If a vacation is a sprint of relaxation, then a sabbatical is a marathon. And what’s the key to finishing a marathon without collapsing? Pace!
Just as you wouldn’t expect a marathon runner to sprint the whole way, you can’t expect yourself to sprint through your sabbatical, filling every minute with activities and adventures, without any time to reflect and recharge.
Now, that might sound obvious. But if you’ve ever tried to plan out a sabbatical when you’ve already got a long bucket list, you will have felt the pressure to “do it all” because you feel like this break is a once-in-a-lifetime chance, and you don’t want to waste it.
The key to a successful and fulfilling sabbatical is managing your pace and building in periods of activity and periods of quiet.
Active Periods
There will be times in your sabbatical when you will be out in the world doing the things you love and have always dreamed of doing. It might be traveling, volunteering, or hiking Everest. These periods are highly active, and your schedule will be dictated by the activities or goals you’re pursuing. You’ll be more active, and the pace will feel faster and busier. And these periods of activity are great! They help you achieve things you’ve always wanted to do, give you a sense of accomplishment, and make you feel like you’re making the most of your sabbatical. They’ll also give you memories to look back on for years to come.
However, these active periods need to be punctuated by quieter periods where you can rest and reflect because your sabbatical is not a sprint; you need to pace yourself.
Quiet Periods
For a sabbatical to be truly fulfilling, there needs to be time and space to do some inner work. This is the time for personal development, figuring out who you are, what you want next in life and work, and how you’re going to get there. Every sabbatical needs periods of quiet reflection and stillness, allowing all that you’ve done in the active periods to solidify and for insights to crystallize. Without these periods, you’re rushing from one thing to the next, with little time for learning or growth. And yet, in sabbatical planning, these are the periods that get condensed or squeezed out in favour of activity and adventure, in the hedonistic pursuit of dopamine and the chase for impressive sabbatical stories.
As soon as you plan a quiet period into your sabbatical, the question of how to structure these quiet days usually arises. You don’t have the normal things like work to structure your time. So how do you structure your time so that you have quiet time but don’t just let it get gobbled up and wasted? This is particularly dangerous when you’re planning a quiet period of your sabbatical at home. It can be so tempting to spend your quiet time on things that aren’t important to you rather than on the deeper work.
Daily Routine Blocks – Active and Quiet
A good daily routine for a sabbatical will allow you to focus on your well-being – physically and mentally – as well as allow blocks of time for focus areas. These routines help you set up healthy habits that you can carry over into your life when you return from sabbatical. Getting these habits installed without the pressure of the busy pace of life and work can help you see the benefits quicker and give you a better chance that you’ll be able to make them stick in your post-sabbatical life.
The most common routine blocks are morning and evening routines. These often involve quiet periods of reflection, journaling, or meditation as well as a physical health focus with yoga or exercise, and healthy eating and sleeping routines. You don’t need to have both an evening and morning routine. Commonly, people have one or the other. But having at least one of these helps to put a quiet period into your day that allows what you’re learning on sabbatical to surface and crystallize – and this is required for one or more focus areas for most people.
This then allows the middle of the day to be guided by focus areas. How you choose to arrange these is totally up to you. Some people have a few blocks a day and focus on different areas during those blocks. Some people dedicate a day to one area and dive in. Some prefer to have active blocks interspersed with quiet blocks, for example, a period of deep work on learning something new in the morning, then a block of meditation before another period focusing on a different area.
These blocks are not all about work. They would be focused on what you want to get out of your sabbatical. Exploration, fun, and building relationships are all legitimate sabbatical focus areas, and you would design your block around those. It's ok to have an entire block of your day dedicated to having fun, in fact, that's really important!
So, what is the right balance of active vs. quiet periods? It all comes back to the purpose of your sabbatical and what you want to focus the time on. If you haven’t already created your Sabbatical Plan House, I encourage you to do that as it will help you uncover what you really need from the time and therefore what you want to focus your time and energy on.
