I’m sitting here writing this post, with a few days left in my 3 month Sabbatical. One of the great perks of working for Automattic is that every 5 years I have the opportunity to take a 2-3 month fully paid time away from my regular work with no expectations beyond disconnecting from work. It is a blessed, and very kind, gift.

I’m fully aware that I’m already fortunate to live and work in a job that pays well for the needs of me and my family – affording some “wants” too – and live in a part of the world that experiences relative peace and comfort. So it isn’t lost on me that being able to walk away from my day to day work and spend time on other interests, without worrying about those other things is an incredible luxury.

The gift, is time.

I think a pretty common insight shared by humans as they age is that the most precious resource we have is the one we have no ability to harvest. Time is stoicly finite. It also seems to move relatively faster, the older we get. Which is why, I’m so grateful to a company that values their employees enough to give them this gift of time.

Here’s a few highlights of what I did with this gift over the last three months

Explored Nova Scotia with my wife

Built some shelves and completed some re-organization that had been waiting to get done for a while

Read books (although didn’t read as much as I thought I would)

Finished volume 2 of The Great Mental Models (Farnam St). I’m currently almost done “Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track” but haven’t put much time into book reading the last couple months.

Played video games

A short list in no particular order, and some I only played a bit of:

• Techtonica
• Starfield (Shattered Space expansion)
• MechWarrior 5 Clans
• Call of Duty – Black Ops 6
• Train Sim World 5
• No Mans Sky
• Fabledom
• Bulwark Evolution: Falconeer Chronicles
• Forklift Simulator
• Ship Graveyard Simulator 2
• Star Wars Outlaws
• The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
• Star Trucker

Lots of Walks

Feeling really blessed to live in such a beautiful part of the world. Here’s a pic I took last week (no filters!):

Changing up my office

I wanted to freshen up my work environment for when I came back to work. I’m really happy with the results!

Switched from Evernote to Notion

I’ve been a long time user of Evernote but ever since it got acquired by private equity a few years back it’s continued the long decline in usability and trust (I swear notes I created disappeared and OCR search has degraded to uselessness). I’ve dallied with a bunch of different note-type Apps over the years but prior to my Sabbatical had been playing more with Notion and decided to make the switch while I had time. So far I’m loving it and have all my personal records moved over and also setup a new process for managing my work life that I’m looking forward to digging into. I might write something about this in a future post.

New theme for my website

I’ve wanted to get unfoldingneurons.com onto a block theme for a while and normally I’d just save time and find something I like already out there and then tweak it. However, I decided that since I had this time it’d be a good opportunity to create a theme from scratch. I haven’t done this for over 10 years and it was really great diving in more viscerally into the site building process at a macro level again. The result, of course, is very niche to me and I still have a todo list of tweaks I want to make.

Getting a new phone and new vehicle

The car was a bit of a spontaneous thing. Our 8 year old Hyundai Sante Fe was starting to cost more for maintenance and we knew we’d be in the market for a vehicle in the coming year but in the span of a week my wife and I bit the bullet and ended up with a really nice Kia Telluride (love it).

Also decided to upgrade to the iPhone 16 Pro. Apple Intelligence suckered me in for the buy.

Family Events

Besides various visits with family and spur of the moment things, my oldest son got married! Might be a grandad next year 😱😱

My oldest daughter graduated from Uni

Also, sadly, my Uncle Don passed away. I’m glad I got a chance to say good bye, he was well loved.

Lots of yard work

I would have done yard work regardless, but the Sabbatical afforded me the time to just go out and putter around outside when I wanted instead of trying to fit it in. It was nice being able to take care of a few outside things needing fixed or cleaned around the house and I also did some trimming of trees at my mom’s house.

There are a few things I also had in my list of things I thought I’d do – but didn’t get to:

• Update WP.data series – gosh I really thought I’d get to this!
• Learn a new programming language. I was going to look into Swift – and try some mobile development). I got as far as reading through the docs lol and then something else distracted me.
• Deep dive into ML/AI – despite not doing a deep dive, a lot of my online reading (and watching vids) has revolved around this topic. I’m still kind of bearish on the short term immediate impact of AI. Nevertheless, I do believe we’re at the beginning of a shift in human history. The next decade is going to be wild.

I actually ended up not going on my computer hardly at all in the past three months – which is an oddity for me. For the past 20+ years there’s been barely a day that has gone by where I haven’t wrote code, reviewed code, or read about code. Shocker (and needed). I didn’t realize how much I had connected my identity to my routine and this sabbatical was a good reminder to break out of the routine more frequently.

Thanks Automattic for this gift! Look out, I’m coming back.