Now that I’m five months into my own sabbatical, I thought it would be a good idea to discuss how to make a sabbatical plan.
I started my sabbatical with a half-baked plan at best, and have watched the last 20 weeks fly by faster than I could have ever imagined. I’ve also spent way more money than I would have liked.
Well, it’s time to rein things in with a solid sabbatical plan before I either run out of money or sufficient time to enjoy my sabbatical to its fullest.
If you’re considering taking a sabbatical, heed my words: make a plan.
Time is too valuable to wander into your sabbatical without a clear direction. Even if your plan is simply to “do nothing,” it’s better to be intentional about it from the start.
The good news is that I now have real-life experience with taking a sabbatical. I’ll use what I’ve learned during my sabbatical journey to help you create a rock-solid sabbatical plan that ensures you maximize this special time and get the most out of it.
Let’s get started, shall we?
Why You Should Plan Your Sabbatical
As with most things in life, we don’t know what we don’t know. We usually have to dive into things to figure them out. While I’m sure you’ll discover your own lessons once your sabbatical begins, I’d like to share some wisdom on why it’s essential to make a plan for your sabbatical:
1) More Likely To Achieve Your Goal
Not having goals, or lacking direction, almost always leads us nowhere. Therefore, it is best to establish goals for your sabbatical and a plan for achieving those goals, which will increase your odds of achieving what you desire.
I started my sabbatical with two primary goals: 1) put more time into building this blog and 2) learning Spanish.
I’ve done well enough with Spanish, but haven’t managed to work on the blog as much as I hoped. Since I never established a clear goal of, say, to publish 2 blog posts per week, I wasn’t able to make a real plan for how I would achieve my goals.
As such, I’m writing this post to build out a more solid plan and sharing with you to help you do the same for yourself. I’ve now established the goal of posting 2 times a week from mid March thru the end of my sabbatical later this year.
2) Your Sabbatical Time Will Fly By
Remember when you were a kid on summer break from school; how fast those summers would fly by? That’s what it will be like on your sabbatical – time will move faster than you can ever imagine.
As I always say, time can be your best friend, or your worst enemy. And because of this, you need to ensure you have a plan for how you’ll use all of your new found free time. Otherwise, your time may escape you and leave you with regret for wasting it.
Speaking of waste, there’s one more thing you need to be aware of..
3) It Can Get More Expensive Than You Anticipated
Thus far, I’ve spent way more during my sabbatical that I would have hoped. As a result, I’m at risk of having to go back to work early if I don’t course correct my spending right away.
Here’s a look at my monthly sabbatical spending thus far from October 2024 – January 2025:
Spending more than $21,000 in five months is just insane. But take it from me, if you don’t plan your sabbatical, the same can happen to you as the costs of all your new found free time can quickly add up.
Step 1: Create A Place To Document Your Plan
Before creating your sabbatical plan, you should establish a document to capture the details of your plan. This can be done with a simple word document, a note app on your phone, or any other resource you have at your disposal. For me it’s this post.
The benefit of documenting your plan is that you can return to it later to review your initial intentions for your sabbatical, make adjustments, and gauge whether you are on track.
Now to the steps for creating your plan..
Step 2: Defining Why You Want A Sabbatical
The most fundamental part of your sabbatical plan is your “why” for taking it. This will be a reason highly personal to you such as wanting a rest from work, time to focus on something important, or perhaps traveling the world.
Becoming clear on what’s motivating you to take a sabbatical will help you decide how to use your time once it starts. The last thing you want is to have one intention for your sabbatical, but use all of your time toward something else. In such a case you may end up regretting how you spent your time and feel it was a waste.
As for me, my reason for taking my sabbatical is that I was extremely burned out from work and needing a break. I also wanted to give myself more free time to work on the blog and learn a second language which in my case is Spanish.
Top Reasons For Taking A Sabbatical
Here are a few of the top reasons someone might consider taking a sabbatical. Of course, your own reason will be personal to you, but this list may help you gain more clarity:
Burnout from Work. Deloitte’s well-cited Workplace Burnout Survey concluded that roughly 77% of the global workforce has experienced burnout at least once in their current roles. Burnout was the primary motivation for my sabbatical, so I understand if you’re considering doing the same to reclaim your wellness.
