Big Time Off: The Transformative Power of Sabbaticals and How to Take One

by D.J. DiDonna

A guide to transforming your well-being and your career through purposeful time off, from Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer and founder of the Sabbatical Project. Our world of work prioritizes the urgent, but the most important moments of our life rarely happen at a desk. In Big Time Off, Sabbatical Project founder DJ DiDonna explores a simple but radical sabbaticals help us avoid sleepwalking through life by giving us time to be present in moments of celebration, difficulty, and transition. Integrating original research and compelling stories of sabbatical-takers from all walks of life—from teachers and nonprofit leaders to startup founders and Fortune 500 employees—Big Time Off explores why extended time away from work has such a profound effect on people’s identity, relationships, creativity, and direction. You’ll When to take a sabbatical—and how to avoid waiting for a crisis to take off. Why sabbaticals—unlike vacations—help you forge a new career path, feel human again, and live a more authentic life. How to navigate your sabbatical using archetypes—the explorer, the seeker, and the achiever—and avoid common pitfalls. Best practices for individuals—no matter the circumstances—and organizations of all sizes to make extended leave possible and sustainable. Whether you dream of making a big change, exploring the world, or simply carving out space to heal, think, and recalibrate, Big Time Off is your guide to creating a richer, more intentional life.

Genres: Nonfiction, Business, Mental Health, Self Help

288 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 21, 2026

Reviews

[Elena]

Big Time Off by DJ DiDonna made me rethink what a sabbatical can be—not as an extended vacation, but as an intentional pause to pursue the things that matter most.

My biggest takeaway? It made me want to take a sabbatical.

The irony, of course, is that I'm currently on maternity leave, which DiDonna is careful to acknowledge is not a sabbatical. Caring for a newborn plus toddler is its own full-time job, with very different demands and very little of the spaciousness that makes a sabbatical transformative. Still, the book challenged me to think differently about the time I do have right now.

Rather than waiting for some hypothetical future sabbatical, I want to borrow some of DiDonna's ideas and apply them to this season. His emphasis on intentionally pursuing interests, passions, and personal growth resonated with me. Even if my available hours are measured in nap times instead of months, I can still be deliberate about exploring things I rarely have space for while working.

[Sadie]

I was currently mid sabbatical as I read this book. A seeker and explorer according to Didonna, I am fortunate enough to be in the few folk who are able to to a paid sabbatical (although sadly for only 3 months not the 6 months to a year recommended). This book was super interesting and insightful even though I had already done all the prep for my own sabbatical already. It’s absolutely a concept that I think more people should participate in.

[Tom Kiefer]

DiDonna's explorations here thoroughly flesh out what a sabbatical truly is, can be, and can mean, especially (IMO) to those who've been in the workforce long enough to experience any sort of burnout, but potentially to anyone from recent high school graduates on.

Much of the book highlights much more privileged sabbatical candidates, those with the financial safety net (which not all of us have) to take such a long break from employment, presumably because those make for much more illustrative examples of what a sabbatical can be. OTOH, there is also clear recognition of this as well as advice for those seeking sabbatical-like benefits without the same degree of time or financial leeway. Overall, IAC, so much to think about...

I wish I'd found and read this 4-10 months (or more) ago, during the span between realizing my own impending burnout and getting laid off: my last few months might have oriented differently. My next few may yet.

[Vitaliy Zasadnyy]

Very practical

A very practical guide to sabbaticals. Especially if you suddenly find yourself in one and don't have an idea how to spend it.

It pushed me not to rush with the first phase, and spend enough time disconnecting

[judith]

Although I am not ready to take a sabbatical this book definitely inspired me to make it a priority in future career planning. It’s a very useful guide on how to prepare yourself mentally and logistically for taking a sabbatical, general advice (purposely broad) for what to do on sabbatical, and advice for how to prepare to return to work.

It should be a policy at all companies who value their workforce and intellectual capital to provide paid sabbatical leave. I wish my company offered this as a benefit.

