Every five years, Automattic employees can take a three month sabbatical from work to get away from the computer and recharge. The idea is that it helps highlight areas where you as an individual have unwittingly become solely responsible for particular tasks, and allows you to come back with a refreshed perspective and enthusiasm. That’s my take on things anyway.

I have been employed by Automattic for well over five years at this point, and I sign off at the start of next week – having pushed the date back a bit to make sure the weather was a bit nicer (!).

Three months is a fair amount of time to fill, but it can easily end up being filled with nothing in particular if you don’t take the time to plan out what you want to do. For that reason, I’m posting this up with my aims for the next few months, so I can look back on it at the end of June and see whether I actually did any of the things I said I would.

So here it is. Over the sabbatical I want to:

1. Travel. I have a number of trips booked – from spending some time in Japan, to visiting my parents in Canada.
2. See more of Scotland. I have been all over Scotland, but there are still plenty of areas that I haven’t been. I don’t have any concrete plans yet, but I want to get to at least one or two different places – preferably further north than Inverness.
3. Make time for old friends. I have too many people that I haven’t seen in ages, and I want to change that. I’ve booked a long weekend to visit some folks down south in May to start with.
4. Get better at guitar. Despite having played guitar for about 18 years, I am nowhere near as proficient as I should be. Rather than learn other people’s songs, I always just wrote my own, and my skills have suffered a bit as a result. I’ve bought some official tab books from bands I like, and want to use them to get much more proficient. The way I will test whether I’ve done this will be whether or not I can confidently play a significant number of songs from those books that I couldn’t play before.
5. Write and record music. I have a few musical projects on the go at the moment, and not enough time to really sit down to write and record. I want to make use of the time I have, and release at least one album by the end of June.
6. Finish and submit another journal article. I have been working on a second journal article for a while, but not found the time to finish it. I want to do so, and submit it for publication.
7. Read more. Specifically, I want to take the time to finish and enjoy a pile of books that have been building up. I’m keeping a list of them all to see how many I get through.
8. Go to the gym regularly. I already go to the gym at least once a week, but it’s too easy to find excuses when you are busy working. I want that to change.
9. Take more photos. I haven’t been taking many pictures over the past few months, and I want to get back into the habit. Specifically, shooting and developing a bunch of film.
10. Tidy up. This is a boring one, but I want to get some things in order. Marie Kondo style.

so that’s it: my ten aims, out there for posterity if not accountability. Looking over it now, it’s probably too much to pack in to what I am sure will be a few months that fly by – but it’s good to aim high. I’ll report back once the sabbatical is over and see how I got on.