I took 4 months off, and here’s why you should too
For the last four months, I took a break away from work. It created major shifts in how I relate to work — and life in general. I’ve transformed into a healthier, more grounded version of myself. So if you’re ever in the (privileged!) position to take a longer break, I can now say from experience that I highly recommend it. Here’s what happened.
How it started
I have no problem taking holidays. Every year I take on average 4–6 weeks off. But I never thought of taking a much longer break, until my colleague Sam Spurlin felt he needed one. He could have just arranged a break for himself, but instead, he decided to bring a proposal to our governance meeting* that now enables everyone in the company to take one. I will be forever grateful to him.
*Ehh, what kind of meeting…? As a self-managing organization, everyone can propose changes to how we work. This includes agreements on how we make decisions, how we do our client work, how we handle money, basically anything you can think of. When the team consents to the proposal, it is adopted. Learn more about how The Ready works and how we do participatory governance.
Our Sabbatical Policy reads as follows:
Every five years Members become eligible for a one trimester, fully paid, sabbatical. Members are asked to be intentional about how they use their sabbatical. Sabbatical requests are considered and granted by a team of relevant roles to ensure the financial and operational safety of The Ready.
Why I wanted to take a sabbatical
Here’s what I wrote in my sabbatical request:
I started working when I was only 12 years old. I’ve been hustling ever since. When my mother became terminally ill when I was 16, my focus on my work was my way of coping with the situation. Over time, working hard, the need to be ‘productive’ and make money has become integrated into my identity and idea of self-worth. I find it difficult to relax and disconnect from work. When I’m not very busy, I feel anxious and sad. Therefore, I expect taking 4 months off will be a transformative experience. I expect I’ll need to do some self-work with a coach or therapist throughout this period. I hope I’ll find a higher sense of purpose in the work I do, other than just working hard to satisfy the ingrained patterns from my childhood.
In the request, I listed these additional intentions/activities for my time away:
- Cultivate habits that improve my work/non-work life when I’m back. For example, habits that create more consistent reflecting/reading/writing time.
- Rediscover old hobbies — making music, hacking, golf, chi gong, chess. Get great at relaxing at disconnecting from work.
- Getting active in my kids’ school and local neighborhood to improve it.
- Spend at least a month of quality time with my wife as she also takes a month off. Spend a lot of time doing fun stuff with my young kids.
After the request was accepted, I spent about 3 months handing over my client projects and internal roles to several colleagues (thank you!). Later, on I realized that an unexpected side-benefit for someone taking a sabbatical is the gain of resilience in the rest of the organization: when a role is being taken over, it requires a transfer of knowledge which reduces single points of failure and enables new people to experience those roles.
What happened
The first month felt like I was on a lengthy holiday at home. Since my partner was off the first month too, and the kids continued to go to school, we took the opportunity to go on lunches and day trips together. We also worked around the house and garden.
Then when she went back to work, I initially struggled to find the space and time for myself I was looking for, as I quickly realized I would only be completely home alone for two days per week, while on the other days at least one of our kids would be with us for at least part of the day. To counter this, I decided to stop scheduling things on those two days.
That’s how I finally found the space I was looking for: being at home, alone, without anything that I needed to do. And the possibility to do anything I wanted. This definitely was something I hadn’t experienced for decades and felt weird. At first, I felt the urge to fill that time with all sorts of things that were on my list of ‘things to do during my sabbatical’. This kept me busy, until (a few weeks later) I realized that I was completely missing the point.
Things I reflected on
A few weeks into my sabbatical, I went on a ‘solo quest’ (organized by Nature Quest). Participants go deep into the woods and stay there for 24 hours. You bring clothes, a mat, a sleeping bag, a tarp, and some water — but not much else. No phone, watch, books, or laptop. No food. Since you don’t get any outside stimulus, you’re mostly left with yourself and your thoughts. You lose your sense of time, and you’ll have a vast amount of time to think and reflect. As preparation, I took these two questions with me into the quest:
- What would I change if I somehow knew I had only five more years left to live? (my mother died when she was 44, and I’ve just turned 39…) — after many hours of thinking, I was very grateful to discover my answer was ‘actually… nothing.’
