Sabbatical kicks off and April plans

Goutham Veeramachaneni -

I originally planned to take a sabbatical from May 1st to July 31st; however, I couldn’t really wait and decided to pre-pone and extend my sabbatical by a month by using my paid time off. The sabbatical officially kicks off on Tuesday, and it’s honestly a little daunting. Even though I have no obligation to make my sabbatical “successful”, I have a little nagging feeling that I need to. I don’t even know what success means here, tbh. My guess is that it’ll disappear once the sabbatical actually starts, but I decided to be a little more intentional anyway.

Overall Sabbatical Goals

If I have to have some goals for my sabbatical, it’d be the following:

  1. Form healthy habits around health, reading and writing.
  2. Rediscover the joy of building things.

If I achieve any of the two, I’d consider this a great success. I have been doing some planning towards those, however, if my plans all fall apart, and I still achieve my goals, I’d be happy.

I’ve been tracking my habits on and off for over 4 months now. And my goal is to do the following at least twice per week:

  1. Read
  2. Write
  3. Cook
  4. Workout
  5. Socialize

Not every day, but twice a week. If I miss a week or two because I am going through something, or obsessing over something new and shiny, it’s OK. This is my graph for writing, for example. It’s not perfectly, but I am pleased with it.

I want to continue to do these but also make them as easy as possible so it’s possible to do them more frequently.

It’s been a while since I built something and advocated for it within a community. I built a few things here and there for myself. It’s also been a while since I’ve written form of “serious” code. I want to spend some time building something on the edge of my abilities this sabbatical. I’ve currently settled on building an editor and Linux distro for distraction-free writing.

April plans

With this in mind, I would like to make sure I have some plans / goals for each month and then reflect at the end of the month. For April, I have three main goals:

  1. Publish the first issue of my print magazine
    1. Oh yes, I’ve launched a print magazine for me and my friends and I need to edit, typeset, print, bind, and ship the copies before April 25th.
  2. Make progress on the Prometheus governance
  3. Get a basic version of Vin working that I can use for my daily writing

I think the magazine is the main goal, and if I don’t get to Vin, it’s OK as long as I put out a great first issue. I have a lot of time, but I also don’t want to rush to not allow for other interesting pursuits that might crop up.

Bits and bobs

Something that has been taking up some brain cycles is using some of the LED Matrixes I have lying around for habit tracking. Maybe I will tinker with it too.

I am doing a lot more random writing at https://thoughts.gouthamve.dev, and it’s something I hope to continue. This and the letters I am writing for my friends should fill the writing quota for the month.

I have a typewriter now!!

And learn some more 3D design for printing and electronics. I will definitely print some TPU stamps, but maybe tinker with a printing press or a pen plotter. Let's see!