Nathanael Yellis

Here's what I'm doing today: taking a walk. It's as pure as it sounds. Almost.

Earlier this year I read the fascinating little book by Jenny Odell How to Do Nothing: Resting the Attention Economy.

Since coming back from the time away, I've been noodling on some ideas. I think there might be two longer-form pieces in my drafts that will see the light of day, or at least the thin blue light of the internet. Writing them has been tough. It could be because I'm reading Raymond Carver and John Updike and they set a high bar, or, more charitably, that I'm trying to say something a little more complex than my usual. Either way, the drafts are beginning to linger.

I've just returned to the normal routine after a 30-day sabbatical from work. It was great to completely disconnect from my job: no Gmails, Slacks, or Zooms. For two weeks of the sabbatical, I kept my normal information habits: Gmail and podcasts and reading online. Not working opened up even more time for this sort of thing and my brain craved it. During our annual ski week, most of my morning checks of the snow conditions turned into email and news reading. At the halfway mark, my sabbatical brain felt and awful lot like my working brain. It was taking on slightly less information, but in the same methods and at the same pace.

For the last month, I've been on a sabbatical from work and have used the time to travel. We spent a week in Maine, skiing, about ten days in Tennessee and the Dominican Republic, and I managed a solo sojourn to Vermont for some skiing. My daily life is local: I can often manage a full week within a few hundred yards of my house; this series of journeys changes that pace!

Last week, I listening to a great book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer. I grabbed it from HubSpot's free books program because I thought it would help me calm down and, amidst my ongoing sabbatical from HubSpot, think about structures for keeping my work in its proper place. The title made it seem like the sort of book that would help me reconsider my constant racing to manage the calendar and inbox and my increasing work evenings.

History may not repeat, but it rhymes. It's not hard to see the echoes of the 1970s today: inflation, foreign wars, recalibrating political coalitions, one-term GOP presidents... there may be lessons to learn from what happened then to what might happen now.

This week has been a pretty busy one for me: I spent the week doing the normal consulting of my HubSpot customers and preparing my team to cover that work during my 30-day sabbatical, which starts today. It's part of the fairly cushy benefits you get when working for a software company: after five years of unlimited vacation, I'm granted a 30-day sabbatical.