A few of my favorite concepts from the book:
- Identity work is necessary to self-actualize and create a fulfilling life. This work is best supported with ample time away from our work.
- Sabbaticals are a time to try out new identities through action such as traveling, volunteering, or working on that side project you always wanted to do. Introspection is important but is only part of the equation and optimally relies on input from new experiences.
- Our mid-life dissatisfaction can often be traced back to decisions we made as young adults in high school and college. Reflecting on these decisions and taking the time to have new experiences is important in changing course before we hit a crisis.
- This quote just really hit hard: “Our education system produces young people who are smart, talented, and driven but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but no idea why they’re doing it”

Overall, a really thorough book on sabbaticals, why you should take one, and how to do so.

[Gerrine Pan]

I’m on my second sabbatical (one was a modest sabbatical as the author describes) and this book totally nails it. Both sabbaticals were life changing!! Before taking them I had been largely concerned with how I would be able to get the time away from work but good reccs in here on how to do that. Hopeful that with books like this, sabbaticals become more mainstream. Time to get my spouse to take one!

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos]

Time With Walls Around It
DJ DiDonna’s “Big Time Off” and the Art of Stepping Away Without Disappearing
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | June 11th, 2026

DJ DiDonna’s “Big Time Off” begins with a man who has done almost everything ambitious adulthood keeps rewarding and still finds himself living by a calendar that has forgotten birthdays. He has chosen meaningful work, built a company around a public good, traveled the world, earned admiration. He has acquired the sort of credentialed alibi that looks handsome in a back-flap biography and punishing in a calendar. Then an acquisition deal pulls him away from his father’s seventieth birthday dinner in New Hampshire and deposits him in a boardroom in South Africa. The scene has the suspicious neatness of a parable. That is why it works. The book does not begin with the misery of pointless labor, but with the better-defended misery of work with a halo – the kind good enough to excuse itself.

Early on, DiDonna recalls fearing the mail-order midlife-crisis tableau: red convertible, coastal highway, tie in the wind, the whole male panic catalog making its little engine noises. His youthful plan is to outrun that future by choosing purpose early, as if meaning were a lifetime warranty. The correction arrives quietly and keeps sharpening. “Big Time Off” is not especially interested in saving people from spiritless jobs. It is interested in saving them from the respectable ones, the jobs that can explain why dinner waited, why the phone stayed on, why absence kept dressing itself as duty.

Most books about rest arrange themselves on a seesaw: work bad, rest good. DiDonna’s is better because it refuses that cheap motion. Work is not the villain here. Capture is – the point at which work keeps the spare key to every hour. A sabbatical, as he defines it, is intentional extended leave from one’s job, marked by duration, intention, and disconnection. The fuller definition emerges in the stories: a sabbatical is time with walls around it, an interval in which the old self stops chairing the meeting. It can include writing, service, caregiving, pilgrimage, wandering, boredom, sublets, savings, awkward conversations, and eventually a return to work. It is not idleness. It is a temporary refusal to let usefulness become the only evidence that one deserves the room one occupies.

Experience, in DiDonna’s telling, has a curriculum no spreadsheet can master, though the spreadsheet will certainly be asked to help. The first half proceeds by stories, but the best of them do not sit obediently beside the thesis; they complicate it. Winston and Kristin Chen move their family from Boston to Rødøy, a tiny Norwegian island, where Winston’s boredom and play eventually lead him to build Voice Dream, a text-to-speech app. Aarti Shahani takes leave from NPR to write the memoir her family history has long required of her. Loren, a depleted consultant, takes a miserable sailing trip before becoming available to care for his dying father. Audrey Pe’s gap year before Stanford becomes less an adventure brochure than a recovery from an “accomplishment trance.” The variety matters. The book never quite collapses into one prescription in linen travel clothes.

