For four years I wrote for 60 minutes a day every weekday. It's how I started my workday. 6:30am, with no one in the office, and before any work demands had crept into my mind, I wrote. This writing was entirely for my Microsoft blog. Two posts a week for four years without a miss (except holidays and vacations).
And then, on Friday, February 16th, 2024, I stopped. That was the last day of my 33 year Microsoft career. I had been on a mission to "write it all down", capturing as much of my learnings as possible. Leaving a paper trail, for others to leverage after I was gone. I posted my final Microsoft blog entry that morning. My paper trail, incomplete but definitely far beyond what most others had left, would remain as a Microsoft resource as I exit stage left.
No Freer Time
I have often told fellow employees who were transitioning jobs that "there's no freer time than the time between jobs." I even posted about that line in November of 2021, when I was enjoying a transition of my own, into a role that I created myself, pitched to management, and landed. Here is that post, as it was written in 2021:
You are given a fair amount of vacation time as a Microsoft employee, and you should use every day given to you. Vacation is a good break, and a wonderful chance to decompress. But there's also a downside to vacation that I hear an increasing number of people refer to, and that is the feeling of being behind when you return from the vacation. This is typically a signal of the need to better delegate and/or better set expectations with the team. But even then, given how passionate you are for your job, the challenge may be mentally "switching it off" while you're on vacation. Personally, I think I was better at taking vacations when my kids were younger than I am now. Another "work in progress."
There is one very magical vacation time that I think overall is underutilized. And it is so rare, that it really should be savored more. When you are transitioning jobs, there is an opportunity for you to take a vacation like no other. You have just finished transitioning your workload to someone else. And you have yet to have your new workload built up. You are in this magical middle place, where no debt is accruing. You are not holding anything or anybody up. You can more readily point your mind elsewhere. You are free, from a work perspective.
Most people can count on their own fingers the number of complete job changes they've had. Not re-orgs, where you bring your same (or similar) responsibilities with you. I'm talking about new role and/or new team. When you find yourself in one such transition, recognize the rarity of it, and then take advantage of it. Don't rush to the new job. Create space here, and experience a level of rejuvenation rarely found. Savor these moments.
Across my Microsoft career, I've only had four of these transitions. And I'm happy to report that I'm 3 for 4 on carpe-ing diem.
May 1991 - between college and Microsoft. I took a full month off and just enjoyed the summer, intentionally spending as much time with all of my good friends in Virginia before driving far away from them.
August 1996 - between Windows and Java. This is the one I didn't capitalize on. I went straight to writing controls for Windows to writing controls for Java. I don't think I took even a day of vacation there.
June 2006 - between WPF and Splash (Zune). This was my best implementation of the between jobs vacation. I took my 8 week sabbatical, and added 3 more weeks of unpaid leave onto it to create my "77 Saturdays" summer (11 weeks where every day felt like Saturday). I aligned it perfectly with my boys' summer vacation, who were 7 and 4 at the time. The word "wonderful" doesn't do it justice.
November 2021 - between Product Engineering and People Engineering. This is the one coming up. This is when I put a bow on 30 years of product development and then turn all of my attention to people development. This won't be a long break between roles. But given all the practice I've had at fully, quickly, and completely "switching off" as part of my annual weeklong retreats, I know I will be able to make the most of it.
Play the pause!
Play The Pause
That “Play the pause” closing is a line I had heard from, of all places, Karate Kid (a perfect example of the "mining for gems" mindset … more on that in a future post). Meiying's violin teacher was encouraging her to be more mindful of what she was playing. From the short stint of music instruction I took, I had never heard that phrase before, but it instantly made perfect sense to me. Learning how to play an instrument, you're struggling to make the transitions from note to note to keep up with the beat of the music. So when there's a rest in the music, it's very easy to just see this as a moment of relief from your playing, or more time to start getting ready for the next note you're going to play. But in that way, the pause isn't getting the attention it deserves. To play the pause is to be more aware of the pause's place in the music, of its purpose as part of the song. It is like the negative space in graphic design: intentionally placed space, to be appreciated.
As I was saying my goodbyes at Microsoft, many people asked me "what's next?" I had built up a list of a dozen different options. Much like my father who retired from his 9-5 data processing career and took up several part-time jobs (including pewtersmith, electrician, and church handyman), I saw many ways that I could continue to contribute. With both of my parents "working" (volunteer or otherwise) for as late into their lives as they were able, I couldn't imagine myself just stopping. People would ask if I was retiring and I would quickly respond, "No!" (I even mistakenly called retirement "the r-word" in my linkedin post, which understandably drew laughs from LinkedInLunatics (reddit)).
But after writing down all those options, I made it a point to not just pick one, or two, and start going. On Saturday, Feb 17th, 2024, I was entering the "no freer time than the time between jobs" period. And I was for sure going to seize it. I gave myself one concrete assignment: over the course of the next year, write and publish a book. This would give me something to focus on, a mental outlet that would keep me from feeling the need to hurry up and find something else to do. It would be a one-year pause in my work life, that I was determined to intentionally play.
Write a Book
I enjoyed two weeks of quality time with my family and friends, and then I got started with my writing. I went through all 400 of my blog posts, grouping and categorizing them, and ended up identifying five potential books: Teach-It-All, Optimize Life, Up/Joy/Now, Play Hard, and Poetry In Motion. I picked Teach-It-All, as that felt the most timely, having just finished my role as Windows' Director of Learning and Development. I established my writing habit of 90 minutes every weekday. I built a spreadsheet to track my progress as the table of contents took shape and then the content began to flow.
It ended up taking me longer to put together a first draft than I had anticipated, but once I had that ready, I kicked off the review process with a collection of colleagues. This process was amazing, and the feedback I got from a wide variety of sources was pure gold. I thanked them all for the feedback, and told them I was now diving into the rewrite. This was the 11 month mark of my pause, and one month after an important new behavior showed up for me.
Restlessness
I have long described myself as a "professional sleeper", falling soundly asleep within a minute of my head hitting the pillow, and then not moving until my alarm goes off. But last November, that pattern changed suddenly. I would still fall soundly asleep … but then two to three hours later I would be wide awake with no interest in going back to bed. When that went on for a week straight, the debugging began. What's changed in my routine? In what I'm eating? Or when I'm eating? In my exercise? In my social life? Nothing jumped out at me.
Another week of low sleep and pondering the cause, it dawned on me that my parents' "life of service" mindset inside of me was probably looking for ways to get my attention. A ten month pause was enough; time to get a move on already. The writing I was doing was clearly not sufficiently satisfying. But why? I had been writing for years and was very driven by it. What was so different with this book writing? I realized it was missing the regular feedback loop. Blog posts sparked discussions, which sparked more blog posts. Sitting in my tree house writing a book was very isolated by comparison.
The Conclusion
Sitting down and chaining 45,000 words together coherently was a wonderful experience, and it feels great to have accomplished that. I know it would feel even better if I had gotten all the way to publishing it. (At some point , that may very well still happen.) But what I realized from my restlessness was that this was off the mark from what I wanted to do.
Ernest Hemingway said, "The writing doesn't start until the rewrite." Uplevel Pro is where my rewrite will happen. Not just Teach-It-All, but of all five books I had envisioned at the start, and more. And this rewrite is going to be in a format that more fully resonates with me. A living dialogue. A progressive rendering. A grander synthesis.
The day I had this epiphany was followed by a restful night of sleep. And I've been back to professionally sleeping ever since. Pause played. Now it's time to hit the notes.