My sabbaticals ru en

My friends and readers know that I often take sabbaticals.

How often? Formally, all my periods of working for other people for money are separated by periods around two years long of "working" "for myself" "for free" — the number of quotes may vary. Except for the first two times, when I jumped straight from Itransition to Wargaming right after university. However, the first year and a half at Wargaming was exactly what my soul craved, for which I thank all my former colleagues — a kind of paid sabbatical :-D but we won't count that period.

Based on this information, one can hypothesize a lot about me, for example, that I'm loaded with money (I'm not), that I'm lazy (I hope not), or that I'm incredibly lucky (I don't think so). I can only imagine what my relatives and parents think about all of this. By the end of the first sabbatical, I could clearly see sadness and hopelessness on their faces, but by the third time, they seemed to have gotten used to it or resigned themselves — who knows. In any case, thanks mom and dad for their support and understanding.

People periodically ask me why I spend time on these adventures, what I do during them, where I get the money from, and so on.

Let's talk about it.

What is a sabbatical?

For residents of the post-Soviet space, a sabbatical is a wild, unfamiliar concept.

The average resident of Belarus, Ukraine, Russia (and any other post-Soviet country) has only heard that poets or artists sometimes go on something called a "creative vacation", often resembling a drinking binge.

For Western civilization, "sabbatical" is a much more common and understandable concept, deeply rooted in culture.

This distinction is a topic for a separate post. Personally, I understand the difference in this way: if you strive to survive, you don't have time for vacations. Moreover, there's no time to establish them in culture. In my opinion, the concept of a sabbatical highlights the real difference in the standard of living and freedom much more clearly than economic indicators.

So, for myself, I use an extensive definition:

A sabbatical is a period when a person prioritizes their time and efforts to improve themselves and their surroundings.

As opposed to regular work or formal study, where you spend yourself meeting external KPIs.

Let's point our attention to some consequences of this definition:

1. Money is orthogonal to this concept. Nothing prevents you from earning money during a sabbatical. The difference is more about whether earning money is the primary goal of your activity (as outside of a sabbatical) or a side effect of your sabbatical activities.
2. A sabbatical may not include rest. For example, during my sabbaticals, I can code for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.

That's why I see some startup activities, like developing auteur games or trying to monetize own software, as a sabbatical.

My sabbaticals

There is no sense in listing all my sabbatical activities — you can read about them in the blog, but I will still briefly list sabbaticals themselves.

1. 2012-2015 — development of the text MMO The Tale. The game is stopped, the lore is available under an open license, you can check out the concept document of the game [ru] or listen to the postmortem podcast.
2. 2019-2021 — the sabbatical was focused on improving my thinking methods and polishing my worldview — detailed report [ru].
3. 2024-… — the current sabbatical is dedicated to working on pet projects and improving management theory. See the 2024 report and all my posts for 2024-2025.

Besides, I practice annual report posts, so you can track everything I did in any year since 2020.

My first sabbatical was not a conscious decision (in the sense "I'm taking a sabbatical now"), but a particular endeavor to develop a particular game. However, even then, there was some additional motivation in the spirit of "I need to test myself" and "I need to experiment with ideas that I can't try at work".

The second one was taken consciously, but I wasn't sure if it was the right decision. During it, I realized that sabbaticals suit me, and I want to continue practicing them.

Now, I'm finishing my third sabbatical, which I entered with a complete understanding of what I'm doing and why.

Why I take sabbaticals

I won't try to advise you whether to take sabbaticals or not — it's a very personal decision that depends on your specific context and how you see your future.

However, I can tell you why I do this.

I’ll break the explanation into two parts: first, I’ll sketch the basic "theory" of how I function, and then I’ll give a concrete list of my reasons for taking sabbaticals.

How Tiendil distributes his time

I’m wired so that I can handle only two big "projects" a day. For example, I can work for money during the day and read complex books in the evening. Or work for money during the day and dedicate the evening to personal projects.

If I concentrate really hard, I can break my life into three big tracks: two during the workdays (day and evening) and one on weekends.

That’s my limit. I can't work on four big things for a long time with the level of dedication that I usually have.

When it really matters, I can overdose on caffeine and work in super mode for 1-2 months, but the consequences will be sad, and with age, they become worse and worse. Additionally, the super mode is often necessary for correcting planning mistakes on one of the main tracks.

For better or worse, I have more than three interests — you can notice it even by the list of tags on the main page of the blog.

