share posts.