Smooth sailing in week 1
After extending my contract till the end of August and our (late) summer holiday was over it felt like my sabbatical really started last week. Everyone was back to work, except for me. I had a speaking engagement on Tuesday evening and still had to prepare part of it so the week started off in a productive mode. Cracking away on my backlog in email and newsfeed made the first week feel like a really productive one.
Feeling productive or ‘in the flow’ is an important factor in how I feel overall.
The challenge in week 2
No more deadlines, no email overload, in essence no more urgencies. Week 2 was of to a different start. And I still hadn’t set my sabbatical goals. So after a few ‘unproductive’ days Thursday was the day. I went through the process of setting my priorities for the coming months and selecting the activities I’m committing towards out of all the ideas I have for my sabbatical. On top of that, I deliberately uncommitted to some others, such as writing a book. My goals for my sabbatical can broadly be summarized in the following 7 categories:
- Develop and maintain a healthy & productive routine
- Develop myself creatively & share with the world
- Spend time with friends & family
- Travel
- Develop a smart passive income project
- Search for co-founders
- Commit to new vocational activities for the next decade
With that out of the way, nothing is holding me back to be productive again, right?
Wrong.
Friday and Saturday passed and I still not found myself executing on these goals. What is holding me back? A little soul searching let to (a first) answer. The goals I set require longer blocks of time to achieve anything meaningful or rewarding. Developing my designer skills is not something you achieve in the time you write an email, hold a conference call or have a meeting. It requires weeks of practice, sometimes even without feeling like you make progress. I simply can’t find the inner piece to do that (yet). I guess shifting away from the corporate urgency with short cycles of adrenaline shots for every meeting, email or call takes some time. Let’s see what week 3 will be like.
What I did
- Running: 25.4k
- Total weekly steps: 85k
- Average sleep: 7:25
- Set my goals
- Attended some very interesting sessions of the UX Pin Virtual Summit UX at scale
- Finished course on Mobile App Design: from sketches to interactive prototype
Thanks for reading!
Broos
Leave a Reply