- What do I have to learn during my sabbatical about myself and my relationship with work? — the time I spent with this question helped me remember how and when some of my patterns (as described above) were created and reinforced, and how I could decide to let go of them.
What it brought me
Here is a list of the major shifts that happened:
🌻 The time in the woods taught me the joy of not-doing. Since then, I’ve been trying to sit in the garden for at least 20 minutes a day, doing nothing (without my phone, book, or anything else to distract me). I find that it is a nice way for my mind to unwind and think about unexpected things.
🥶 I participated in a workshop where I learned the Wim Hof method (he is also known as ‘the ice man’). Through a set of breathing (and not-breathing) exercises, you learn to control your body with your mind. The experience ended with being immersed in a bath full of ice cubes, which was actually quite pleasant! Since then, I take cold showers and am really enjoying it.
🌮 My relationship with food changed. When I was 24 hours in the woods, I didn’t bring any food. This turned out to be much easier than I expected. It taught me that our bodies are perfectly capable of being without food for longer periods. I started doing 16:8 intermittent fasting, a few times a week, where I don’t eat after dinner and skip breakfast. This also helped me lose weight.
🏃♂️ Lots of exercise, which means I am now fitter than ever. I went running three times a week and was able to extend my run length by 30% to about 7km. I played a lot of golf, started kayaking, and continued playing tennis. Through regular physiotherapy and exercises, I was able to recover from a long-standing elbow- and shoulder injury.
💪🏻 To adopt new habits, I discovered that it helps to make agreements with myself and track if I am living up to those. The app Streaks helped me to do that. The habits I track range from doing my physio stretches every day, to connect with my grandmother and -father every month.
⏳ Doing long overdue things and kept postponing for years: I bought new glasses, visited several family members and old friends, and started working with a geneticist to see if there are patterns in my family’s medical history that are worth noting.
♛ I rediscovered my love for chess. At first, I started teaching chess classes at my kid’s school. But only after my colleague Aaron Dignan tweeted he played regularly online, I really got into it. Want to play? I am kajurria on chess.com.
🏎 Other fun things: I went to the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Monaco, which was something on my bucket list. And I rediscovered Lego: I built the Lamborghini Sián which consists of almost 3,696 pieces.
📚 I finished reading 8 books. My three favorites are Work with Source, Thinking Fast and Slow, and Humanocracy. It got me excited about new ways of thinking and talking about my field of work. I’ve almost finished a Dutch book on climate change that has shifted my perspective and wants me to reduce my impact on the planet even further.
📕 After not looking at its contents for about 3 years, I re-read my own book Formula X. I postponed diving into it for a long time, as I was afraid of it being disappointing, but it was quite the opposite! I found myself laughing out loud at times, and enjoying plot twists that I forgot we wrote. This made me start to think about writing a second book.
🧳 Changing my relationship with work. I feel I can be much more intentional about what I want to be doing and why, instead of keeping myself busy and running on auto-pilot.
In summary: in only 4 months, I’ve transformed into a healthier, more grounded version of myself. My batteries are fully charged to take on my next big work project… or am I?
Getting back to work
Now that I’m back at work for a few weeks, I can tell you, it has not been a smooth ride. At first, I felt quite sad that it was over, and was very stressed. On the day I got back I immediately started on a new client project which felt like I accelerated from 0–100km/h in 1 second. My body required some time to recover from those g-forces and felt sore. Logically, my colleague was operating at a higher clock speed. I had to find creative ways to find time to keep doing the daily rituals that I learned during my time away. All of this is now getting better but there is definitely some transition time to take into account.
Now it is your turn…
I hope the story of my sabbatical inspires you to think about taking one yourself if you’re in a position to do so. I also hope it inspires leaders to adopt similar policies as I learned that it is pretty rare that an organization offers this, even though the benefits to the people and the organization are abundant. Contact me if this sparks anything for you, I’d be happy to chat!
Thanks to everyone at The Ready that made my sabbatical possible, especially to the colleagues that had to do additional work when taking over roles from me.