The wish to get away, in DiDonna’s hands, becomes duration, disconnection, money, permission, and return. He makes sabbaticals serious enough to include father-care, budget tabs, children’s schedules, health insurance, and the body’s belated complaints without reducing them to a vacation with better paperwork. He is fond of little handles for private states – “feeling human again,” “fertile emptiness,” “regret insurance,” “functional workaholism,” “new bosses,” “sabbaticals hidden in plain sight.” Some are a touch laminated, as phrases designed to travel often are, but several earn their keep. “New bosses,” especially, is a small masterpiece of diagnosis. A person can flee an employer and immediately install a newsletter, a public performance of transformation, a bucket list, a job search, or an inner productivity foreman in the same chair.

Rather than moving directly into advice, DiDonna waits before handing over the checklists. He first has to make the reader feel why holiday-sized advice will not suffice. If “Big Time Off” opened with burn rates, sublets, auto-replies, and journaling prompts, it would feel like an unusually elaborate out-of-office message. Instead, the first eight chapters ask what must be named, arranged, defended, and explained before a person can stop answering emails before breakfast and wonder what the rest of the day might be for.

Inside the Field Guide, the book starts counting costs: months away, fixed expenses, variable ones, the porous danger of “just one” consulting call. DiDonna argues for a six-to-twelve-month ideal, while acknowledging that many people will have to take something shorter, smaller, or closer to home. Detox before you experiment. Protect disconnection almost ferociously. Journal before and during the break. Avoid announcing the sabbatical too early. Create a distinct reentry phase rather than letting job anxiety colonize the whole experience. The advice is plain enough to fit beside a budget tab, and more persuasive for refusing glamour. In this book, transcendence may require an auto-delete rule.

Prose is not the book’s deepest virtue, but DiDonna’s sentences are more alert than a manual’s need to be. He writes to explain, not dazzle, and the explaining usually has good manners. A scene opens; a gloss follows; a small conceptual handle appears; a practical implication waits near the exit. The rhythm is friendly rather than carved, coaxing rather than commanding. He is funniest when lightly puncturing himself: the wispy beard, the overwrought pilgrimage dispatches, the map-book obsession that turns a circular Buddhist walk into a private speed trial. He lacks the clipped philosophical snap of Oliver Burkeman in “Four Thousand Weeks,” but he has more room for other people’s unruly practicalities.

At times, there is too much scaffolding around the building. The book has archetypes, catalysts, barriers, first principles, phases, waypoints, prompts, examples, policy principles, and help from psychology, religion, management theory, and gap-year research. A good deal of it helps. Some of it files the jagged edges too neatly. Grief, money, caregiving, class, marriage, ambition, and illness are not always improved by being sorted into consulting-room shapes. DiDonna occasionally explains what a scene has already made vivid. Still, that explanatory habit is also what makes the book usable. He is writing for readers standing before a calendar scrubbed clean enough to frighten them, and blankness, however fertile, rarely pays rent or answers email.

Privilege is the book’s hardest weather, and to DiDonna’s credit he does not pretend the sky is clear. He repeatedly acknowledges that sabbaticals are easier for people with savings, credentials, supportive employers, founder authority, severance, spouses, foundation support, elite institutional pathways, or enough professional mobility to convert a pause into a narrative rather than a warning sign. His chapter on modest sabbaticals is both necessary and among the book’s most persuasive. Doug Bozick stays local, gardens, returns to theater, becomes primary caregiver, and understands his wife’s labor more fully. Monisha Kapila takes a two-month, child-sized leave and later builds a policy into her nonprofit. Lily Chandrasekher discovers San Francisco not as a start-up map but as a community. Derek Aguirre splits foundation-supported time over eighteen months and finds meaning in errands, coffee, guitar, and a return to his late father’s cabin.

And yet the book does not hand over the keys to everyone on the far side of the gate. The modest examples shrink the postcard, but they do not fully distribute the possibility. Even the humbler stories often depend on some form of buffer: severance, organizational authority, a grant, a spouse’s income, a flexible professional identity, accumulated trust. That does not undo the book’s argument; it supplies the weather in which the argument has to stand. “Big Time Off” is most honest when it admits that sabbatical is both a private practice and a question of who remains paid, insured, and protected while gone. It is least convincing when the leap from individual story to policy outruns the machinery required to make extended leave plausible for hourly workers, contract workers, single parents without backup, people with medical debt, or anyone for whom the missed paycheck, not the open calendar, is the point.

