Have a one year garden leave, struggling to fill the time as hard for wife to join me traveling while working a full time role and it's not fair to her to F off for months at a time. What would you do to stay active/keep mentally sharp with so much time?
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An entire year? wow. You must've been fairly senior/instrumental in that group. I have seen/heard of six months, but one year is wild.
1) learn languages
2) Do what's legally possible, read the small print and maybe you can do something on the side
3) I would say travel, but you have your SO as well. Maybe weekend trips?
4) renovations around the house
5) rebuild a classic car, i.e. Porsche or BMW. might take more than one year though. but totally worth it and you will have our emotional support during this endeavor.
FYI 1 year is pretty standard for any type of quantitatively driven/ macro role. 2+ years is long
I didn't know that. Thanks for clarifying.
Guess us in VC with a more fleeting mentality don't get these conditions.
Insane garden leave props to you for being that important. I’d use the time to rebuild relationships. I did this once for only a month or 2 and it was incredible what it did to my personal life. Just taking the time to hop on a call, schedule a dinner, or text someone hi goes a long way.
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To stay sharp, treat your garden leave like a job where you spend a certain number of hours a day working on a personal project. You can and should also give yourself time to relax -- give yourself half of each day as extended vacation so you recharge; but also force yourself to do some work for half the day to keep in the habit. On a year long garden leave, it's real easy to fall into the trap of sitting around the house all day wasting time and playing video games, and if you let yourself fall into that habit for a year, then once you go back to work you'll never have sharp focus again.
On my last non-compete, I scheduled myself to work 4-5 hours a day on learning projects and then gave myself the rest of the day as vacation. It's astonishing how much high-quality free learning classes are now on the internet (coursera classes, online tutorials, lots of colleges even put their entire curiculum online in free videos.) And then I spend the other half of the day on semi-vacation to go to all the stuff in New York that I never took advantage of before (museums, street fairs, meeting friends for lunch when they were free, etc). Was pretty sweet. But definitely definitely spend several hours a day doing some kind of work/learning project and treat it as a job where you don't let yourself skip it -- that's the only way to avoid the trap of becoming lazy bones around the house for a year.
100%. It's amazing.
If I had that long a period of garden leave, I'd go thru John Cochrane's free 'Asset Pricing' course that's the same course that he teaches at Booth. Then a few econ courses from MITOpenCourseware, then maybe Damodaran's courses. I've heard of people taking Cochrane's free course who just email him questions as if they were his students, and he even answers them
I also had a mandatory year off. I'd recommend staying as close to your prior schedule as possible. I maintained my workout and sleep schedule, for example. During the day, there was a lot of impromptu things I would do. e.g. go to a sports meetup, go watch a matinee, go for a long run. Got way more reading done and caught up on a lot of movies and TV too. On weekends, things were the same as when I was working. Also took a ton more trips with the wife, because my vacay time had always been the limiting factor ie get one week off in the summer and one during xmas time. Was able to take multiple 2+week vacays that year.
The advice the past 5-10 years was to pick up a job at a FANG at the same time as accepting the competing offer. Stay for a year, and hop (probably foregoing the garden pay). Not sure how that has shaped out since the layoffs.
Take some courses at a local college, you can take something interesting that’s of interest.
Take up scuba diving and dive around the world
I have been scuba diving around the world. Some notable spots:
- Cave diving in FL
- Jamaica
- Grand Cayman
- Red Sea (Dahab, Egypt)
My most memorable time was probably in the Red Sea. I met up with some locals before and they insisted we smoke hookah before scuba diving. They asked me what kind of shisha I would like and I boldly said "the strongest." They all started laughing and brought out this really strong stuff. I was buzzed AF scuba diving in the Red Sea and it was great.
Just taking the time to hop on a call, schedule a dinner, or text someone hi goes a long way.
I would advise doing the following:
- pick up BJJ
- and Muay Thai
- and endurance sports (triathlon)
These things are very time consuming; you can use the year off to create a solid base, then taper off a bit at work when you start again. Trust me, you will love it.
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