Bringing it to life with real examples
Let’s take two examples based on my clients’ experiences (with details changed for confidentiality) and see how they managed both pace and routine during their sabbaticals.
Matt’s Adventure-Packed Sabbatical
Matt is a Partner at a law firm. He’d been doing long hours for over 30 years and wanted a break. The purpose of his sabbatical was to have some great bucket list adventures and also spend quality time with his family – two things his job hadn’t allowed. His focus areas were adventure, family, and figuring out his next chapter.
Matt started his sabbatical with a huge challenge – hiking to Everest Basecamp. A dream he’d always wanted to achieve. This was on top of a long list of other adventures he wanted to squeeze in. Matt also had some family trips planned, both together as a family and individually with each of his sons. The idea was that these trips would give him the quality time he was craving. The sabbatical was relatively short – 2 months. Once the adventures and family trips were planned, the schedule was already packed and all action. There was very little downtime or periods of quiet. One of Matt’s focus areas for the sabbatical was to figure out what he wanted the next chapter of his career to look like. This was going to take some quiet reflection, and he needed some time to investigate some options he wanted to incorporate, like teaching and taking up Board Directorship positions. Once everything was laid out, Matt realized that it was more important that he use his sabbatical for future planning than squeeze one more adventure into the time. We then designed a quiet period for Matt. He went to a place where he knew he could feel relaxed and go at a slower pace, their summer house, and used his days for reading and reflecting. This gave Matt the right balance. Most of his sabbatical was active, but he carved out a quiet period to do the deeper work and plan his future from a calm, beautiful place.
Dean’s At-Home Sabbatical
Dean had been the co-founder of several successful startups and had just exited his latest. After the frenzied pace of the last decade of startup life, he knew he needed a break. The purpose of his sabbatical was to recharge and figure out what was next. His focus areas were well-being, family, self-discovery, and new horizons. Dean was planning to be on sabbatical for about 6 months with an open-ended timeline. With a young family at home, the sabbatical also gave him the opportunity to get more involved in the day-to-day of being a parent while also giving his wife a break from having taken the load of raising four children while he focused on the startups. There were some ideas for trips, but most of the sabbatical would be spent at home. This raised a huge challenge for Dean. How would he feel going from his time being filled with work to nothing, and how would he know he’d used the time effectively? The key was in crafting a daily routine that allowed him to focus on family responsibilities but also gave him the freedom and flexibility to focus on his other growth areas. We designed his time in blocks. A morning routine focused on health and mindfulness, a block for getting the family ready and off to school. Then a block in the middle of the day where he could focus on personal development, reading, and diving into learning about things that piqued his interest. This was followed by a family-focused afternoon and evening. We also planned ‘escape weeks’ where he went on solo trips to retreats or calm locations where he could focus on himself and quietly reflect. This was the right balance for Dean. It gave him enough structure to recharge and focus on his new horizons but also dedicate time to his family. This reflection time paid off, and around month five of his sabbatical, he felt the call to the next business idea, which gave him a natural transition out of the sabbatical. He’s now successfully launched that business and is approaching work with more balance.
Both these examples are vastly different sabbaticals, but they both used active and quiet periods to help them get the most out of their time. The most important thing is for you to find the balance that is right for you. Find the right sabbatical pace as you journey through the months, balancing active periods with periods of quiet reflection. Find the daily routine that helps you stay happy, healthy, and focused during your sabbatical – particularly in the quieter periods. Design blocks, active and quiet, into your day and use those blocks to structure your time on your focus areas.
This is NOT easy! While these concepts seem pretty simple, it can be hard to put them into practice when you’re planning your own sabbatical. This is often because finding the right balance means saying ‘No’ to something else, and we’re not practised in our everyday life at prioritizing quiet time. If this feels hard, or you feel you’re getting lost, feel free to book a call with me. We can discuss the support you need to get you back on track. It may be as simple as one coaching session, or you may want to deep dive with a coaching package – it’s up to you. I’m here to support you.
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