Of course, it's impossible to do everything at once. Therefore, evolutionarily, my interests have consolidated into the following tracks:

• Paid work — this is what I do for money.
• Personal projects — I always have one or two active projects. For example, currently, I'm working on Feeds Fun and prototyping a game while learning Rust and Godot.
• Self-education — this includes a lot of things, but mainly it’s reading technical and popular science literature, plus blogging.

Have I forgotten anything?..

Well, of course, I have a wife (!) — my beloved person, who must be prioritized above all these tracks. Usually, I manage to do this, but there is always room for improvement.

Moreover, I'm a human being, not a robot. I love watching TV series, playing games, traveling — all that stuff. Sometimes, you need rest to bring your psyche back in order.

Typically, a single track is dedicated to a single project. Having multiple projects on one track is difficult — most of what I do is rather long-term stuff, and if I split my attention, nothing will be finished. If I rotate projects, I usually do it with less-priority projects that are not urgent and don't require constant attention.

I can’t give up my personal projects or my self-learning — I kinda need them. Without those things, I will feel, mmm… not boredom but a kind of emotional pain, especially without pet projects.

I envy — in the best possible way — people whose work perfectly matches their professional interests. Finding a well-paid job related to, say, genetic algorithms or developing experimental MMORPGs is quite difficult :-D So I usually work in an interesting but not ideal job. For example, writing backend for mobile games.

Since in a standard mode, I can only maintain two tracks (and my wife!), and I love to eat, the tracks are paid work and personal projects. Self-education suffers because I don't have the energy to seriously learn something after work. Again, this is my peculiarity: I can easily generate ideas or code for 12 hours a day, but modifying my brain with something complex can only be done for about four hours when I'm fresh. I read documentation with pleasure, but reading something like Scale [ru] requires me to set aside time specifically for it.

On what exactly Tiendil lacks time

Because at least one track is always idle, a sort of technical debt builds up. But this debt is not in code, but in, mmm… self-improvement.

Here is how it manifests.

Sketchy ideas accumulate that you can't test at work due to your responsibility to your employer. Some approaches, architectures, and technologies are not right to test for someone else's money, but it's fine to test in your own projects, after which successful cases can be brought to work.

Project ideas pile up that would be fun to realise. For some time, I dumped some of them into concept documents for games, but that only works for games and only if it is enough to just toy with the idea without implementing it.

Books also accumulate. In my case, these are often popular science books related to thinking, evolution, or, as in this sabbatical, a collection of books on management. Since I prefer physical books with hard covers, they accumulate quite literary — in the form of a stack in one of the corners.

Let us not forget about the accumulation of work experience that needs to be processed and digested: gathered together, broken down into parts through analysis, synthesized into a form convenient for your brain, and stored back inside. Preferably, all this should be done through writing a blog post. Doing this in parallel with work is challenging, although it must be done.

To rethink your experience well, you need to put yourself outside the system in which you gained this experience — to look at everything from the side. When you're inside the system, within the workflow, it's challenging to do this — it's possible to analyze specific situations but not to reflect on a few years of work. To reflect on, for example, the course of a project, you need to pull yourself out of the context.

That's why, as I understand it, people often take shorter sabbaticals without changing jobs. Sabbaticals for two years with resignation are more caused by how life carries me than by any special practice I follow.

Besides the accumulation of such debt, sometimes life brings tasks that are simply more comfortable to complete without obligations to spend 8 hours a day at work.

For example, during the second sabbatical, my wife and I bought an apartment, sold it back (yep, unlucky we) and moved to Poland. At the beginning of the third sabbatical, I moved to my wife in Germany, where I was busy setting up our household — it took a year to close all the tasks related to the move (yes, we have a family project in Jira). Could I have done this while continuing to work? — Of course. Would the salary compensate for the loss of nerves and health? Not sure.

How to plan a sabbatical

A sabbatical is neither a vacation nor a sick leave.

If you, God forbid, are burned out at work — take the vacation you are entitled to and rest. Or take a sick leave if it's possible in your country.

If you have a midlife crisis, maybe you need a sabbatical to rethink your life; however, perhaps you just need to take your bank card and buy a motorcycle, continuing to live as usual.

For a productive sabbatical, you need to:

• Have a list of goals you want to achieve.
• Resolve questions with your employer somehow.
• Secure the money.

Let's walk through each point. Please remember, these are my thoughts based on my experience. You are not me; your situation may be different.

Goals of a sabbatical

Theoretically, one can go on a sabbatical without clear goals, hoping to formulate them in the process. Most likely, young people do just that when they take a gap year. Or the goal can be as simple as "understand what the hell is going on in my life", which is the same thing as no goals.