You Need Time to Think or Work on Something Else. As a writer and creator, I always appreciate having more time to do nothing but think. Unfortunately, the demands of daily life often make it hard to achieve. After working, maintaining my health, socializing, and studying, there’s usually not much time left for anything else. A sabbatical is a great way to carve out an additional 40–60 hours each week for deep thinking or focusing on endeavors beyond work.
You’d Like to Travel the World. In 18 months of international travel, I’ve met many interesting people doing exactly this. They’re taking sabbaticals or working remotely to realize their dreams of traveling the world.
Focus on Your Health. Health often becomes the first casualty when life gets too busy. This is understandable, as it takes herculean discipline to use the last ounces of energy after long days of work and tending to families. Rather than waiting until retirement to reclaim your health, a sabbatical could be an opportunity to hit pause on “normal life” and focus on getting in the best shape you’ve been in years.
A Career Change. One reason many people stay stuck in jobs they hate is that they’re too busy to work toward something new. Taking a short sabbatical could be a wise strategy to carve out time to study, gain qualifications, and prepare for the next chapter of your career.
Focus on Family. Most of us would spend more time with our families if it weren’t for the pesky thing called work. There will always be more money to earn, and work will still be there when we return. Yet, as any parent knows, we can never get back the precious years spent with our children and loved ones. Once that time is gone, it’s gone forever.
Step 3: Establishing Clear Sabbatical Goals
The “why” for your sabbatical defines your overall motivation, but it needs to be supported by specific goals that you can actually work toward achieving. For example, a sabbatical taken to travel the world (why) may be supported by a specific goal to spend at least a week in 5 different countries over a 4 month period (goal).
Goals are important because they help you determine which actions are most important. They also enable you to track your progress.
To ensure success, I suggest you limit yourself to 2-3 goals. This will ensure you can focus your efforts and attention.
Step 4: Planning Your Sabbatical Duration
They say that time is money. Yet, the opposite is true when it comes to a sabbatical: money is time. Specifically, your savings or income sources will ultimately determine how long you can spend on sabbatical.
We’ll do a deeper dive on how to plan for managing your finances once your sabbatical starts, but for now let’s run through 3 simple examples showing you how to plan your sabbatical duration.
Employer Sponsored Sabbatical
If you are so lucky to be in a position to take an employer sponsored sabbatical, then you will almost certainly have the duration defined for you as a part of the agreement. Just be sure to check with your manager and HR department to ensure everyone is on the same page, and then enjoy your time away.
If you aren’t so lucky to have the benefit of employer sponsored sabbaticals, you may want to explore roles at companies that offer them.
Self-Funded Sabbatical Using Savings
Perhaps you’ve saved up a hefty lump sum which you’d like to use to fund your sabbatical. In this case, you simply need to divide the amount of your savings by your monthly average spending to get a rough estimate of how long you can survive on your savings without work. Here’s a quick example:
Savings: $40,000
Average Monthly Spending: $8,000
Sabbatical Duration: $40,000 / $8,000 = 5 months
Income Driven Sabbatical
Another plausible scenario is one where you have an auxiliary source of income beyond your primary job that you can lean on to fund your sabbatical. This could be rental income from properties you own, dividends from investments, revenue from a side hustle like freelance work or selling products online.
Having such a supplementary stream can provide financial stability during your time away from traditional employment and make your sabbatical more sustainable.
As you plan for your sabbatical under this scenario, consider how stable your source of income is, the amounts you receive, whether they adequately covers your needs, and if you will need to supplement by dipping into your savings and thus doing a blend with the aforementioned method.
Recommendation: Reserve Time For Transitioning Back To Work
It is easy to underestimate how difficult it can be to find a new job. I anticipate that the process could be even more difficult after my sabbatical as recruiters and managers aren’t unaccustomed to seeing candidates with long gaps on their resumes.
