The intentional sabbatical

Or, how my inherent laziness has made me productive on a big project

Photo by Elizeu Dias on Unsplash

This semester I’ve been on sabbatical to work on the second edition of my book, Flipped Learning, A Guide for Higher Education Faculty. I’m doing two main things in this project: completely rewriting a survey of the research literature about flipped learning in higher education, and conducting faculty case studies. These will add at least four new chapters to the book.

I’m currently halfway through the semester, but thankfully, more than halfway through the project. When I was working on the first edition ten years ago, it was my first book and I had nothing like a plan for getting it done. I ended up working 10-hour days the summer before the deadline because I had frittered away the preceding year with ineffective or nonexistent work on that book. This time, I was determined not to do that, and I’ve taken a much more intentional approach.

That approach has worked out well so far, and today I wanted to share some of the major parts of what’s made it so effective. It’s really just an application of the fundamental principles of “intentional academia” to a specific (large) case.

Start with scheduling

In my last post, I said that in the real world, being intentional often just looks like scheduling: Creating a coherent framework for what you are going to do, and not do, at given times of the day, days of the week, and weeks in the month. Time boxes can be part of that, but there is no single way to do it – only a single imperative that you really have to have a framework for time, if you want your mind to be at its freest.

For this project, the framework originated at a very high level, very early on.

While I was writing a proposal for the sabbatical in 2024, I had to create a timeline for the project. I did something uncharacteristically smart for me: I asked another person for their advice and listened to what they had to say. That person was David Clark, my colleague and co-author on the Grading for Growth book and blog. The case study part of my sabbatical project, is basically a direct copy of what David did on his sabbatical a few years ago when we were writing the Grading for Growth book. He took a semester to interview faculty on their use of alternative grading, and the resulting 17 case studies ended up being, in my view and many others’, the best part of the book.

Toward the end of 2024, I asked David for details on how he made his sabbatical so successful. The first thing he said was that I needed to start, immediately, to line up faculty interviewees. As he explained, it will take more time than you think, at every step, to get faculty involvement: soliciting interest, getting people to commit to interviews, drafting and finalizing their interviews, and more. Especially when all of this involves email, which if you read this blog are aware that this is not many professors’ strong suit.

David is a very smart guy and is usually right about things, so just after New Year’s Day, I made out a Google Form for prospective interviewees and started pushing it out on email and social media. I decided I wanted between 15–20 case studies for the book and would be satisfied with 10–12 good ones. To get that many case studies, I estimated conservatively that I would need at least double that number of actual interview responses, so I would have some room for picking and choosing. And to get around 40 interview responses, I estimated – again, conservatively – that I would need at least 80 responses to my interest form, possibly more (given many faculty’s propensity to say “yes” to things and then decommit or forget).

By the end of April, I only had 30 total responses to the interest form. And to my dismay, when I looked over those responses, almost all of them were from STEM disciplines – a serious problem because the publisher had conducted a focus group of readers who unanimously agreed that the first edition had too much STEM focus. So I redoubled my marketing efforts over the summer to specifically target humanities, social science, arts, and business faculty, as well as centers for teaching, in the hope that I could un-skew the responses.

Long story short, it all worked out. By the middle of August, when I had planned to really begin the sabbatical project, I had just over 50 responses – still not as much as I wanted, but a reasonably large sample – and around 30 actual interviews. From those, I’ve been able to select 23 faculty members to assemble into 19 case studies, which are shaping up to be really cool and useful.

Had I waited until the start of the sabbatical itself (August) to start the interview solicitation process, there is no chance that I would complete this project on time. My takeaway: In GTD language, a project is defined as an outcome that requires more than one step and which you want to complete in one year. When you have a project that’s of this scope, you have to take that “one year” part literally. On all projects, especially ones this big, start early, count the costs, and have a framework for how you’re going to complete it, or you and the project will be toast.

Having a time framework on a large scale allows you to be intentional about what you’re not going to do, as well. Starting nine months in advance allowed me to commit to doing absolutely no work on the sabbatical over the summer, except for ongoing communications. I was scheduled to teach a class during May, and I really just wanted to chill on the beach and practice my bass the rest of the summer, rather than work like a dog as I did with the first edition 10 years ago. Since I knew what was coming well ahead of time and had made a little progress by the start of the summer, I was able to set a firm start date of August 15 for all sabbatical work¹, and say no without guilt to everything related to before then.

