Sabbatical Times, Part 3

This is part 3 of a series on sabbatical that I’m doing on the blog.

So it’s been almost full year since I last updated, and you can pretty much categorically attribute that absence to all the responsibilities I listed in my last post. To dive a little more into specifics, here we go:

Sabbatical Times, Part 2

This is part 2 of a series on sabbatical that I’m doing on the blog.

A neighbor’s prized purple hyacinth bean vine.

A sabbatical is supposed to be a period of deep rest—I typoed “rest” initially as “reset,” and yeah, that too—but it’s stayed pretty frenetic for me, especially at the beginning. This is due to the following factors, in equal-ish proportions:

Sabbatical Times, Part 1

A mind adapted over hundreds of thousands of years for the pursuit of singular goals, tackled one at a time, often with clear feedback about each activity’s success or failure, might struggle when faced instead with an in-box overflowing with messages connected to dozens of unrelated projects. We spent most of our history in the immediate-return economy of the hunter-gatherer. We shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves exhausted by the ambiguously rewarded hyper-parallelism that defines so much of contemporary knowledge work.

Cal Newport