Today is the day that the project for the sabbatical started (or in the end perhaps not)
The plan is to take a month off, all contact severed, no social media, no contact with work, no decision making, turn my phone off an buy a cheap mobile to use that for communicating with my family. Do whatever I want (within family constraints) for the month I have no responsibility to the business or to patients.
The date provisionally is February 2017. All the technology is in existence with answerphones, out of office emails and a great team at the practice who know how to run this place and can probably run it better when i’m not here. It’s easy for anyone to do this, all you have to do is save a 12th of your money for a year to give you an additional four weeks off (you obviously have to be in an organisation which embraces that and if you’re not perhaps it’s time to move on)
I even had a conversation with one of my patients about it today and it turns out that in his University post he is given a semester every four years for a sabbatical which basically adds up to four – six months of time to do whatever he likes to improve himself as a person (there are some small constraints to demonstrate what you have done but it’s not a deal breaker) Following a long conversation with him about my plans for a sabbatical in 2017, his only criticism of the idea was that a month was “absolutely not long enough”. Perhaps we will try this in 2017 and go for three months in 2018.
It’s likely that the person who returns from the sabbatical will be very different to the person who went on it.
Blog Post Number: 838
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