Thanks for the response, Katie!
I’m in Political Science, and my area is Political Theory. So while my colleagues get to deal with Congress, elections, International Relations, and the like, I get to have my students read Sophocles, Plato, Aquinas, Havel, etc. 
My pleasure!
Wow! That’s incredible! Terrific.
My first major was Poli Sci! I concentrated on Civil Liberties, every law class offered (humongous university) in Poli Sci and Criminal Justice and I had a phenomenal prof who was on loan from Israel for international studies and cool stuff like nuclear deterrence. I took every course the latter taught.
I’ve never dealt with such early Political Theory. I imagine that would be an eye opener for me. Which philosopher would you recommend as both enlightening and readable?
I have book that was my Dad’s. (He died when I was four.) I picked up that book by the most brilliant St. Thomas Aquinas and read a bit. I reread it and I thought that it was over my head.(And I’m a good reader. LOL!) I’d really have to make a concerted effort to read it. And I have picked up Dante in Spanish that was a cakewalk comparatively. 
“Treatise on Law (from the Summa Theologica)”.
Fabulous material as are Augustine’s works!
42! Wow, we have limits of 30 over in the UK, and that seems like a lot.
I have my students start with Sophocles’s Antigone. Many of them have read the drama before, and it’s a pretty accessible way in to a discussion of competing obligations among conscience, family, and political community — and just how complicated those obligations become when they overlap with one another. The National Theatre did a contemporary staging of it several years ago (with Christopher Eccleston as Creon and Jodie Whittaker as Antigone), and they’ve got a solid playlist of clips and commentary on YouTube. (Alas, they seem not to have ever made the full production available for purchase in any format; it’d be an instant buy if they did.)
The first three books of Plato’s Republic are also pretty readable, and are great for discussing the nature of justice, injustice, power, and truth.
Aquinas is definitely a challenge! I have my students read Summa Theologiae I-II Q. 90 and I-II Q. 91 (the first two questions in the Treatise on Law), and they find it tough going. And to be fair to them, I didn’t encounter Aquinas until my first year of graduate school, and I found it tough going then! I try to prep them by giving them an overview of the structure Aquinas uses for each article in every question. Thankfully he’s very consistent, so once students understand how each part of the structure works, it becomes easier for them to get his key points. 
Everything old is new again. You can always find someone who said something first. But I’m going to keep trying new things (even if they’re only new to me) and sharing what I learn. I’m not as smart as Drucker or Covey, but I know there are people who I can help that they can’t. I consider myself to be in permanent beta, and I think it is absolutely worthwhile to share and teach what has worked for you.
I predict that the next trend will be Anti-Productivity: the idea that in order to make progress, you have to completely undo any previous progress, repeated until no progress is possible. It’s an idea that’s so counterintuitive, it just has to be a big moneymaker. I started writing about this last year, but never seem to get very far… 
Perhaps if everyone were in the same, static situation, productivity could be a subject that could be written about definitively, once, and the book closed. That’s not the case.
This thread, for example, began by helping someone understand how many different ways the concept of a sabbatical can be applied. Why didn’t we all enter this thread with perfect understanding about it? Wouldn’t it be helpful for someone to follow up on this thread with an article or a podcast episode elaborating and summarizing some of what’s learned? Will there be readers and listeners who didn’t see this thread who will benefit from that?
In a sense this is good, though. Ten years ago, I didn’t have time for some of these approaches (like a sabbatical) or the self-awareness of what I would do if were to implement these tools. Now that I’m older (42) and more established in my career, these things coming back around allow me to work at them now.
I predict that the next trend will be Anti-Productivity: the idea that in order to make progress, you have to completely undo any previous progress, repeated until no progress is possible. It’s an idea that’s so counterintuitive, it just has to be a big moneymaker. I started writing about this last year, but never seem to get very far…
you’re not being very productive 
Hyper unproductivity 
There were 29 boys! But actually they were a very good bunch.
In another district, they didn’t want to pay the substitute teachers. I already had about 35 kids in my class.
When the principal asked me to take some students as my neighbor, another third grade teacher, was out sick. I said “Sure. How many kids?”
“All of them!” I thought she was joking.
Another third grade teacher I found out later refused. Union rules said we didn’t have to take them. (It would have been nice if she had helped out!) So I had close to SEVENTY kids in my room. Oh did I sleep soundly that night!