Because of this, I strongly suggest that sabbaticals be planned with reserve time dedicated solely to transitioning back to work. The table below captures what I refer to as recommended reserve time allotments:
What you’ll notice about the table is that it calls for shorter sabbaticals to allocate greater percentages of overall time for transitioning back to work. This makes sense considering the 3-6 month average time it takes for finding new jobs.
Remember, the length of your sabbatical is ultimately driven by your money and the goal of reserving funds for transitioning back to work is avoiding financial hardship.
By dedicating a portion of your funds as reserves for finding a job, you avoid backing yourself into a corner and becoming desperate when it comes time to consider which role to accept. Thus, it would be a shame for you to conclude your sabbatical by returning to work you really don’t want to do.
Step 5: Planning Your Sabbatical Finances
In the last section, we used our funds as the basis for determining roughly how long we can spend on sabbatical. Next up, we’ll go a few levels deeper with a discussion of how you can plan to actually manage your finances on a day-to-day basis once your sabbatical starts.
I started my sabbatical without any semblance of a financial plan. As a result, I’ve spent way too much money. So take my word to heart when I say you will be best served by planning your sabbatical finances well in advance.
Plan Your Spending With A Budget
I’ve previously discussed the process of creating budgets in my posts on how to control spending and how to save $100k, so I won’t try to reinvent the wheel here. Instead, I urge you to check out those articles and follow the steps for creating a budget that will help guide your spending during your sabbatical.
It is important not to skip this step because without a budget, you have no real basis for monitoring and controlling your spending beyond gut instinct.
Ultimately, the goal for your financial plan should be to stretch your finances as far as they can go. You’ll do this by slashing unneeded expenses, closing spending leaks, and sticking to your budget once its created.
Here’s my newly minted sabbatical budget below. A note here is that it is still very much a work in progress as I look to refine it closer to perfect over a 3 month period:
Set A Cutoff Point To Control Spending
Even with the best budget we can fall off the rails with our spending. To account for this, I recommend establishing a boundary for your overall sabbatical spending, which if reached, triggers the end of your sabbatical and a mandatory return to work.
My suggestion is that, if at any point, you’ve spent 40% or more of your budgeted remaining funds, you’ve hit your cutoff point and must pivot in earnest to transitional activities to land a new role as quickly as possible.
Here’s an example showing how it works:
Sabbatical length:12 months
Total savings: $70,000
25% Reserves for transitioning back: $18,000
Net sabbatical funds after reserves: $52,000
Monthly budget: $5,777
Based on these figures, you will run out of sabbatical funds at exactly the end of the 9 month mark, and will then be in your reserve time for transitioning back. But what happens if you’ve gotten ahead of yourself by spending too much? The following table shows various cutoff points given our example:
There are a few reasons for doing this. The first being that we need a mechanism to hold ourselves accountable during our sabbatical. The second, and most important reason is that we need to ensure we don’t bring ourselves to financial ruin by overspending.
Step 6: Planning Your Sabbatical Start Date
If you’ve followed the steps thus far, you’ve done quite a bit of work and are nearing ready to start your sabbatical. But when exactly should that day be?
My sabbatical coincided with the end date of my last project. It seemed simple at the time: I only needed to close out the project, turn over any documentation, say a few goodbyes, and sail off into the sunset. But looking back, that was a suboptimal approach since I wasn’t as prepared as I could have been.
If I were to do it all over, here is the checklist of items I would ensure I’ve completed before and after establishing a target start date:
The list above ensures we start our sabbaticals ready to hit the ground running. It’s much easier to establish a start date once you are clear on what you’ll actually be doing.
Then, once your start date is established, you can use the remaining time until your last day of work sticking the landing and setting yourself up for a smooth transition back into the workforce.
Step 7: Planning Your Daily and Weekly Routine
It’s now time to reap the rewards of all the hard work sabbatical planning as this is where we can now make plans for what we’ll actually do when our free time starts.
This section helps your sabbatical come to life. It’s important that you do this, because as I said at the start, time will fly by if you don’t make plans for how you’ll use your time.