DiDonna’s chapter for anyone staring nervously at the org chart earns its place. It is not merely an appendix for benevolent HR departments or executives who enjoy being told that generosity improves retention. When a leader disappears, someone has to know who signs checks, owns clients, remembers passwords, soothes donors, and makes decisions without hovering permission. Junior employees may get stretch opportunities. Hidden compensation problems surface. Key-person risk becomes visible. A founder may discover, with mixed pride and insult, that the institution can operate without him. The argument is clever because it turns absence into an audit. A workplace that cannot survive one person’s protected absence may not be lean and loyal; it may simply be brittle in flattering disguise.

If there is a question humming beneath the case studies, it is not “How can I take a break?” but “What has work been helping me avoid?” This is why the sabbatical must be long enough to become uncomfortable. DiDonna is very good on the awkward middle, that neutral zone in which a person has left the old identity but cannot yet inhabit a new one. Boredom arrives. Anxiety arrives. A network sends job leads too soon. A partner wants a different kind of journey. A person who thought he wanted to write discovers he does not. A traveler learns that the mountain was never the point. DiDonna’s sabbatical is not a spa in the imagination; it is a room where the clocks have been removed and the self begins checking under the furniture for what went missing.

Many readers will arrive wanting permission and find, a little inconveniently, recognition. The book touches burnout, unused vacation, career-break stigma, caregiving strain, and the familiar bargain by which professional-class workers are invited to mistake constant availability for moral seriousness. But DiDonna is not simply reacting to the current office mood. His value is not that he has spotted a trend; it is that he has named the office’s quiet annexation of nights, weekends, bodies, family emergencies, and the private self. Slack may be new; deferral is ancient.

It sits nearer to Simone Stolzoff’s “The Good Enough Job” than to books that treat rest as a better holiday. Stolzoff asks what happens when work becomes the chief source of identity. DiDonna asks what kind of defended interruption might loosen that identification without requiring contempt for work itself. The difference matters. “Big Time Off” is not anti-ambition. It is anti-captivity. Its finest examples are not people who learn never to work hard again, but people who return with a more discriminating sense of what deserves effort.

The chapter that earns the book’s big phrase is Loren’s, where “feeling human again” stops sounding like a slogan. His sabbatical begins as recovery from the physical wreckage of consulting and becomes something far more intimate when his father’s cancer returns. He moves home, helps his father bathe and dress, records messages from him, and is present when presence matters. The chapter works because it refuses to turn leave into a better-worker machine. Time off does not merely make Loren more employable; it makes him available to love in a form that cannot be postponed, outsourced, or summarized in a performance review.

Returning, for DiDonna, is where the postcard version of sabbatical gives way. A leave can fail after it succeeds if the old life simply reattaches itself whole. His advice to return as an observer – to shadow replacements, conduct a listening tour, notice which responsibilities feel heavy and which feel alive – is advice a reader might actually use six months later, when the calendar starts refilling. So is his counsel to accept a stepping-stone job rather than stretch unemployment into a watery imitation of sabbatical. The point is not to make one perfect choice after time away. The point is to return with enough self-knowledge not to put every old meeting back on the calendar simply because the invitation still exists.

Only at its most earnest does the book begin translating experience after experience has already spoken. DiDonna likes to make sure the reader has received the lesson, signed for it, and perhaps placed it near the journal prompts. A more severe stylist might have trusted the scenes more. A more radical thinker might have pushed harder on labor, public policy, health insurance, and wage inequality. A more literary book might have left more silence around the mystery of why people change. But those books would also be less immediately usable. DiDonna trades some mystery for a bridge sturdy enough for anxious readers to cross.

Part of the book’s appeal is that its own form enacts its argument imperfectly. It wants to guide readers toward unstructured discovery through structure. It warns against productivity while supplying exercises. It insists on play while citing research. It treats sabbatical as a sacred container and then advises readers to calculate their burn rate. This could be hypocrisy, but more often it feels like adult honesty. Most people do not reach freedom by pretending logistics do not exist. They reach it, if they can, by making enough arrangements for wonder to survive first contact with rent.

