Summer sabbatical update: focus, fleeting
There’s a lot going on in the world right now, and most of it is bad news, with climate change, loss of civil rights, increases in anti-trans violence, continued police killings. I’m not in the mood to write about any of it, and so instead, I’m writing about focus, which I think is indirectly related to the topic of fighting for justice.
I have mixed feelings about summer. Anyone who knows me well knows that my preferred temperatures are 45–70F — anything less and feel encumbered by layers, and anything more and my brain overheats and I turn into a shade zombie. And this summer, like all summers likely for the rest of my life, promises to be hotter than ever, and therefore more full of asthma-inducing smoke than ever. I will survive this season, and thrive inside, in the evenings, when I can finally think again.
But I also find summer to be a relief, professionally. I’ve often found myself describing modern life in higher education as a industrialized form of the more romantic idea of academia of quiet, isolated pondering. In a non-sabbatical year, I’m doing research, but doing it with six doctoral students, a postdoc, fifty undergraduates inquiring to help, a hundred students and scholars a year writing to join, and the never ending escalation of writing and reviewing, as our warped incentives collectively drain our capacity for creative discovery. I’m doing teaching, but with 35, 70, 200 students at a time, all to support a level of revenue that sustains our ability to compensate faculty and staff in an ever increasing Seattle cost of living. And I’m doing service, but ever more of the local resource management kind, rather than the inspiring kind that involves changing the world.
Summer is freedom from those organizational aspects of academia, a time to simplify, to the few folks in my lab, to the big questions we want to answer, to expansive periods of focus.
Except, that’s what I’ve been doing all year on sabbatical. This is the beautiful thing about the unparalleled perk of paid professional leave: it is up to a year, free of the distraction of the organizational machine that subsidizes discovery, free to let discovery be what it has always been: insight that emerges from focus, wandering, wondering, and play. This past Spring, for example, has been rich with two weeks of play in Pittsburgh, a stimulating visit to my first AERA, a week getting to know the University of Michigan, and hundreds of glorious hours of exploring what it might mean to decolonize programming languages by trying to make a language that radically engages the diversity of culture, ability, and language. It has been a time of intense focus.
And so this summer, I feel different. Aside from being a summer of polishing Wordplay.dev enough to share it, this is a summer of foreboding. It will be what sabbatical has been for me, and it will be what summer usually is for me, but it will also be the foreboding reentry into bureaucracy. The TA recruiting for Fall has begun. My Dean’s inevitable ask of my administrative leadership has come. The daily attentional churn of hundreds of emails, dozens of demands for work from staff, faculty, students, and the public, and the hourly sense of just barely staying afloat will return. And I will wonder where the time went, when I will be able to focus again, when I will once again have time to advance those big ideas.
But I am an anxious person, and a precrastinator, and so my mind this month has been afire trying to imagine ways to preserve some of the focus time that has been so preciously abundant this past academic year on leave. So I thought I would share some of my ideas, in case others might benefit from them, so I can make sure my return is more morning jog than sprint for survival.
One idea is to just reserve my mornings for focus. All summer, I’ve reserved 8-noon for myself to work on things that I must advance as an individual. During sabbatical, it’s all been Wordplay development: I haven’t looked at email, answered student DMs, or thought about anything else. It’s been like having an entirely different job for four hours a day, Monday through Thursday, and it’s been the highlight of the year. If I were to just do that exact same thing during a non-sabbatical year, what would happen? My prediction is not much: the afternoons have never been entirely full this year, and so they might be more full of meetings when I return. But if I just protect that time ruthlessly, I could reserve 16 hours for focus work. Some of that might be Wordplay, but some would probably be fundraising (which I always experience as thought work), some might be service (which often requires focus as well). It would be my thinking and writing time, and I could use it as a flexible resource for whether I felt like getting done. (Unless I collaborate with Europe, sigh).
Another idea I had was to keep my consolidated email schedule. It’s been quite freeing to consolidate all of my communication into a single period in the week. I’ve been going to my favorite cafe every Friday to churn through messages, and it’s really helped me stay motivated to write, but also warm up the language centers in my brain, and reduce the time fragmentation that comes with answering every day, or whenever I have time. It’s also been a nice way to keep a regular pace to my work; weekly replies keeps things moving at a weekly pace. Prior to sabbatical, I reserved an hour every morning, and I did it first thing; that meant I was very responsive, but I also did the thing I liked the least at the beginning of each day, out of a sense of duty to unblock people. It also meant that my pace was daily, which was a bit too fast to allow for focus. I think I’ll relax that, and perhaps choose two days a week for two hours of messaging in the late afternoons, and see if that helps me condense it to four hours, and maintain some responsiveness. Maybe whichever days I’m not teaching.
I’ve also enjoyed aligning physical space to activity. Prior to sabbatical, I’ve always worked on campus all day (or at home during the pandemic), just to be available and accessible to students, for serendipity. But this past year, I’ve done deep thought work at home, and then gone to campus in the afternoons to connect. The transitions mid-day have had many nice benefits. One is having an explicit time to shift from one kind of work (thinking) to another (relating). Another is having lunch during that shift, allowing me to eat at home or out as an activity to make that shift. Living in Seattle, it also meant that even in the darkest days of winter, I saw the sun, as I was in transit mid-day. Missing rush hour was also a win.
I’ve had a fair amount of service on this sabbatical — wrapping up a term on the CRA Education board, serving on the Exploring Computing Education Pathways board, serving as ACM TOCE editor-in-chief — and so I’ve been reserving my Fridays for email and service work. This won’t work during the academic year, as Friday is usually reserved for faculty and committee meetings, but I could reserve Friday afternoons for service. People rarely want to meet then anyway. That way, the day would be iSchool service in the mornings, external service in the afternoons.
I don’t know if this will work. Meetings and calendaring conflicts have a way of intruding into carefully crafted schedules. I don’t control when my classes are. And I don’t know if I’ll be able to be so reliably committed to this defragmented schedule. And the calendar chaos that comes from holding leadership positions is inescapable, and only likely to get worse as my own responsibilities increase and the world gets ever more unpredictable. But I do know I need to try. This year has been too much of a success in finding focus and wellness for me to let it go. I don’t think I’ll survive without it.
As for Wordplay, it is still at the center of my thoughts, and will be all summer. I have a few hundred bugs to fix and a lot of thinking to do about how to open up the project to contributors globally, to realize its broader visions. This includes finding ways to fund its ongoing design and development, and to begin building a global community of radical diversity in culture, language, and ability. I’m excited to spend the summer charting this future and seeing what unexpected places that degramented time will take me.
