I’m not sure there’s anything in academia with a greater air of mystery than the sabbatical. From outside the profession, it’s often seen as a year-long vacation and travel to exotic locales. Within, it’s treated as a chance to recharge and to finally get some real work done on our much-neglected research projects.

There’s a bit of truth in both positions. A sabbatical is a chance to recharge, and an opportunity to get things done, and I’d be lying if I said that professors don’t tend to carve out some actual vacation time in there as well. That said, this vacation time should be seen in the context of the usual academic workload, which doesn’t tend to conform to the typical 35 hour, Monday-to-Friday workweek. As someone once joked, academics work 80 hours a week, but they get to choose which 80 hours.

As it happens, I just finished my first full, honest-to-goodness sabbatical. I’d started a half-sabbatical (six months) in January 2020, but it was cut short in March when the world ended. With my 1.5 sabbaticals now under my belt, 12 years into this crazy career, I thought it might be helpful to share some sabbatical insights. My hope is that these will help demystify the sabbatical to non-academics and help early-career fellow scholars make the most of theirs when it comes around.

• Leave the administrative stuff behind. I can’t stress this point enough. A sabbatical can be many things, but at heart it’s a chance for you to take care of your career, whether that’s through reading, research, physical recovery (I’ll get to that in a minute) or letting your mind wander in order to think of your next big project. It’s a chance to break out of the routines that can come to overwhelm our work, particularly our research. Don’t worry about your department’s politics; it’ll still be there when you get back.
  
  Full disclosure: This is very much a do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do suggestion. In my case, late last Summer I ended up getting involved in a Brock University Working Group to deal with the threat of generative AI. Given my research, I didn’t feel I could turn away. And then in January, our Graduate Studies Faculty unilaterally and without consultation announced they were defunding one-year Master’s programs, effectively threatening my (and other) department’s ability to run our graduate programs at all. Here, I also felt I had to get involved, since there was a good chance my department wouldn’t be there when I got back.

That said, as a rule I think it’s a healthy one.

• Don’t wait until the beginning of your sabbatical to wind up projects. When I took a paid leave to pursue a fellowship in Germany in 2018, I spent my first several months cleaning up a lot of smaller projects, things that were just winding down. It always takes longer to finish something than you think it will. As a result, it took me that much longer to work on the things that I had planned to work on: the fun stuff.
  
  This time, however, I made a concerted effort to start my sabbatical with as clean a slate as possible. It worked out pretty well. I didn’t get everything done that I’d planned, but that extra pre-sabbatical push contributed to my sense that the sabbatical was indeed a break from routine.
  
  
• Everyone’s sabbatical needs are different. The answer to the question of what is a sabbatical for, what you should want out of it, depends on the person. It could be a chance to overhaul your research agenda: A senior scholar once told me that during his first sabbatical, he decided to focus on the area in which he became a foundational voice.
  
  Even if you don’t end up reinventing a field, a sabbatical is an opportune time for just such a reconsideration. But it’s not the only thing you can do during a sabbatical. You can use the time, unencumbered by administrative and teaching duties, to get some writing done, or really get that research done, or teach in another department.
  
  Or even physically recover. One giant lesson from the ongoing pandemic is that we need to be kinder to ourselves, and to others. This is a lesson that, for me, is continually reinforced by age. The early days of the pandemic were exhausting for everyone, triply so for those with children and those dealing with pre-existing conditions. And the lingering effects of the ongoing pandemic, to say nothing of political uncertainty and climate change that literally made it difficult to breathe the air last summer, and you have a recipe for physical and mental breakdown. You’re no good to anybody if you remain exhausted beyond all help, so take the opportunity to recuperate when it presents itself.
  
  For my sabbatical, I wanted to do three things. First, I wanted to develop a new research agenda. I’d just published The New Knowledge, so it was a good time to plan my next steps. I also wanted to coordinate a special issue devoted to the centenary of Susan Strange’s birth, and to lay the foundations for a digital governance institute. I knew that these things were within my capacity to do, and I was able to take steps toward completing all of them.
  
  That said, I also spent a couple of months laid up with a pinched neck nerve, which was exactly as much fun as it sounds. Did it keep me from completing some projects? Most definitely. But whether you’re on sabbatical or not, shit happens sometimes, and you have to just roll with it and not beat yourself up over it.
  
  
• Go somewhere else, if you can. For both of my aborted 2020 sabbatical and my 2023-24 sabbatical, I arranged a research fellowship at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin. Beyond the excellent people and really positive atmosphere, I found that being in a different city (especially one as awesome as Berlin) and out of my usual environment really helped me focus on my research and writing. I don’t think I’ve ever been as productive, or worked as intensively, as I did in 2020 at the Institute.
  
  Sabbaticals are also an ideal time to meet with colleagues. In this sabbatical, we arranged a series of book talks in Canada and throughout Europe, and I also helped to organize a two-day event in London to celebrate the centenary of Susan Strange’s birth. These were all very rewarding, not just for their stated purposes, but because it allowed us to meet people we otherwise would likely never have met. If a sabbatical is about recharging, there’s nothing more invigorating or inspiring than just shooting the breeze with old and new colleagues. You never know where new ideas will come from: one of my favourite journal articles came out of a discussion over coffee in Berlin.
  
  Of course, not everyone can just up and go to another city, country or university. But if you can find a way to break your routine, or even just consciously set aside a good amount of time for your own work, the dividends can be significant. It’s the break that’s important.
  
  
• Sabbaticals are the least-bad time for home renovations. There’s a reason why, in our department, the last three people to go on sabbatical, me included, used it as an opportunity to complete some large-scale home renovations. Even the smoothest-running renovations can be a huge pain in the neck. But if you’re going to be without a kitchen (and running water anywhere but your upstairs bathroom) for five months, better that it be during your sabbatical than when you’re also dealing with course prep and countless administrative issues.

• Europe’s patio game is (mostly) on point. Because the pandemic is ongoing and we’d rather not mess with long covid, we’re still practicing covid precautions, which means almost no meals in restaurants. Fortunately, we found that even in February, many restaurants throughout Europe keep their patios open. For this, we can only thank Europe’s millions upon millions of smokers. We may have different goals – they’re poisoning their lungs while we’re trying to keep ours clean – but we’ll take our patio allies where we can get them. Thanks, Euro smokers!

• You won’t get to everything. In the abstract, 12 months (assuming a full-year sabbatical) is a long time. But when you take out weekends, holidays, travel, family obligations, and unforeseen events, opportunities and emergencies, the time passes incredibly quickly. So you probably won’t get to everything on your list: my original plan was to look for fellowships not just in Germany, but also Australia and Brazil. Twelve months later and I can’t but wonder exactly when I thought I’d be able to take two additional international trips.

More generally, a year of unstructured work time (and it definitely is work – I think we took the equivalent of three weeks of vacation time over the past year, even as we were travelling) is both an incredible privilege and a great opportunity. If anyone has any questions about sabbaticals, or suggestions for getting the most out of yours, please leave a comment below.