One late admission saves the book from the guru trap. After writing the book, getting married, moving, taking on demanding work, and starting a family, DiDonna says he needs another sabbatical. He is not selling permanent enlightenment from a hammock with excellent lighting. He is describing a recurring depletion: the reservoir runs low again, even for those who know where the water is. Seasons of intensity must be answered by seasons of recovery, reflection, and reorientation. The sabbatical is not a cure. It is a counter-season.

Unshowy and late, the widower in the closing section becomes the book’s last witness. Speaking after his wife’s death from cancer, he regrets not quitting work entirely during her final months. But he also remembers the six months they took together just after marrying, before children, as one of the best times of their lives. That story could easily have become sentimental, but DiDonna lets it sharpen rather than soften the argument. The question is no longer whether time away is indulgent. The question is what shape regret will take if every dream is scheduled for later.

Limits remain, and they are not decorative. “Big Time Off” is better at naming a problem and designing limited remedies than at solving the largest contradiction it identifies: the people most in need of a protected pause may be least able to claim one. Still, limited remedies matter. The book gives readers language for experiences they may have been embarrassed to describe: the sadness after public success, the exhaustion beneath meaningful work, the shame of not knowing what one wants, the fear that stepping away will reveal not emptiness but desire. It also gives employers a serious reason to care: humane leave is not merely kindness but a way to find out whether trust exists before an emergency does.

On the 100-point scale, the right temperature for “Big Time Off” is 78/100, which corresponds to 3/5 Goodreads-compatible stars under the stated rubric. The number may seem cool beside the book’s practical warmth, but it reflects admiration with reservations. The examples return, again and again, to the same pressure: what happens when a person stops being legible only through work? The prose is lucid rather than arresting; the scaffolding sometimes crowds the view; the access problem remains only partly answered. This is a high three-star book, close to four, held back less by failure than by the number of people it wants to help cross a bridge that still has tolls.

Sabbatical, by the end of DiDonna’s book, is not the fantasy of disappearing from responsibility. It is the hope of returning to responsibility with less clenched hands and a less frightened heart. The best image is not the red convertible or the faraway pilgrimage, though both have their uses. It is quieter: a person standing at the edge of ordinary life after time away, sorting the old burdens by hand – this one still mine, this one no longer, this one never chosen – while some waiting face, patient until now, finally receives his full attention.

[Nancy Cao]

crazy that it takes a whole book for American workers to justify time off work

[Jenni Swan]

Impeccable timing on this release. This is a subject that has been very much on my mind, and the way it's presented in this book really resonated with me as it's full of practical elements as well as real-life examples from people who have done it, have taken a sabbatical for a variety of reasons and for different durations.

[Ryan Fehr]

Big Time Off is both entertaining and insightful. It pairs memorable stories with actionable advice on how to live a more fulfilling, intentional life. I particularly appreciated the book’s discussion of the value of truly disconnecting during sabbaticals. It’s shaped how I think about time off in my life, and will be the first book I return to on my next sabbatical.

[Jon Staff]

My sabbatical was shaped by DJ's advice and it would have been all the better if I had only followed more of what he had to say. He is the expert, and he makes a strong case for the power of such an experience. As Annie Dillard has said "How we spend our days is... how we spend our lives". If that hits you, it's worth reading this book.

[Eli Susman]

This is the definitive guide to making big time off possible, taking it with intention, navigating it wisely, and returning in a way that integrates it all. Before I went to college, I took a gap semester that changed the trajectory of my life. Big Time Off captures not just the research or the practical steps needed to take one, but the aliveness of it. The possibilities that open and experiences we may cherish for the rest of our lives. Beautifully written and filled with moving stories, this book helps you work through the timing, uncertainty, and financial realities of taking big time off—all while confronting the deeper cost of never taking it.

