DJ DiDonna’s new book traces the rise of the sabbatical.Evgenia Eliseeva/Supplied
Sabbaticals still conjure a type. The elbow-patched professor taking a year off to write in obscurity. Or the tech bro, setting off an adult gap year to build his AI side project.
In some parts of the world though, sabbaticals aren’t reserved for brogrammers or the ivory tower. Under French labour codes, eligible employees can request six to 11 months of unpaid sabbatical leave. In Sweden, workers are entitled to six months’ unpaid leave to study or focus on an entrepreneurial project, their jobs protected. And in Australia, staff get paid long service leave after seven to 10 years with the same employer.
While some governments are formalizing sabbaticals, more firms are dangling paid and unpaid leaves. In Canada, 27 per cent of human resource managers across various knowledge fields say they now offer paid sabbaticals as a work-life balance perk, according to a spring survey from recruitment firm Robert Half. Younger workers who prize flexibility are scanning companies’ sabbatical policies; LinkedIn even introduced a “career break” feature that lets people describe what they did during gaps in employment.
With burnout intensifying, a new book traces the rise of the sabbatical. In Big Time Off: The Transformative Power of Sabbaticals and How to Take One, DJ DiDonna proposes taking a small fraction of our retirement years earlier.
Sabbaticals, the senior lecturer at Harvard Business School argues, offer rare windows of uninterrupted time. Time for unravelling burnout. Or spawning the big ideas and career reboots that don’t necessarily come sitting at a desk. It can be a time for health, or a period of re-invention, people tapping into parts of themselves that get lost in the grind.
“Taking off is a subversive act,” writes DiDonna, who interviewed nearly 250 sabbatical alumni. “The strongest case for sabbaticals lies in one of the most common phrases in my research: feeling human again. Not like a machine whose habits and schedule revolve around work but a living, loving, sensitive individual seeking meaning, fulfillment, and joy in the day-to-day.”
After co-founding a fintech company, DiDonna took a four-month sabbatical, including a six-week pilgrimage in Japan. (He took no pay but kept his health insurance.) He’s since designed sabbatical policies for nonprofits, Fortune 500s and other organizations. DiDonna, who founded The Sabbatical Project, a hub for research and advocacy, spoke from Vienna, where he’s on paternity leave.
How do sabbaticals collide with current norms at work?
The dominant story is that you graduate from high school or college and you work until you retire. For most people, that’s not actually what happens. Unfortunately, breaks tend to happen to people because we can’t run, full-on, for 40, 50 years.
Still, we have a work devotion norm: if you take more time off, you’re not a hard worker or serious about your career.
This is beginning to deteriorate. The pandemic opened the door to more possibilities around how, where and when we work, and the Great Resignation gave people permission to renegotiate their relationships with employers.
There’s also been a generational shift. Gen Z and younger millennials value flexibility, meaning and purpose in their work, more than compensation. Employers who give people time to pursue something meaningful, it lets them check the flexibility box for younger workers.
In the book, some describe their sabbaticals as major rites of passage on par with a wedding day or childbirth. How can it be so life-altering?
Two thirds of sabbaticals are catalyzed by a negative event – a life quake in a relationship, health, employment. Your life is going to be very different and you have no choice but to take time off.
It means you might be taking care of an ailing loved one instead of continuing to work 70-hour weeks. What does that do to your perspective about how you want to live life and be there for family?
Other sabbaticals can be a chance to live a different life, to try on a different identity. Maybe you always wanted to write a book, work for a nonprofit or volunteer. It’s stepping out of routine and being more intentional about life, for a relatively small chunk of it.
A sabbatical also gives you practice. Call it retirement practice or regret insurance, pursuing things that are important to you but that you normally don’t give enough time to.
What do the better sabbatical policies look like?
Best practice is, at the very least, keeping employees’ health insurance active or having a stipend so people can float their mortgages. Some companies try to get away with what is essentially a long vacation – a few weeks or a month. But the more it looks like months, and the more it resembles keeping an entire salary, the more equitable the policy becomes. If it’s equitable, everyone can take it and it doesn’t build resentment inside the company.
How do people mess up their sabbaticals?
Not giving it enough time. Surrendering their autonomy around it, working through it, or being beholden to other people’s schedules and ideas.
Doing work on sabbatical that’s very separate from your job – that uses a different muscle, matters to you, or answers a question you’ve had about yourself – this is recuperative. But I would discourage taking on consulting gigs related to your job; then you never switch out of the work mindset.
Honestly, I’ve never met anyone who regretted what they did on sabbatical. And these are people who got divorced, or took care of an ailing family member, or had health troubles.
People assume that taking time off is a panacea. It’s more of a mirror. It can be a mirror telling you that the ways you work, take time off and try to be productive don’t actually work for you.
Your most fulfilled sabbatical takers end up helping family and friends through trying times. Alex Pang, who studies four-day work weeks, found people frequently spend their third day off aiding others. Why does care get overlooked when we talk about re-organizing our work lives?
People get so caught up in the urgent things they forget to prioritize the important things. Often we’re evaluated on the urgent things: How did I do against my goals this quarter? You miss a few of those and you know you’re in trouble. But when you miss time with ailing loved ones, or picking your kid up from school, or a workout or art class for the umpteenth time, it might not seem like you’re failing. But those add up and culminate in a life of regret.
Sabbaticals, you acknowledge, remain a privilege for those who can walk away from income. Any prospect this becomes more accessible?
I think about the trajectory of parental leave. Fifty years ago, paid parental leave was a non-starter. We identified something. Those who had the power to adjust policies got to experience it. Then, a grassroots movement pushed for it. Society came to value it and made it happen. We have to remember, even the weekend is only 100 years old. These are things we can value, fight for and put in union contracts. The first step is to tell the story of people who already do it and realize it’s not a trade-off on productivity or wealth.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.