Notes From Sabbatical: Month 1

TLDR; It’s All About Boundaries 101

It’s been one month since I announced my sabbatical via LinkedIn and Twitter.

Arriving at the decision to step away from full-time work was far from a ‘let me sleep on this tonight and see if I feel the same way tomorrow’ thing. Far from it. Choosing to take a sabbatical was something I’d considered for many years, whether contemplating pursuing an MBA or perhaps just being more intentional with vacation time.

It wasn’t until I read the book Brain Surfing: The Top Marketing Strategy Minds in the World that the idea of a true sabbatical surfaced as a viable option for someone like me. Prior, I always associated sabbaticals with executives and senior academics (and not a mid-career VC). One of the most illuminating points made in the book referenced someone who habitually worked for 7 years then would take 1 year off to research and inform the work that would be done in the following 7 years. It reminded me of interval training for a half-marathon back in 2008; running 7 minutes, then walking for 1 minute. In short, pacing myself for long-term endurance and success.

I’m going to pause here on what led to my decision to take the sabbatical because the purpose of this particular blog is to quickly reflect on lessons learned from month one. I’ll come back to that topic in another post for those interested.

Month 1 of Sabbatical: The Stats

Sabbatical by the numbers, from April 4 through today, May 3:

• 12+ Cities: Witnessed Spring in action from coast to coast, with trees blossoming and flowers making their triumphant return
• 12 Flights: Passed through BNA, JFK, DAL, ABQ, LAX, PDX, SFO
• 4 Rental Cars: 2x bright red Mini Cooper Countryman, 1 brand new Toyota Corolla Cross, and 1 4-door Jeep Wrangler
• 89 Years: The age of the oldest person I spent time with
• 10 Weeks: The age of the youngest person I spent time with
• 3 Museums: Visited the Vasily Kandinsky: Around The Circle exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum (NYC) and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (Santa Fe) + a visit to Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return (Santa Fe)
• 2 Tattoos: First tattoo ever in Portland on a Saturday; second tattoo in Silverlake the following Tuesday
• 2 Wineries: Visited Ashes & Diamonds for a special private dinner with First Republic Bank’s Women In Venture Summit, then wine tasting with family at the historic Chateau Montelena
• 2 Calls: I imposed a strict no-call/meeting policy, and for the entire month of April was just on 2 scheduled calls for Build In SE projects
• 1 Concert: Leif Vollebekk in Brooklyn (Music Hall of Williamsburg)
• 1 Bald Eagle: My first flight of sabbatical was from BNA to JFK, and there was a bald eagle on board in Row 2(!)

What I’ve Learned in Month 1

• Taking a sabbatical is all about setting boundaries, which for me is a Boundaries 101 exercise (aka new for me).
• It takes a while to unwind from work responsibilities, so my first week of the sabbatical wasn’t really sabbatical time.
• Backlogged personal responsibilities (chores, house projects, loved ones to visit) also fill time upfront. Plan accordingly.
• People will email/DM/Slack/SMS to get around the work email auto-responder to still ask for favors, e.g. “I hope your sabbatical is going great! I wanted to see if you could…” or “Let’s grab coffee, I’d love to hear how sabbatical is going.”
• Bad habits die hard. For me, it is checking email, and social media, and generally spending more time on my phone than I’d like.
• Changing environments is a great way to jumpstart a sabbatical. Even though traveling was tiring at times, I feel refreshed after removing myself from Nashville and exposing myself to both new and favorite places.
• Writing in a journal, and bringing a small purse-sized journal everywhere, is an effective way to unwind my brain and also capture new ideas as they surface.
• Back to the boundaries point, a sabbatical means saying no to call/meeting requests about 5x/day. It is surprisingly refreshing to practice writing, “I am not scheduling any new conversations at the moment.”

During my first week, I started writing tweets for my own amusement, though people actually engaged with them so I kept going for a few days. I’m resharing these below for safekeeping because there were a few points I wanted to capture as a way to chronicle my frame of mind jumping into uncharted territory.

P.S. A theme I particularly love is that of nature and the lessons we can learn from it. In New Mexico, my Aunt Clare (the aforementioned 89-year-old) was talking about her blossoming fruit trees in her front yard.

She mentioned very casually that she never knows when ‘it will be a fruit year’ because the trees do not produce fruit every year. One of her trees didn’t bear fruit for 7 years, and then finally was full of fruit she used that year for making jam and syrups.

We never know when we will have a fruit year. But it would probably serve us well to not expect fruit every year. Instead, choose to enjoy the year all the same and look forward to when the fruit returns, making the most of it when it does.

My next piece will be published via Mood Board, my Substack account. The motif will be ‘Ownership’ and it is a piece I started drafting from the front window of an amazing chocolate cafe in Taos, New Mexico. You can subscribe here (or not) to receive the article right to your inbox once I hit publish.