Your Daily Schedule
Take a moment to envision what your ideal day looks like. Start with your overall sabbatical goal and consider the things you’ll do each day to accomplish that goal. Then fill in the rest of the details with things you need to do and would like to do.
Here’s a look at my daily schedule come March. It includes daily focus time for working on the blog, studying, and hitting the gym which are my only priorities:
One of the best things about a sabbatical is all of the time you’ll have. Yet ironically, having a lot of free time can trick you into thinking you can accomplish everything when in reality, you can’t.
Because of this, I recommend making your daily routine as lean as possible. A few things accomplished consistently will always beat constantly missing your goals because you’ve overloaded your plate.
Pro Tip: Think About Your Sabbatical Logistics
While planning, it helps to think through the logistics of the activities in your daily schedule. For instance, becoming the primary parent for dropping off and picking up the kids since you’re on sabbatical may not coincide well with your plans to go to 7 a.m. yoga. As such, you’ll need to resolve these logistics to ensure it all works.
Plan to a level of detail that gives you a real sense of where you’ll be and when, how you’ll get there, what you’ll do, who you’ll do it with, and how you will fund it all.
Things To Do While On Your Sabbatical
Your sabbatical will eventually be underway and you’ll undoubtedly have a lot to contend with between accomplishing your goals while balancing the responsibilities of real life.
For as busy as you’ll be, it would be helpful to not lose sight of a few housekeeping items that can easily get lost in the shuffle. Here are the things I recommend you ensure you’re regularly doing alongside everything else:
- Revisit & Refine Your Sabbatical Plans. To ensure you are on track or to make adjustments where needed.
- Don’t Waste Time. Procrastination is the enemy of progress. Avoid falling into the habit of wasting time on things that don’t matter such as scrolling social media, watching TV, or “relaxing”.
- Mind Your Budget. I suggest holding weekly or bi-weekly budget sessions to ensure you are tracking well.
- Keep In Touch With Colleagues. Keeping your career network alive will make the transition to work much easier down the road.
- Take A Vacation. Even your vacation calls for a vacation. Don’t forget to treat yourself to a much deserved getaway.
Step 8: Plan Your Return To Work
Sadly, there will come a time where you will have to return to work. Our goal is to make this transition as easy a possible. Of course, we do this by planning.
What Career Will You Do?
Are you going back to your old job or are you going to do something new? Take some serious time to think about it because the answer to this question will determine what actions you need to take to hop back into the workforce.
My plan is to move into a new career path upon my return to the working world. Because of this, I have to go through the steps of learning, qualifying, and preparing for my chosen career path.
This means I’ll need extra time to achieve my goals. It also means I’ll have to put forth more effort toward accomplishing this goal than I would if I were to return to my old career which I’m already well qualified for.
What’s Needed To Land The Job?
Whether you plan to return to your old job or do something new, there will be steps required to land a new job in your chosen field. As I mentioned before, it takes on average 3-6 months to find a new job; so you’ll want to be as clear as possible on what actions you’ll need to take.
Since I’m looking to pivot into something new, here are the steps I plan to take:
- Educate. My new field is of a technical nature which means I need to educate myself on the ins and outs of the work.
- Qualify. After education comes qualifications to certify my knowledge and ability to do the job. I’ll do this by sitting for 1-2 industry standard exams.
- Networking. My goal is to “shake the hornet’s nest” of my network to see what falls out. I don’t know what to expect, but maybe some promising leads will come to fruition.
- Apply. Ultimately, I’ll have to throw my name on the table and hope to get an interview.
Start Early, Use Your Reserve Time
The steps needed to land your next role will depend on your role and industry.
Take time to outline the steps you’ll need and avoid waiting until the last minute. This is why we’ve built in reserve time into our plans: we want to have adequate lead time to do everything it takes to land our new roles.
If you wait until your finances are nearly exhausted to begin your job finding activities, you may find yourself in a desperate situation – and desperate candidates never fare well in the job market.