Then it happened again and again. Initially the administration was so thankful. After a while, they started expecting it of me.
And still the other teacher refused.
Thirty is not that bad. I rarely had that many– always more. They just keep adding them on if they can get away with it, But actually the kids were never the problem. The little ones I can entertain!
How do you get the judges to “honor” your blocked out time?
That’s a nice idea, actually. They do it in Mexico.
Ok, I bought Antigone and bookmarked the YouTube videos you recommended.
Also, I bought “The Republic”.
When I get to St. Thomas Aquinas I’ll get a Cliff Notes type book to help me out.
Thanks ever so much! Just fascinating!
I just advise them I have a conflict at that time if they ask if I’m available. If it is something emergent I’m more flexible, because the idea of that time is that it’s flexible to meet my needs. If that occasionally means it’s flex time for a client’s needs that’s ok with me. It has not been an issue so far.
Also, another pro tip. Turn the little number that hangs over your email (off). If you’re like me and can’t resist checking to see who or what emailed you. That’s been a game changer as well.
Sean McCabe. I’ve heard other work of his on the topic, and yeah - he seems pretty insistent that a couple of days off, or even a schedule where you’re mostly off but check in with work occasionally, is a non-starter for a sabbatical.
Doubling back to the post you were replying to, that’s the thing with Sean’s philosophy of “sabbatical” - he very much promotes it as all-or-nothing, and an option that’s (practically speaking) available to everybody. From Sean’s writing elsewhere:
It is my mission, by 2047, to get every company in the world to pay their employees to take off every seventh week.
I think your version is very reasonable. I think the version that’s promoted by the guest in question (and objected to by @peedy) can be very…idealized? Pipe-dream-y?
In many professions, I think that taking a week completely off with no scheduled or planned check-ins with work, email, etc. just isn’t an option. If I recall correctly, even David had to do a modified version where he popped in occasionally just to make sure nothing was “on fire”.
I think Sean has structured his business in such a way, and in such a field, where these things are possible. And honestly, I think he probably relies for that business on a number of industries, technologies, etc. where the ideas he promotes are probably less feasible, practically speaking.
Either way, nothing against the idea as a broad, generalized thought. I just agree with you (@OogieM) that the implementation of that idea needs to be adapted on a per-person basis.
If Sean’s goal is to drive change at the corporate level, then it seems like he can’t ever be out of touch in advocating for it. Every employee who says “well, I’d like to, but it’s not realistic,” just needs to be pointed towards their manager and HR department as the problem.
I’m seeing this late, so I apologize if my reply is a duplicate, but it occurs to me that maybe David HAS lived like no one else, and now this is him “living like no one else”. I also vehemently disagree you should wait until later to live your life. That’s a recipe for regret.
Perhaps with more people talking about sabbaticals and actually doing them, they will become more common and accepted. It seems like they have value, even to a begrudging participant like David. Like Ferris Bueller said “Life moves pretty fast sometimes, if you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you might miss it.”
Sabbaticals are definitely a professional-class thing. I definitely could have done a sabbatical if I had structured my vacation time around it and planned appropriately, but only for a max of 16 days a year. But someone working two jobs just to pay rent and keep the kids fed and wearing clothes without holes? No way they can do that. And there are millions of people stuck in that rut, at least in the U.S. Definitely different in Europe!
But it’s not because these people are trying to ‘hustle’ - they’re just trying to keep their heads above water. They would look at you like you had two heads if you tried to lecture them on the urgent necessity of taking a sabbatical.
On the other hand, this episode wasn’t targeting someone working for minimum wage at a fast-food joint. So there’s that…
I agree that they’re a professional-class thing - but I think that even some parts of the professional class could have significant challenges.
I would bet that it’s much more do-able for the professional-class people that are in companies large enough and/or abstracted enough to do it.
It’s when you have customers that have time-specific needs that they need handled by a specific person at the company that things could easily come unglued.
David ran into this on his sabbatical, if I recall correctly. He didn’t “do work” during the week, but I think he built in some time to check in and see if anything was “on fire”, so to speak. If it was, he’d have had to jump in and take care of it.
I think the sabbatical mindset is fantastic though, as long as we don’t get dogmatic about the implementation.