30 Sep 2018 What I did on my summer vacation

Health & Fitness

Re­cov­er­ing and get­ting healthy again was my top goal.

I pri­or­it­ized sleep, which is much, much easi­er to do when you don’t have to wake up around 5am to com­mute in­to Cam­bridge.

In the first few weeks after leav­ing work, I prob­ably slept 10 hours a day… per­haps 12 in­clud­ing naps. At first, I still woke up at 3 or 4am in a cold sweat, like I’d been do­ing for the last year, but that gradu­ally faded. Then I’d fall back asleep and wake up in mid-morn­ing. It was amaz­ing. Wak­ing up happy and re­laxed was the cra­zi­est feel­ing.

I went to the gym three to four times a week, work­ing with a per­son­al train­er to de­vel­op sev­er­al workout routines that would con­tin­ue to re­build my back and core after sur­gery.

I re­worked my diet, cut­ting back on caf­feine and con­veni­ent-at-work foods, do­ing what I knew should have been do­ing at work but didn’t have the en­ergy to do.

There was a list of med­ic­al stuff I hadn’t got­ten to enough lately… checkups, fol­low-ups, grow­ing-old things… I did them all.

I slowly in­creased my cyc­ling volume, work­ing my way up to 3-4 rides a week, with a lim­it of about 3 hours on the bike at a time. I still haven’t hit a 100-mile ride yet, but that will come.

Res­ults: I star­ted laugh­ing again. My blood pres­sure dropped from “high” to “really good”. My rest­ing heart rate re­turned from the 60s back to the high 40s. My cho­les­ter­ol dropped from “too high” in­to “be­low av­er­age”. My av­er­age sleep sta­bil­ized around 8 hours a night with zero wake-ups. I lost about 15 pounds. Ac­cord­ing to my dent­ist, even my gums got health­i­er.

Reconnecting

I spent a day or two a week catch­ing up with old friends, re­spond­ing to vari­ous con­tact points in Linked­In, mak­ing new con­nec­tions based on re­com­mend­a­tions from friends. It felt sort of like the net­work­ing you do to find a new job, ex­cept I wasn’t do­ing that. I ended up in Cam­bridge or Bo­ston about once a week. I learned how to take the com­muter rail in­to town, and used Bo­ston’s Blue Bikes to get around Cam­bridge.

Gotta say, this was a total blast. It’s fant­ast­ic to get just a bit of a per­spect­ive on all the amaz­ing things go­ing on in the area.

Consulting

That re­con­nect­ing led to a few ac­tu­al con­sult­ing pro­jects. Turns out that some small tech com­pan­ies would like to bet­ter un­der­stand the CIO per­spect­ive and could use ad­vice from someone who’s been through a lot of or­gan­iz­a­tion­al com­plex­ity.

I didn’t want to spend much time in this mode be­cause my top goal was re­cov­er­ing, but I was in­trigued by what was go­ing on in these com­pan­ies and wanted to help out my friends in these situ­ations.

That was so much fun! I prob­ably could do that as an ac­tu­al full-time job, as long as I was work­ing with the right cli­ents and not trav­el­ing too much.

Hiking and Backpacking

I went on four or five hikes up in the White Moun­tains, usu­ally with a friend. I love be­ing up in that part of New Hamp­shire, and hadn’t been up there enough in the last few years.

Bey­ond en­joy­ing the hike, my goal in climb­ing the moun­tains up there was to test and train my back strength in pre­par­a­tion for a week-long back­pack­ing trip in Septem­ber in Utah. So, as I hiked in the Whites, I car­ried weights in my daypack, aim­ing to haul 30+ pounds up the moun­tains. That was prob­ably in­sane, but it worked out.

I spent dozens of hours plan­ning the Utah back­pack­ing trip and get­ting my gear in or­der. Thanks to my back woes, it had been years since our last trip, so it was great to be able to get the gear ready while train­ing.

Then, as a bit of a cul­min­a­tion of the sum­mer, my friends and I made it out to Utah and hiked as planned. It was a fant­ast­ic trip. It is so pretty out there, and get­ting back in­to the out­back to climb high peaks, breath in fresh air, and watch the stars spin by, es­pe­cially after the last few years of back pain and work stress.. what an amaz­ing gift.

Biology

For years, I’d had “take in­tro to bio­logy” on my list of things to do. I nev­er got to it… too busy, too many oth­er things go­ing on, took too much fo­cus.

So I signed up for MIT and EdX’s MIT 700.x, In­tro to Bio­logy from Eric Landers, de­livered over the web. I put about 10-15 hours a week in­to it. It’s been fant­ast­ic… it’s fas­cin­at­ing ma­ter­i­al, it’s help­ing to fill in all sorts of things that I’d picked up some sense about, but nev­er really learned.

