2025 Goals Series: Craft a Summer Sabbatical

2025 Goals, Continued

WORK Category, Goal #3: Treat summer like something different — craft a summer sabbatical of sorts!

One of the major positive aspects of having one career that is flexible and self-directed is that I can choose to have busier seasons and slower seasons. Truthfully, I usually feel ready for a lower-productivity phase come summer, and I’d like to formalize that by really leaving more blank space on the calendar during those months — specifically June and July.

Last summer, I spent some of that time drafting my book proposal, and obviously that paid off! But this summer I should be entirely done with my manuscript but also not quite at the phase of book promotion. Instead of trying to launch straight into the next thing, I’d like to treat that time a bit differently, spending more time in contemplation and thinking carefully of next steps rather than just continually moving forward. I’ll obviously still be podcasting and I am not ruling out running some kind of course during that period, but I really don’t want to feel busy. It might also be a fun time to experiment with some fiction writing just to see how it feels (really for fun / creative exercise more than anything else) – perhaps a casual summer version of NaNoWriMo.

There isn’t much to do for this goal for a while other than NOT put a bunch of stuff on the calendar, and to avoid committing to some big project that would require a lot of summer work!

(Side note: my clinical work won’t pause, but thankfully I do not have any call weeks in June or July next year!)

If I had to periodize my creative career over the seasons, I’d love it to look something like this:

Q1: Some teaching, lots of brainstorming of content to come, big picture business planning. More work on big project (whatever that happens to be in any given year!).

Q2: Lots of execution – speaking, courses, etc. Push + wrap up work on big project.

Q3: Down season – ideally done with big project for that year! Think about next steps, practice creativity without concrete goals, connect with others, recover

Q4: More teaching, embracing “new academic year” energy, start new big project with ideas generated over the summer

Q5: Lots of person-facing work as everyone is excited about planning this time of year! Courses, guest spots, etc. Probably not a ton of time for big projects, but that will pick back up in Q1. End with a ~2-3 week period of relaxation/family time.

Obviously this kind of periodization is not always going to be realistic, as I can’t always control which opportunities come up and when! But it’s nice to have an idea of what would be an ideal rhythm to aim for.

Snippet from time tracking sheet (from Monday + Tuesday)

As much as I still prefer paper, experimenting with Kae‘s sheet has been fun so far! Adding some color definitely somewhat negates the fact that doing this digitally just somehow doesn’t feel as satisfying (this is a me thing; this is highly individual, I know!).

She has an “accomplish” category, plus happy / gratitude / bummer. Yesterday’s bummer gave me a mild heart attack:

I was leading my very last BLP at Home session for the year, and about 90 minutes into the two hour session my internet suddenly dropped! I basically panicked, thinking perhaps it was my router but when toggling that off and on didn’t work, thankfully it occurred to me that I could use a phone-based hotspot, and that saved the day!

I think I was off for something like 5-7 minutes (using data, I put a panicked “my internet stopped, I’m coming back!” message on WhatsApp for the group and assume someone shared that) and it was super stressful because these participants paid for a relaxing and peaceful planning experience and not amateur-hour internet connectivity issues! I have never had random mid-day connectivity issues ever before (during a massive thunderstorm, sure; otherwise, no!) so it wasn’t even something that was on my radar!

It turns out our entire community had an outage and it wasn’t restored for hours. OMG was that stressful!! I ended up letting the group know I will be holding a (free) midyear check-in session to make up for any inconvenience/mid-session stress, and I think that made everyone feel okay about it all. But wow. Next time I’d be quicker to resume via hotspot — now I know!

It took me over 2 hours to fully recover from this stress (I can tell from my time tracking sheet!) and I know the afternoon wasn’t as productive as it would have been without the outage, but eventually I did and now it seems like less of a big deal. I still hope it never happens again!