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What I Accomplished During My Sabbatical

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

Taking a sabbatical has been one of the best decisions I have made for my business. I am already thinking about doing it again next year.

For those of you who don’t know, I recently took nearly six weeks off work, from mid-January to the end of February. I did this for two main reasons: I was feeling overwhelmed and a bit burned out from a very busy year in 2018. I also realized that I no longer had a clear vision for what I wanted to accomplish through my work. When I first started freelancing, my goal was to earn enough money to support myself, and for a few years that was enough to keep work challenging. Now that I have moved beyond the start-up phase, I found that simply being busy was not enough. I needed a new challenge to focus on.

So my goal during this sabbatical was to figure out what that new thing should be. 

I thought the answer was going to be writing, because I do enjoy writing and as my wife can probably attest, it is something I frequently talk about. It is really because of writing that I sought to work in publishing in the first place. 

But looking deeper, the reason I enjoy writing—and why I enjoy indexing and blogging and introducing people to each other—is because I enjoy connecting people to new ideas and information. I enjoy being the facilitator who enables other people to accomplish what they need. 

Part of this shift, for me, came from listening to the audiobook version of Authority, by Nathan Barry. The book is about making the mindset shift from being highly proficient in your particular skill to becoming a teacher of that skill. Part of me quails at the thought of calling myself an indexing expert, especially knowing indexers who have ten, twenty, or even thirty years of experience over me. Yet I also have to acknowledge that I am no longer a novice and that I do have experience and knowledge that I can share. 

So this is my first pivot. I will continue to index, and I also want to find opportunities to share the indexing knowledge that I have.

I actually did just that during my sabbatical, by writing an email course on indexing. The course provides an overview of the components of an index and the indexing process, from the initial pre-planning to the final edit, in seven lessons delivered over seven days. It took me five and a half days to write and publish the course, and I have to admit I had a blast doing so. If you are interested, you can check it out here.

Writing is still important, though. The shift for me was to realize that while I still want to publish fiction, I am also just as happy writing nonfiction. Writing is one of the ways that I can teach and facilitate, in a more direct way than indexing (though indexing is also in service to the reader, making the text accessible). This is my second pivot, to be intentional this year about making writing part of my business. The finer details of how this will happen still need to be worked out, but I have a few ideas for writing projects and have dedicated 9-10 every morning to writing, to make sure that words are produced. 

I did some other things during my sabbatical too. Besides a week away visiting friends, I still showed up at my office almost every day. In addition to what I have already mentioned, I spent time brainstorming and writing a two page vision document; read several books to help me reflect on my work; worked my way through the exercises in the writing book Story Genius, by Lisa Cron, to improve my fiction; established a new daily and weekly schedule; and I finally finished setting up investments for retirement, which is something I started a year ago and then let fall to the wayside. In a way, I used this time to try out and practice new habits and new forms of work, such as writing the email course. Without this time, I would have felt too stressed and squeezed to invest the time and effort. I also made sure that I spent evenings and weekends resting, which was sorely lacking before. 

Returning to this theme of vision and purpose, I think the biggest benefit from this sabbatical is that I do feel energized again about my work. If I had done nothing else, the sabbatical would have been worth it to have accomplished only this. I have a much clearer sense for what I want to accomplish in the remaining ten months of 2019, and most importantly, I am excited to get going.

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