(upbeat music)
- Sabbatical is over, it's time to get back to work.
Welcome to a new blog, friends,
the first work blog for awhile.
If you missed it, I was off work for a month on sabbatical,
which is a benefit ConvertKit offers
when you've been at the company five years.
It was a wonderful time.
I uploaded a couple of blogs from my month off,
as well as did a bunch of streaming while I was off as well.
So I'll link in the description,
you can watch those if you care to.
But today, I am back to work,
and I wanted to blog today
and talk you through how I'm feeling about it
as the day progresses.
And the first thing that we're gonna do,
as well as drink this cold brew,
because it's really freakin' hot here today
is sign back in to Slack.
I signed out of work email and Slack completely
while I was off,
so that I wasn't ever tempted
or like distracted by things happening at work,
and it was great, 'cause I was really able to switch off.
Should we take bets right now
on how many notifications I'll have?
(heart beat pulses)
Oh, I feel my heart racing, yes, this is like signing in.
(mysterious music)
Okay, moment of truth.
Hm, seems like people did a good job
of not tagging me in things while I was out.
I did set my status to be that I was on sabbatical.
I am tagged in four threads.
Yeah, there's like a bunch of messages and channels
as well as a bunch of DMs.
Okay, but not as many as I was expecting, honestly.
I'm gonna look through the DMs, but for all other channels,
I am going to declare select bankruptcy
and assume that if they're important,
then they will come back to me somehow.
Okay, let's go read these messages.
(uptempo orchestral music)
Okay, I finished going through everything
that I think I need to bother to check in on, which is good.
That only took me about an hour,
mostly because I marked most things as unread,
but one thing I had done
to make things easier for myself upon coming back
is I scheduled this Slack message.
This was the doc that I had put together
with my instructions for the team while I was on leave
with who was responsible for what
and what to do about the things that,
and like delegating other tasks.
But yep, I set this message to automatically post,
so that people could add things into the doc,
and the team all did,
and I loved these (laughs) replies as well.
So that was a really great resource for me to have
to just like read some quick bullet points
from folks within that doc of the most important things,
like in in their view, that I should be aware of
as I came back.
My manager as well had scheduled a message
to be sent to me this morning,
filling me in on the high level things
from like a company perspective.
I have a couple of longer meetings scheduled for today.
Yeah, hour long catch ups with two of my team.
I've scheduled like a long catch up with everyone
for this week at some point to check in on them.
So before my first one of those,
I am going to go and eat some lunch.
Nora is also eating her lunch.
I don't know if you just heard that in the background.
Why are you like this?
She takes the food out of her bowl
and eats it from the floor.
Oh dear.
(upbeat jazzy music)
Well that was nice,
just spent two hours chatting to two of my team members.
The other two are actually off on a film shoot today.
I feel like I have forgotten all of the like regular stuff
that I do on a Monday.
It wasn't until I was on a call with David,
and he was talking about how he had attended
some of the state of the business meetings
for me while I was out, that I was like,
oh yeah, that's something that's on Mondays.
I've gotta go and gather all our metrics
and like fill in the agenda ahead of time for that.
People in the US are just sort of started
to come online now.
It's about 3:15 my time.
It's feeling like I never left to be honest.
Like, I don't know.
I feel like I've slipped right back into it.
I hope that I haven't slipped right back into
some of the unhealthy habits that I had around work.
We shall see tonight.
If I don't sign off at 7:00 pm or slightly before,
then we will have a problem.
(bass guitar music)
It is 5:00.
I'm noticing that I am struggling with focus,
so I just put my desk up, stand up for a little bit,
sometimes that helps.
It's like a little change of scenery.
(motor hums)
Last meeting of the day is done.
That was good.
State of the business, I think,
is really handy that it happens on a Monday,
and that was happening on my first day back,
'cause it was great to just get a quick overview
of what all the other teams in the company
are up to you right now and what the challenges are.
It is 6:40 now.
I could get started on something else.
I could get started preparing for review writing,
but I think I'm gonna call it for the day.
I think I'm gonna sign off, call it a win,
that I made it through,
that I kept focus through our meetings
and haven't felt too overwhelmed by everything.
I'm honestly feeling much more positive
about coming back to work after this work day
than I was at the start of it.
Being off was just so nice.
I didn't wanna start thinking about work again,
quite frankly, even though I love my job,
I love not working more.
But it's been nice to be reminded
of the good parts of my job.
I think 'cause I spent a month
feeling the stress of the job leave me
and like not wanting to return to that,
which is another reason why I should sign off now
instead of starting on something else.
But yeah, it's easier to focus on the negative again
and forget the parts that you genuinely do enjoy,
like talking to my team,
like the fun problems that I'm gonna get
to dig into and start solving,
once I get past review writing,
which honestly, I do enjoy as well.
I do enjoy giving feedback to my team.
That is my first day back from sabbatical.
I hope you enjoyed coming along with me for this day.
Tried to be very honest about my thoughts,
'cause quite frankly,
it is difficult to return after spending a month
spending my time however I wanted to,
to like give up some of that control again.
Luckily, I still work remote,
so I do still get to control a lot of my time.
Well, thanks for hanging out with me today,
and the cats say thank you as well.
I think one, yep.
There's Sam behind me right there.
It's dinner time now,
for all of us.
I will see you in the next blog.
Bye.
(upbeat music)