I don't share this approach — even as a teenager, I was a pretty conscious young person — I could always say what I would be interested in doing if I had more time.

Suppose you, like me, practice metacognition (strange that I still don't have a post on this topic) — monitor your thoughts, analyze them, track your interests. In that case, you’ll soon find yourself with an ever-growing backlog of things left undone and unexamined.

Part of such a backlog can manifest in a fairly physical form, such as a half-meter stack of books in the corner of the room.

So, if you constantly have such a list in your head, it will irritate you, sometimes even piss you off — I'm sure of it.

When you catch yourself thinking that the irritation is too intense, you have two options:

• Either forcefully clear the backlog — firmly decide "I will never do this and that";
• Or go on a sabbatical and try to complete the backlog.

If you chose the second option, then this list is your set of goals for the sabbatical. We'll talk about prioritizing it later.

Resolving questions with your employer

Generally speaking, a sabbatical does not require resignation — especially in the academic environment, where it may even be expected of you.

Outside of academia, it may be harder to take a sabbatical without resigning, but remember that finding and training a new competent employee is a long and expensive process, so a good employer will have the motivation to let you go for a while if they are confident in your value. If they are not confident, then the trick won't work.

In my case, I always timed my sabbaticals with resignations — it's just more convenient. I haven't found a company yet where I would like to work until retirement, and leaving for a long time in the middle of a project is not very polite for your company and colleagues.

Also, the cycle "work — sabbatical — work — ..." looks quite convenient and logical for me.

I've left jobs for different reasons, but the approach is roughly the same: you bring the current stage of the project to a logical conclusion when you become less needed, and thus, your departure won't hit your colleagues too hard. Then you slip out politely.

Of course, all these plans can be heavily influenced by financial circumstances, such as the timing of bonuses, agreements on stock options, etc.

The financial side

Honestly, I don't know what to write here.

You need money, so you should earn it somehow :-D

Simplifying, you need to know how much money you spend on average per month and how long you plan to be on sabbatical — from this, the minimum budget logically follows. It's better to double it — just in case of force majeure.

However, as I mentioned, a sabbatical is not an obstacle to earning money. For example, during my first sabbatical, I partially lived from the income from the game.

Additionally, during my first sabbatical, I moved back to my parents' house, which helped me save a significant amount of money.

So, everything depends on you and your lifestyle.

My style, let's say, is modest: I’m not into clubbing, cars, designer clothes, or any of that. So, my money has a tendency to grow — even during university, I didn't spend much, and working in IT accelerated this. But this is in the context of Belarus, where being an IT specialist gives some advantages; in Europe, it's just a job.

So, I would say, to be able to go on long sabbaticals, you need to be a seasoned professional who earns decent money. And don't spend it all on cocaine.

It's easier when you're a single loner. After meeting my wife, expenses increased, but they are still manageable :-D We could say that relocations hit our budget harder than sabbaticals.

Also, I want to note that when you take sabbaticals regularly, your financial situation will be completely different each time. Firstly, you grow as a specialist, secondly, you accumulate obligations, and thirdly, have you seen what's happening around?!

That's why there are no secrets here, just pure improvisation.

Planning a sabbatical

Everything is simple here:

• You have a list of goals you want to achieve.
• You have a budget that you can't exceed.

So, you sit down and think about what goals you can achieve within the time you can buy with your money. Make sure not to take on unachievable ones.

Here are some nuances.

Firstly, you don't have to plan everything precisely. It's much more critical to regularly synchronize your plans with reality [ru]. If you notice that you're falling behind, drop some of your plans; if you have free time, add something. It's not fatal even to completely replan your sabbatical in the middle if your worldview has changed.

Secondly, the planning doesn't have to be, mmm… business-like. It's unlikely that you have some strict deadlines for releasing a product called "Make Yourself Better".

How I do it:

• Choose books I want to read and sort them by priority. I read them sequentially from the top of the list stack until the end of the sabbatical.
• Choose 1-2 projects that I really want to work on, and adjust their scopes to fit the remaining time so I can produce something finished.
• Add various mandatory tasks, such as "furnish the apartment" or "go on vacation" — these tasks usually have soft deadlines and automatically arrange themselves in chronological order.
• Choose a group of small tasks that I would like to do but can skip if I don't have time. For example, try a new programming language, play a game, improve my understanding of neural networks, etc. I work on them, literally, based on my mood, sometimes as a distraction from larger projects.

So, I work on mundane tasks, spend most of my time on primary projects, and read books when my mood and time allow it — that's how time passes.

Thirdly, don't burn out! It's easier to understand for remote workers and freelancers, but people without experience in remote work may find it harder to grasp.

