Starting the journey...

These doodles are an attempt to record my experiences during this never before sabbatical that I am taking. How did this take shape? The blog, not the sabbatical. When I was talking about this sabbatical proposal with my writer friend of mine, Meenakshi, she suggested that I go ahead and record every bit of it and who knows, at the end of it, one might have something interesting developed there. Hmmm, it made immense sense, my sabbatical was the talk of my office and folks there still found it too incredible to believe. Soon I started hearing stories like I’m getting married and I’ve got this really super paying job now. Against it, my sabbatical story seemed to dwindle in the reality scale and people automatically began to reject it. Even outside of my office world, a sabbatical is not an infrequent phenomenon and always generates enough and more talking points.

Considering my day-to-day life has largely revolved around some structure that I’d manage to minutely plan, this time around, there is no plan. I use the word day-to-day deliberately, drawing close parallels to the penny wise, pound foolish phrase – not at all in the economic sense [there, I’m all foolish] but referring to life itself. I go with the flow and don’t strategize and fantasize about important milestones and their corresponding timelines. My skill level in handling ambiguity ranks pretty high and this helps me adapt to life’s ever changing and shifting sands. However, in everyday life which happens between the important milestones, my planning does fairly good justice to my programme and project management skills and life goes clock-work. People who interact with me during these times would consider me fanatical about planning things. Hence, the comparison to the pennies and pounds.

Anyway, this isn’t a thesis on my personality type, though substantial amount of work has been done in that region. To cut a long story short, this time I don’t have a plan – for the first time, there is no structure to focus my world around. And my walk just now on that long dwindling path of pennies and pounds was just an extension of my intention to take the time to smell the roses along life’s path, u’know, to linger around for sometime before getting to a destination or the root of the matter, in this case.

This recording of events would help give me some perspective on how things are transpiring. Writing things down would give me a sense of the road travelled so far. Not that I’m structuring my journey, but in a way, it’s like a quasi structure – so, I’m not looking ahead and planning things but I’m looking back to see if I’m liking whatever I’ve done so far. It might be directing the flow ahead to things I want to do, but all the same it’s not a tangible structure.

Having said that, I’m not cheating on the flow. It’s almost a fortnight since I’m on this sabbatical and I’ve not planned a single thing. I’ve had loads of fun, doing an interesting mélange of things. That was the free falling bit. Now, as I’m moving into the next phase, I’m introducing some tags around the flow. If I’ve managed to hook your attention amongst this waterfall of myriad thoughts and confusing cues and somehow you can understand what I mean, let’s get on with the flow, mate!

My Seven Year Itch or so…

I’m currently on a sabbatical from the corporate world. It’s been 7 days of a spreadsheet-sans-and-meeting-sans-world, especially relevant since I’ve been working for the last 7 years after passing out of b-school. I served my one month notice with Dell and during the entire time, several friends and colleagues have come over and tried to probe the reason for my sabbatical. While my reasons have undergone significant change through each version I narrated to someone, the spectrum extended from sheer whimsical to outrightly outrageous. I sure must have come across looney to several folks but who cares! On a more serious note, this is my attempt to remember the method behind this madness.

I’ve 2 theories to support this decision – one the more overt, in your face logic and the other, something that came to me in retrospect, after having decided to quit work. So for the first theory – the last seven years have been non-stop work, almost akin to being on a non-stop long distance flight. Ofcourse, there’s been the annual 10-day holidays and occasional weekend breaks and not so frequent national holidays but nothing really to break the monotony. Over the years, there has been a progressive decrease in the joy of working – sounds clichéd but the original thrill of taking on daunting and new tasks, the heady feeling of achievement and the justification of the sheer toil for the goal itself without any anticipation of reward have almost disappeared. I’ve changed companies, industries and roles, all in a bid to inject something into the experience – learning and excitement. Without much luck!

The former has happened in leaps and bounds and I’ve been blessed to have a good learning curve. But the latter is lately elusive. Through the years, I’ve clung to some advice that an old fresher friend gave me when I was experiencing the first signs of job dissatisfaction – “ there is no perfect job, the best job is one with the least dissatisfaction” – this motto of always looking on the bright side of life held me in good stead as long as I knew that the learning was happening. However, even that lerning, in the last year, had all but vanished inspite of a new role [yet again!]. It wasn’t that I was going through a burn-out but everyday more and more, I was beginning to feel like not going to work. I kept yearning to do all the things I could do, if I were not at work. Getting there was an ordeal and the looming 10-11 hours of work was a thought that instantly bored me [like instant noodles, the result was immediate in screwing my mood].

And then it struck me…I was displaying symptoms of the 7-year itch, albeit in a corporate scenario, one where the reasons that one originally set out with had long changed, if not completely disappeared…it was time to do what one does with a 7-year itch …take time off, revisit the reasons and find out what I really needed and wanted to do. I did some rough math, my finances could sustain me taking off for 3-4 months, did some quick objection handling to protests that family and friends would raise and did some deep thinking about my career stage and life cycle stage – and hey, it wasn’t like I was a pioneer in doing so, in going where no person has gone before. I’d always heard of folks abroad taking such breaks to travel and join NGO’s and study. I was beginning to hear of it amongst my IIM fraternity and others too. All in all, I realized I could afford such a break - in my life stage, career, finances and my structured life. I beat this decision to death with my family and friends that I’m sure they thought I really wouldn’t do it. And finally, I did it, I quit work. So there, the first theory explaining my sabbatical was the 7-year itch that I succumbed to, and I must add, delightfully.

Being the usual fence sitter that I am, I kept thinking about my decision, trying to see all sides, trying to again justify it to avoid any nuances of cognitive dissonance that I might later face. Keeping my analyst hat firmly on, I stumbled onto the second theory behind my sabbatical. My work in the last 7 years has been in the areas of strategy, product management and marketing, consumer behaviour, revenue, sales and recently operations. Basically, except for the operations stint, it has been in the consumer arena of understanding consumer needs and matching products to meet them - largely associated with creative work. My operations role in the last year was in the area of technical support, where the only avenues of being associated with creative work were designing and running contests / incentive plans, organizing events and being responsible for fun activities at work – all of which I was a part of. The scale was much smaller since it wasn’t an intrinsic part of my core Ops role as compared to that of my previous assignments.

My second theory revolves around balancing the left and right sides of the brain. My Ops role was focused on analysis, evaluating processes and implementing new programmes, apart from people management – largely left brain oriented. My sabbatical is a means to divert energies to the right side which has been hitherto rusty – a focus on activities using several senses would help balance me as an individual and avoid any effects of being lopsided. I see this time off being enriched spending time with family, travelling, learning a craft or a skill, doing yoga, de-stressing, introspecting and in many ways, rediscovering myself much like the chrysalis trying to move to the next level.

Using my 2 theory reasoning, my sabbatical is a 7-year itch as well as a chrysalis experience. Any more questions, people, I might find a third theory?