Today was my last day of work and I
won’t be back until Monday 3 January. I knew this sabbatical was coming and had been planning for it for months. That’s both in terms of how to handle the hand-off of responsibilities and in terms of rough plans for the three months off itself.

It was nearly 16:00 and I found myself in this strange place of checking for final Slack messages. I signed out of my Happiness Engineer WordPress.com account so as to avoid work related notifications. I disabled apps on my laptop, removed others from the dock. I dithered. When my partner came in to celebrate the start of my sabbatical, I was so lost. Yes, this is great! But also surprisingly terrifying now that I stared the great unknown in the face.

So I organized a kitchen drawer. I usually only use the top pan in the drawer as everything was stacked. Thanks to an organizer, I found that we had seven (two not pictured) frying pans. This was immensely satisfying and let me focus on just one thing.

I aim going to go for 100 days of blogging. This sabbatical seems to be an excellent time to do things that I haven’t done before, so why not? Also, I’m writing this from the WordPress app on my phone, yet another first!