Could I be use­ful in a bio­logy lab at this point? Not even close. Could I have stra­tegic dis­cus­sions about where my bio­logy-based work­place should go? Nope. Will I have a bet­ter sense of what we’re talk­ing about at work when we dig in­to bio­lo­gic­al areas? Ab­so­lutely. Will I be bet­ter able to un­der­stand the rel­ev­ance and im­port­ance of new dis­cov­er­ies? Yes.

And I real­ized that there was no way I could have done this while at work in the last few years. Work and fam­ily pri­or­it­ies just nev­er al­lowed that amount of ded­ic­ated fo­cus over a multi-month peri­od.

Reading

Fi­nally, I star­ted mak­ing pro­gress on all the books piled up on my phys­ic­al and elec­tron­ic shelves. Non-fic­tion, busi­ness, sci­ence, sci-fi, his­tory.. I burned through the books.

The best: N. K. Jemisin’s “The Fifth Sea­son” tri­logy. Wow.

Some­where in the sum­mer, I re­membered that at one point in my life, I had al­ways had a book I was cur­rently read­ing. I hadn’t real­ized how much I missed deep read­ing while in full-time work mode. Tech art­icles, busi­ness cases, and head­line brows­ing are just not the same thing.

Detox from Work Attention Disorder

It took me weeks, but I stopped com­puls­ively check­ing my phone at all hours to see what new Ur­gent Is­sue I needed to deal with.

Still, three months later, I have this nig­gling feel­ing when I re­lax that there’s Some­thing Crit­ic­al I should be hand­ling.

I’ve trained my­self for dec­ades that my “de­fault” mode is to be think­ing about work… I’m wor­ried this one will come back in spades when I re-enter the work­force.

Crazy moments of pure joy

Sev­er­al times dur­ing the sum­mer, I found my­self feel­ing in­cred­ibly happy… some­thing I hadn’t felt at that level of depth for years.

These hit at odd mo­ments. On the trail when climb­ing up a moun­tain, on a bike when rid­ing on quiet rides, when step­ping out of a sub­way sta­tion and hav­ing total free­dom to de­cide which way to turn, when fin­ish­ing up a par­tic­u­larly sat­is­fy­ing book…

I’m not sure where these came from. It was some com­bin­a­tion of feel­ing fully res­ted, see­ing that the kids were all on track, that I was mak­ing pro­gress on things I cared about, and I had a lot of op­tions for next steps, both near and far. Things just felt Good.

Reflections

Among the things I learned:

• If I do ever re­tire, I won’t have the couch potato prob­lem. I had so much to do and so much go­ing on… I was busy all the time, and hav­ing a blast.
• With the pres­sure of work re­moved (pres­sure I cre­ated for my­self), I re­learned what I liked to do and how I liked to work.
• I really can only do one “fo­cused pro­ject” at a time. This sum­mer, it was bio­logy. When I tried to do oth­er fo­cused things that took con­sid­er­ably think­ing (e.g. or­gan­iz­ing three dec­ades worth of pho­tos), both pro­jects slowed down too much to be sat­is­fy­ing or for me to main­tain state.
• There are cer­tain ways of work­ing that make me more ef­fect­ive and sat­is­fied. I took the time to re­dis­cov­er those. For ex­ample, I put a lot of time in­to tweak­ing the apps I use on my laptop and where I put my data. Now it’s easi­er for me to shift quickly in­to fo­cus mode and to put my fin­gers on the in­form­a­tion I need. Like­wise, I re­membered that I just work bet­ter in clean, or­gan­ized spaces.
• I didn’t come any­where near to fin­ish­ing my pro­ject list. I could eas­ily have been in this mode for an­oth­er 6 months. And by then, I’d no doubt have oth­er things on my list. (Which means that “when I fin­ish my list of pro­jects” would have been the wrong in­dic­at­or for “when to re­turn to work”.)
• Free time is such an amaz­ing and power­ful tool.

Onwards

As the sum­mer closes, and as I re­turn to the work­force, I find my­self with very mixed emo­tions.

• Worry: about what will hap­pen as I re­turn to full-time work. With new pres­sures on my time and pri­or­it­ies, will I lose the re­cov­ery be­ne­fits that I’ve gained? While fall in­to un­healthy pat­terns again? Hope­fully I’ve learned enough from this sum­mer to avoid this, but I’m con­cerned.
• Ex­cite­ment: to be tak­ing on new chal­lenges on the work front.
• De­light: with how the sum­mer played out, what I got done, and what I learned.
• Deep grat­it­ude: that I had the time to re­cov­er and to ex­plore.