One of the incredible benefits of working at Automattic is sabbaticals. After five years at the company, you’re able to take up to three months off, fully paid.

Once you return from sabbatical, you’re eligible for another one five years later.

Although, I’ve been with the company for about six-and-a-half years, I didn’t take my sabbatical when I was first eligible. Instead, I took parental leave for the birth of Caleb — another one of the many excellent benefits of working at Automattic.

But now, I have my sabbatical planned and will be taking time off starting at the beginning of July and lasting until the end of September.

My wife, Becky, is a teacher and has each summer off. It’ll be nice to have a little over two months away from work where the whole family can have more time together.

We have a little bit planned — most notably a road trip to visit family. But much of the time will just be spent enjoying each others’ company and working on various projects around the house. Nothing major, just a lot of little things.

I do have a plan for keeping a somewhat regular schedule, though, to prevent my return to work in October from feeling too jarring.

Each weekday morning, I plan to spend three hours in our home office or garage learning, writing, and building — spending about an hour on each.

Thinking a bit about each of those individually:

• Learning — Prior to taking the position at Automattic, I regularly spent a handful of hours each week learning skills through Treehouse. At least at the outset of my sabbatical, restarting my Treehouse account is high on the priority list. I think I’ll probably try to learn a little JavaScript, but I’m open to adjusting that if I have any ideas for projects that would require a different programming language.
• Writing — In recent years I had a structure in my head for how often I wanted to publish each month. I stuck to it pretty well up until the beginning of this year where I sort-of fell off the bandwagon. I’m hoping to correct that during my sabbatical with consistent, dedicated time for writing. Much of it will end up here on Initial Charge, but I’m sure a lot of it will end up in Day One or elsewhere.
• Building — This is the area that may be most exciting to me. If only because it’s fairly open ended and may take the form of physical objects or web projects. The only thing I know for sure is that I’m going to start out by building a workbench for the basement/garage area. We had an old one that was left here by the previous owner when we bought the house and it was in pretty rough shape. We have since gotten rid of it, but nothing has replaced it as of yet. That will change shortly after I start my sabbatical.

I feel incredibly blessed that I work for a company that offers this benefit and I’m excited to finally take advantage of it. Spending time with family, fully disconnecting from day-to-day work, and carving out some room for self-improvement along the way will undoubtedly reap rewards long-term.