The Master Plan

I have one plan for completing my project in the sabbatical proposal that was reviewed by my department and the Provost, and another slightly different Master Plan that I am actually following, that looks a little like this:

• Last half of August: Set up the infrastructure that I need to complete this project: folders, directory structures, accounts, and so on, as well as figuring tools and workflows, like I described earlier in my post on using Obsidian and Zotero to take research notes.

• September: Conduct all background research. For the case studies, that meant getting all initial interview responses collected. For the research review, it meant reading all the papers I intend to read and curating my notes.

• October: Get everything in position for drafting the manuscript. For the case studies, that meant turning all the interview responses into rough drafts of the actual case studies that I could send out to authors for their comments. For the research review, it meant constructing detailed outlines of all parts of the review.

• November (present day): Draft all the things. Then put them into cold storage until Q1 of 2026 when the entire book manuscript is being assembled and edited.

• December: Absolutely nothing.

You read that right: In December, I want to do absolutely no work whatsoever. Not on the sabbatical, not on planning my Winter 2026 courses… nothing. I want to enjoy the holidays with my family, sit in my comfortable chair in the family room and read books and watch movies, and play my bass, for one month without interruption². Because this is a SABBATICAL, and on some level, this has to mean rest. Otherwise, we really need to work on the branding.

So in the spirit of the Law of the Whole Person, I designed my whole plan around doing no work during December and then working backwards from there to make things fit.

There is a larger plan in place that also is predicated on the idea of large chunks of doing no work whatsoever. When the publisher asked me when I would like to set the deadline for the manuscript, I told them August 1, 2026. I was fully aware when I said this, that I could easily complete the entire manuscript by the end of May, and I still plan on doing this. But I think you can guess by now that I am committed to not working in the summer, so I started with that as a priority and worked backwards.

The day to day

Plans are all well and good, but execution is where things really happen. On a day-to-day basis this fall, I’ve kept in mind a primary principle that’s intuitively obvious to most of us, but that’s also backed up by science: human beings on average are only really capable of about four to six hours of effortful work every day. After that, most of us are too spent to be useful.

Those four to six hours are most of the time carved up into 50- to 75-minute segments throughout the day in the form of classes and meetings and research with a bunch of dead space in between. But when you’re on sabbatical, you can cluster all of that time into one place. And that’s my goal, and my daily plan: Do four to five hour sprints of heads-down work every morning and then stop. My schedule looks like this:

• Wake at 5:45am.

• Coffee, Wordle, reading, and day planning for an hour (until around 7:00).

• Be at the keyboard, ready to work by 7:30.

• Work without distractions on sabbatical tasks from 7:30 to 12:30 with one 20-minute break.

• At 12:00-12:30: STOP WORKING and put sabbatical stuff away until tomorrow³.

• Have lunch and take a 3-mile walk.

• Afternoon: Do whatever else is in the next actions list. A lot of times that’s blog maintenance (posts like this one, guest article management over at gradingforgrowth.com, etc.) or personal learning time or bass practice.

• By 5:00pm, shut it all down and enjoy the evening.

Do I always follow this schedule? No. Sometimes life intervenes, sometimes things go longer than expected, sometimes I have a dentist appointment, etc. But it’s a framework I can live with and live by.

Is this schedule sustainable in the long term? Also no. When I get back to my job in January, I will be teaching three classes on Monday/Wednesday/Friday and this schedule won’t work. But it can work on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I plan on keeping it on those days, because there’s an entire rest of the book that needs to be updated. But for now, I am taking full advantage of the unique scheduling opportunities afforded by a sabbatical.

How it’s going

As I mentioned earlier, I am well ahead of schedule on completing the project, possibly (OK, probably) because I’m so highly motivated by doing nothing in December. (My own inherent laziness is a clear common denominator behind everything I write about here, if you know what to look for.)