My personal goal is to avoid any job hunting related stress. Therefore, I plan to start my job search activities even before my reserve time begins. I’ll do this by tackling the education and qualification requirements mentioned above over the next 6 months.
Then, I’ll only need to use my reserve time for networking and finding the best role for me.
Step 9: Planning For Challenges You Might Face During Your Sabbatical
In this final phase of sabbatical planning, we will focus on risk mitigation wherein we try to envision things that could happen that could derail the success of our sabbaticals, and outline ways to overcome them if they happen to occur.
Based on experience with my own sabbatical, challenges can either stem from internal factors related to your mindset and emotions, or your money.
I can also envision that those of you with spouses and kids may have unique challenges of your own. Let’s cover all of these below:
Your Spouse Isn’t On Board With Your Sabbatical
It should go without saying, but your spouse should be fully on board before you take a sabbatical. In other instances, your spouse may be supportive initially, but grow weary of your newfound lifestyle midstream.
It’ll help for them to see you being consistent and productive. Also ensure you’re being present with your family and not shirking your duties.
In cases where they still aren’t on board, communication is a must. Neither of you are islands of your own. Work together to figure out what’s best.
You Regret Taking Your Sabbatical
Regret is a normal part of life and can happen to any of us. Taking a sabbatical may sound like a great idea before you start, but you may eventually find that you don’t enjoy it as much as you thought you would.
There’s no point in kicking yourself if this happens to you. Instead, I suggest that you step back and reflect on where you are at the moment and what got you there. Reviewing your sabbatical plan could be a great way to take yourself back to where you were when you decided to take your sabbatical.
And if after that you still aren’t happy with your decision, you can always begin the process of returning to work.
You Get The Itch To Return To Work
It’s possible that you may eventually feel that not working creates a void that makes life feel less meaningful and structured than before. I’ve experienced this myself and as a result have felt and itch to return to work early in spite of it only being 4 months since starting my sabbatical.
To combat this, I’ve reminded myself that it’s important to stick to my goals – I started the sabbatical for a reason, so I must see it through. I also know that I’m not stuck on this path and can always pivot back to the workforce if I find that I absolutely have to.
Work truly is a big part of our lives. If you end up feeling that you really miss it, give your sabbatical a bit more time, and if the feeling doesn’t go away, give yourself permission to go back.
You Run Out Of Money
Ultimately, running out of money means it’s time to return to work.
Thankfully, you’ve established a cutoff point as outlined above. So you should at least have adequate runway that helps you prevent total financial collapse.
Additionally, you should always have a separate six month emergency fund that is not included in your sabbatical finances. Therefore, you should ensure you’ve saved this first before you begin working on your sabbatical savings.
You Feel Lazy Or Lost
You may not be ready to return to work, but you may end up feeling a bit lost during your sabbatical. For this, your plan is your best friend. Review it often.
It also helps to have a solid daily routine that grounds you with a sense of purpose and structure. Since starting my sabbatical, I’ve had to rebuff many attempts from people trying to monopolize my time for their own gains. I’ve had to work hard to protect my time.
Feeling lost will likely be rooted in poorly planned goals or a lack of discipline and focus. If it happens to you, step back to assess why, and move swiftly towards course correcting.
On the other hand, laziness is a tough habit to break once it sets in. Therefore, you should consider it your worst enemy from the start.
Let’s not even plan for it happening – instead let’s commit to hitting the ground running with solid daily routines that include working toward our goals, focusing on our health, and managing our lives like the winners we are.
Ready For Your Sabbatical?
Think you’re ready to start your sabbatical? Good for you if so.
This is the plan I wish I would have had at the start. Therefore, if you’ve done your due diligence in following it, you’re ready to go.
If you aren’t quite ready – no sweat. Keep working, earning money, saving, and working the steps of this plan until everything is in place. As they say, it’s better to measure twice and cut only once – so take your time and don’t rush.
Let me know what you have planned for your sabbatical. Also let me know what parts of planning I may have missed.
As always, plans are meant to be iterative and should constantly evolve to get us where we’d like to go.
Cheers to the best time of your life!