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It’s Thursday 17^th January as I write this and it’s four weeks into my sabbatical. This is volume three and each time I’ve done this since breaking up in 2015 it has changed and evolved and been different.

Next year it won’t be in the Winter either. At the present time it’s planned to be at the end of July and through August 2020, for reasons that will become apparent a little bit later.

It’s the worst kept secret why I’m working through my sabbatical but in the next few weeks or so I will be in a position to ‘burst open the piñata’ and spill it all out.

It is an extraordinarily different way to work though, when you remove much of your responsibility from day-to-day life and start again with a blank canvas, a bit like sacking yourself and starting again.

It’s a forest fire that leaves the earth bare and allows you to plant something different.

Yesterday I spent a full day with the Senior Leadership Team at The Campbell Clinic planning the strategy for the next three years of our business, breaking it down into years and goals and how we would all go about our different areas of work to try and make something like that vision come about.

It’s not possible to achieve days like that when your nose is to the grindstone all the time for years on end.

Today I knocked off some of my jobs on my project management tool (Asana) in the house, with my dog, after I’d done a 7:00 – 9:00am Academy meeting to plan what’s going on this year with The Campbell Academy (that was me and Tom together in the house and video linked to Andy in Manchester)

I have got space though to meet my friends and to give blood tomorrow afternoon. To ride my bike six days a week and do crazy meet ups with people planning crazy things that might otherwise never happen.

I have got time to collect my son from school.

This will be the last January that I ever collect any of my children from school as he will move to ‘big’ school in the Summer so I’m trying to make the most of that.

With two weeks or so left of this time off I need more space in the diary now. I am going to be reading the things I’ve been leaving, planning what I’m going to read for the rest of the year and making sure all my technology is sorted out for going back to work (the bits that were broken that I’ve just suffered and put up with) and make sure my diary is in some sort of shape all the way to December.

When you find your life is running so fast that you can’t put 15 minutes a day in to listen to ‘Headspace’ on your headphones to make yourself feel a little bit better, it really is time to stop and carve out a bit of space to reorganise things and take the heat off before you get back onto the hamster wheel again.

Blog Post Number: 1892