For the case studies, I’ve been collecting interview responses since the summer and drafting the case studies since August, updating these as faculty members review drafts and give comments. By doing it this way, it turns out I’ve already written most of the case studies, in pieces, and all that remains is assembly. Earlier this week, I sat down to write an initial draft of the first of the three chapters that I had planned, and was able to complete it in roughly 15 minutes because all I had to do was copy and paste the drafts I’d had in progress into a single document. The only bottleneck is getting interviewees to contribute their comments and suggestions on the drafts.

These will eventually need to be edited for consistency and flow, but that is something for next semester as the entire manuscript comes together. This is an example of where knowing your scope of work comes in very handy. I decided early, in the sabbatical proposal, what I planned to do and what I did not plan to do with the time. I did plan to complete a complete first draft of the case studies, but I did not commit to completing, nor do I intend to complete, the final draft.

It also is an example of taking small steps consistently within coherent systems. Rather than waiting to draft three monolithic chapters of case studies, I’ve been incrementally drafting the individual case studies bit by bit every day for a couple of hours. And now putting them all together is just a matter of keyboard shortcuts.

I’ve not been doing the same sort of thing with the research review. Instead, I’ve been focusing on surfacing relevant papers to read, selecting what seem to be the best of the bunch, reading those carefully and taking good notes that are curated within a coherent system (Obsidian, for me) where I can get to the results easily for making and summarizing the overall themes, and building detailed outlines of what to write. Since it’s November, according to my Master Plan I am drafting the research review. The outlines make it simpler, though not effortless, to write up these drafts. I don’t have to think about what citations or main ideas I’m going to present, or when. This has already been worked out. And having all the results of each individual paper pre-summarized in the Obsidian canvas that I wrote about here makes it very easy to simply scan visually and know what I want to write.

What I’ve learned

First: Like I said earlier, with any project but especially big ones, it’s important to do a thorough and careful accounting on the front end of all the steps you think you’re going to need to go through completion of a project, and start further in advance than you might think. Build in slack time for not only things that take longer than you expected, but also simply to rest. If email communication is involved, it’s not a bad idea to multiply all time expectations by 1.5.

Second: The Law of the Whole Person is real. Start with the human considerations on these large projects and build in time for you to be a whole person. That can mean, like it does for me, quitting by 12:30 in the afternoon so that I can focus on other things such as exercise. It could also mean setting a hard start date in addition to a hard stop deadline so that you’re giving yourself permission not to work on the project up until a certain day. Whatever it looks like for you, don’t just say yes to a project and then let scope creep take over until you have no life left.

Third: Don’t be afraid to put systems and schedules around things, even if there’s a nagging voice in the back of your head saying that something is going to come up to break those schedules. Of course something will come up and break those schedules from time to time. But as they say, failing to plan is planning to fail. Having the schedules set up as frameworks lessens your workload, because all you have to do is show up and do the boring stuff every day for a few hours and let the wins accumulate.

Etc.

• Any discussion of my sabbatical project would be incomplete without mentioning how clutch various AI tools have been. I know people have varying opinions on how AI should be used in academia. But without a doubt, these tools have been absolutely crucial to my progress on this project. For example, I set up a NotebookLM for each of the five research questions that structured the research review, and when I found a paper that I wanted to include, I’d dump it into both Zotero and the relevant notebook. Then in addition to actually reading the papers, I could chat with the notebook to surface different insights and double-check my own reasoning. And I already mentioned in an earlier post how scite.ai was helping me cut through the mass of research to find the 20% of papers that influence 80% of the field. You may have legitimate issues with AI, but if you are a researcher and you’re not tapping into it, you are trying to build a skyscraper with hand tools.

• Music: Lately I’ve been working on expanding my listening beyond my usual Spotify playlists. I asked Gemini to create a list of albums that, based on my listening habits, I would enjoy but might have missed. It gave me a list of 20 of these and I’ve been sitting down with 1-2 of them a week. This week was The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and all I can say is, I think I’ve been sleeping on a lot of great music.

1. “Sabbatical work”... What an absurd contradiction in terms, but here we are.

2. Originally there was a plan to tap out of the human race for the entire month of December and spend it somewhere warm on a beach, but sadly that became too expensive.

3. I’ve been ending these work sprints a lot of times with “sabbatical check-ins” on LinkedIn, like this one, where I summarize what I did that day and what I learned. These have been very useful for me, and gives others a look behind the scenes at how sabbatical research works.