Today was my first day back at work after three months of paid leave1. I’d meant to write about the overall experience of my sabbatical and the things I gained from it before I returned, but I’m glad I didn’t because one of the lessons only crystallised this morning.
My typical work schedule sees me wake up some time before 06:30 so I can check my notifications, formulate my to-do list for the day, and so on, before the kids get up. Then I can focus on getting them full of breakfast, dressed, and to school, and when I come back to my desk I’ve already got my day planned-out. It’s always felt like a good way to bookend my day, and it leans into my “early bird” propensities2.
Over the last few years, I’ve made a habit of pulling out my phone and checking for any new work Slack conversations while on the way back after dropping the kids at school. By this point it’s about 08:45 which is approximately the time of day that all of my immediate teammates – who span five timezones – have all checked-in. This, of course, required that I was signed in to work Slack on my personal phone, but I’d come to legitimise this bit of undisciplined work/life-balance interaction by virtue of the fact that, for example, walking the dog home from the school run was “downtime” anyway. What harm could it do to start doing “work” things ten minutes early?
But walking the dog isn’t “downtime”. It’s personal time. When I’m looking at your phone and thinking about work I’m actively choosing not to be looking at the beautiful countryside that I’m fortunate enough to be able to enjoy each morning, and not to be thinking about… whatever I might like to be thinking about! By blurring my work/life-balance I’m curtailing my own freedom, and that’s bad for both my work and personal lives!
My colleague Kyle recently returned from six months of parental leave and shared some wisdom with me, which I’ll attempt to paraphrase here:
It takes some time at a new job before you learn all of the optimisations you might benefit from making to your life. This particular workflow. That particular notetaking strategy. By the time you’ve come up with the best answers for you, there’s too much inertia to overcome for you to meaningfully enact personal change.
Coming back from an extended period of leave provides the opportunity to “reboot” the way you work. You’re still informed by all of your previous experience, but you’re newly blessed with a clean slate within which to implement new frameworks.
He’s right. I’ve experienced this phenomenon when changing roles within an organisation, but there’s an even stronger opportunity, without parallel, to “reboot” your way of working when returning from a sabbatical. I’ve got several things I’d like to try on this second chapter at Automattic. But the first one is that I’m not connecting my personal phone to my work Slack account.
Footnotes
1 My employers’ sabbatical benefit is truly an epic perk.
2 Mysteriously, and without warning, at about the age of 30 I switched from being a “night owl” to being an “early bird”, becoming a fun piece of anecdotal evidence against the idea that a person’s preference is genetic or otherwise locked-in at or soon after birth. As I’ve put it since: “I’ve become one of those chirpy, energetic ‘morning people’ that I used to hate so much when I was younger.”.
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