[Scott]

It was fun, informative, provocative, and forced me to think more deeply not just about time off but about what I want out of life (first) and work (second). Well-written, well researched, and full of anecdotes and frameworks to unlock what can be a pretty powerful tool for self-discovery, healing, and growth. Will definitely be a book I gift in the future.

[Whitley Cargile]

Really enjoyed Big Time Off! DJ did a great job of laying out the disconnect I feel between my “work identity” and who I am without my job. I think a sabbatical is in my future…

[Ugn Lee]

A good book — but if you already buy into the thesis, it is obviously less impactful. I found the first half, particularly the stories, quite interesting and inspiring. The second half, which gets more into the practical "how to take a sabbatical" stuff, was a little less relevant to me, although there were still some good nuggets.

What I found most interesting was putting some of my own thoughts about how to live a good life into a framework.

A few takeaways:

* Sabbaticals create the time and space to ask the right questions — basically, living the examined life. The emptiness of having nothing you *have* to do is actually important for growth and creativity.
* Freedom is powerful. Once you taste it, it changes your perspective. (Can you really go back?)
* A sabbatical creates opportunities for play and self-authorship. You get to try things out and figure out what you actually enjoy and what you are intrinsically motivated to do.
* It can accelerate an identity change. Try things. See what gives you juice — and, just as importantly, what doesn't. That can help reduce regrets.
* I liked the idea of a sabbatical as a rehearsal. You get some evidence that you can step outside your existing life and figure things out. That, in itself, can give you confidence.
* And what about learning for learning's sake?
* Ha — the MBA was basically a sabbatical in some ways. It was a relatively low-stakes way to step away from my existing path, explore something new, meet different people, and see what I liked.

The "field guide" portion was a little less relevant to me, but there were some useful ideas: give yourself a deadline; give yourself some time to detox before jumping into crazy exploration; approach things with a beginner's mindset; spend time with other people; and, before going back to your old life, actually revisit it. Do the things that used to occupy your time still serve you? Can you change parts of the old life to make it better, or do you need a wholesale change?

The bigger takeaway for me is that big time off can be an opportunity to strengthen relationships and exercise curiosity...and both of those are pretty important drivers of human flourishing.

Overall, a pretty good book. But I was already sold on the concept, so there wasn't a huge amount that was new to me. And I do think the message probably would have been better served as an article rather than a book: the main ideas could have been tightened. Still, the book gave me some useful frameworks for thinking about how we use our time — and how stepping away from our normal lives can sometimes help us figure out what we actually want from them.

[CatReader]

DJ DiDonna runs a business called The Sabbatical Project advocating for the role of extended time off before retirement. His 2026 book Big Time Off is a manifesto of his business, highlighting various folks who've taken sabbaticals (some more compelling than others), as well as giving pointers on how to go about taking a sabbatical.

I do think DiDonna makes a good point; one book I read a while ago but still think about frequently is Gary and Max Sirak's How to Retire and Not Die: The 3 Ps That Will Keep You Young about how many folks spend decades preparing for retirement financially but give relatively little thought to what they're actually going to do day-to-day in retirement; at worst, this can lead to years or decades of lack of fulfilment, lack of purpose, and general misery despite having 'all the time in the world.'

DiDonna advocates for essentially borrowing time against one's future retirement balance by taking periodic gaps of 6-12 months throughout one's working career to reset, explore, and grow personally; at the same time, he acknowledges this isn't possible for most people for a variety of reasons (finances, family situation, etc.) and that re-entering the workforce after these gaps isn't always easy. He shares stories of various folks who've done just that, though I hardly think the high-achieving teen taking a gap year before college really counts in that category; he also lumps folks that do a mid-career MBA in that bucket though that's debatable as well as many of those folks are still actively engaged in their regular jobs during the process (i.e., the executive MBA track). The story about how certain US armed forces leaders go off to 'war colleges' to learn in-depth about other areas of armed service was genuinely interesting, though again, still tied to their main jobs. I would've appreciated more stories of academic sabbaticals and 'true' sabbaticals where people genuinely take time off and are unemployed.