You have no formal weekends and working hours during a sabbatical — it's very easy to start working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and only notice it when you burn out. Remember, you're not a machine — your body and mind also need rest, even if you're doing what you like.

Fourthly, don't waste your time. It is the opposite of the previous point, but amusingly, they often go hand in hand. It's easy to burn out and gradually start working less and less while not resting properly in your free time. In the end, you'll just waste your time without achieving anything.

Benefits of regular sabbaticals

Again, I cannot guarantee that you will achieve the same results as I did. I will list the benefits based solely on my experience and understanding.

A handy learning loop emerges: practice->theory->practice->… On the paid job, you develop your practical skills until they outgrow your theoretical understanding of the area; during a sabbatical, you catch up on theory until it pulls ahead of your practical skills, then you jump back into practice again.

Moving in this loop, you steadily and quickly grow as a professional. Of course, you can struggle through and catch up on theory while working, but you simply won't have the time and energy to do it properly.

You get a unique experience. You work on your own projects, test things you wouldn't test at paid work, read books you wouldn't read otherwise. The experience you gain strengthens your hand when job-hunting, negotiating salary, or backing up your ideas.

For example, I have experience in the full cycle of MMO game development, from concept to decommissioning. Thanks to this, I find it easier to understand people of various professions and roles both in game development and in software development in general: from QA to product managers and community managers.

I also have a deep understanding of metaprogramming in Python, thanks to several niche experimental projects I've worked on. This allows me to quickly implement more flexible and reliable solutions.

Or, for instance, I made several big architectural mistakes while developing "The Tale," trying to implement my "brilliant" ideas, which I will never repeat in a paid job.

And let's not mention the many smaller things I learned along the way.

You declutter your mind. — you get rid of the constant irritation and disappointment from unfinished tasks, half-formed thoughts, and so on. It really feels like a weight is lifted off your shoulders, especially when combined with thinking through writing practice.

Of course, if you have such a problem. I'm not sure if it's a common thing; perhaps it's just my personal quirk.

You finish necessary tasks at a comfortable pace. For example, you don't rush to view apartments at night after a 10-hour workday fixing a bug that cost the employer 100…0 money, but calmly meet with realtors during the day, with the ability to think and ask the right questions.

You strengthen your psyche. Modern culture places a person in a hamster wheel, pushing them to sweat it out without regard for mental stability and health. A sabbatical is an opportunity to step out of it, take a breath, and fine-tune the parameters of the wheel for the next run.

Growth in income. I have returned from sabbaticals with a several-fold increase in income. This is due to rethinking my experience, understanding what I want and what I can do. But this is not guaranteed. So far, there are only two control points, but if I achieve a third multiple increase, then we can talk about a pattern and a success story.

Disadvantages of sabbaticals

They eat money — an inevitable evil that comes in two forms.

First, you burn through your financial cushion.

Second, you don't earn money. You lose not only the money you spent but also the money you could have earned — this can be a significant amount.

I’m wagering that my pay will multiply after each sabbatical; so far, the bet has paid off. If global upheavals and constant relocations hadn’t got in the way, I’d call it a clear-cut win.

However, what works for me in my situation might not work for you in yours. There’s also no proof that plain old job-hopping would have grown my salary less. It is possible that I would have been making more money, but I would be sad, with dark circles under my eyes and smelling of booze. Or not, no one knows.

Lack of understanding from people around. Especially from relatives, of course. In the post-Soviet space, a long period without work is not exactly the norm; it is considered shameful, scary, and just incomprehensible.

In my case, I am on self-support from the university while helping my parents, so there are no levers of influence on me, which is why we don't discuss these adventures much, but sometimes I can see the concern in their eyes :-)

Gaps in the resume. You will need to explain what you were doing during the sabbatical and why you chose to do it. If you don't have a good answer, it can be a red flag for potential employers.

I'm not sure if modern automated resume filters can properly assess such a situation — you might end up in big trouble if you're aiming for big companies.

Temporary decrease in some work skills. Since a sabbatical implies a change of activity, some standard work skills will remain unused for a long time. After returning to regular work, they will recover fairly quickly, but it may be harder to find a job and in the first months of it.

In my case, for example, my communication skills suffer because I work independently and communicate with people less frequently. If, for example, you decide to spend a year attending conferences, your communication skills will likely improve, but some more practical skills, such as coding, may suffer.

Conclusion

How one of the well-known characters says — "That is my nindō! My ninja way!".

I like this path, and I recommend it to you, but I won't take responsibility for the consequences :-)