July 2021 Mini Sabbatical
Finding or making the time
This summer, I decided to burn a few vacation days for personal and professional improvements, a small scale sabbatical. I wanted to find fun again in what I do, whether it be Russian language / history academic pursuits (I have a Russian Technical Translation background - degree, experience), my security / dev / devops / database pursuits or just finding the magic in my mindspace with writing, coding, games and finding my open mind again. I've been fortunate to be busy during and even before the pandemic lockdowns in March 2020. I have had a steady queue of work and client requests, but I wanted to carve out a few days for some personal controlled entropy.
Finding time for my tasks to work on other people's tasks as a motivator
Even in a normal time, it's difficult for me to find this time unencumbered by "other people's" tasks, after all they pay for my every day and my family's well being. My wife calls me an "action potential" person - an "A" personality when it comes to a singular focus. On the clock, that is delivering quality and delivering on time (come hell or high water) for my client. That requires sacrificing some things that I want to do for things I need to do. So for this next week, I'm going to use my "action potentiality" for a few personal projects.
Rough schedule:
- Planning, rough ideas in the beginning of the week
- Design an app
- Focus on a tech
- Write some fiction
- Catch up on my specializations - Russian, Security, Disaster Recovery, Architecture
- Quick post on my weight loss (dropped 30 lbs in 2 months, survived vacation and still hanging in there)
- Write something about the family
- Write something about my extra curriculars
- Complete an app
- Retrospective and plan for next sabbatical
Miscellany
My internet browsing for "mini sabbatical" led to a few articles by Sean McCabe,
A few poignant articles led me to read over the body of his work at SeanWes.
Blog posts will be forthcoming ...