The guide to how to take a sabbatical section at the end was somewhat redundant and repetitive, especially after having listened to the book from the beginning.

My statistics:
Book 179 for 2026
Book 2485 cumulatively

[Scott Daly]

I approached this book with a bit of trepidation. I have two young children, a mortgage, a full-time job, and a second job on the side that I mostly do for fun. I, in no way, have the means or opportunity for a sabbatical, and the idea that I would seemed absurd to me.

The thing is, D.J. knows this. He understands that for the majority of his readers, sabbaticals are simply out of reach. A luxury for the privileged few. But he argues...it shouldn't be that way. And he has the receipts to prove it.

The research here was fascinating and convincing. The testimonials and real-world examples gave a glimpse into a life that I think we all want. A life where work is part of us, sure, but not all of us. A life where we have the time and space to figure out who we are and what we want to be. A life without regrets. It's a beautiful picture, and I very much want it.

Everyone working in corporate America should read this book. But most importantly, Management should.

[Jessie DePriest]

I’ve found myself in a sabbatical after an unexpected layoff that came with a significant financial benefit to keep the pressure from running to the next thing off. There are some great tips I plan to employ but I can’t exactly employ the tips about “preparing” for a sabbatical since I wasn’t given any forewarning. At least not the months of prep alluded too. My husband is still working full time and I have kids who just started their school year, so a lot of the travel tips feel impossible to employ as well. The guidance on looking for the next job if you’re not returning to the same job implies a healthy job market and that the next gig will come quickly/easily. I guess this is a long way of saying some of the suggestions still felt out of reach and unrealistic for some. Overall I think it’s a worthwhile read that is helping me stretch my definition of possibilities and take advantage of this massive gift of what is effectively paid time off.

[Adam Sandell]

I wondered whether there was a whole book in this. There is! It's exceptionally well-written, and manages to combine great stories about how people have approached and benefited from sabbaticals along with clear, practical advice. And it's a book that recognises that travelling around the world for a year won't be an option for everyone.

I've taken two short sabbaticals in my career, including one in the last year — and I didn't approach either of them as well as I would have done if I'd read this book. I'm now inspired to plan another one somewhere down the line. And, honestly, I felt refreshed and invigorated from just reading this thoughtful, enjoyable book.

If you've ever thought about a sabbatical, you should read this book. And, if you've never thought about a sabbatical, you should really read this book. It's potentially life-changing!

[Jorge Leal]

I read this on the eve of my mini-sabbatical before starting my MBA. While reading it, I discovered the author categorized MBAs as a flavor of sabbatical, and that my 2.5-month "sabbatical" might fall short of what the author considers a proper one.

The book provides a practical framework of different ways to experiment with a sabbatical and its stages. It also covers the benefits and how many people should take one. Coming from a country where the cost of living is at the cheaper end of the world, a sabbatical is honestly a luxury that only a limited percentage of the population can have. Unlike the author, I can't relate to suggestions like one month's rent at home paying for several elsewhere; for many Colombians and me, it's the other way around. I feel immensely privileged to be able to do it.

[Connor Toohill]

I really enjoyed this book. I've yet to take a sabbatical myself, but I know several people who have and they've often found it transformative. The author does a great job of weaving together detailed stories of "examplars" with insights from psych / social science about why sabbaticals can be so effective. I definitely came away hoping to take a sabbatical myself in the future.

[Reader]

After taking a few sabbaticals myself and feeling how much they’ve changed my life I am so happy that finally someone researched this topic with scientific rigor! Amazing work and clear signal to both employees and employers.

[Tony CW]

Great inspirations and examples about how people around the world take sabbatical.

[Felipe Appio]

It’s just a must for everyone thinking about taking a sabbatical. I highly recommend it.

[AJ]

Inspiring. Just 100 pages too long.

[Annelies]

Graag gelezen nu onze eigen Big Time Off concreter wordt. Gaf bevestiging + realiteitszin. Zowel concreet als inspirerend. Zou het wel niet aanraden als er geen plannen zijn.