The Long Goodbye: A September Spent on Garden Leave

Hey everyone, Jamie here.

I'm writing this on the last day of September, with that distinct, crisp autumn air starting to settle in. For the past few weeks, I've been in a strange sort of professional limbo, a state well-known to many in the UK tech scene but rarely talked about: garden leave.

Tomorrow, October begins, and on Monday, I start my new job. But this month has been a mandatory pause, a quiet buffer between the old and the new. It's not a holiday, not really. It’s the strange, paid purgatory where you've left your last role mentally, but you can't yet begin your next one. It’s a unique opportunity to hit the reset button, and it taught me a few things.

The Grand Plans vs. The Quiet Reality

Every developer I know has a list of “if only I had a month off” projects. My list was no different. I had grand ambitions: finally containerise that old side-project, deep-dive into a new language, contribute to an open-source library, maybe even build a whole new SaaS product. The temptation to turn this free time into a frantic “productivity sprint” was immense.

But the reality was much quieter, and I think, far more valuable.

For the first week, I did almost nothing related to a computer. After the handover at my last job, I needed to properly decompress. I leaned into the recent move back home, spending time with family and exploring the familiar landscapes of East Yorkshire with a fresh perspective. I dusted off my old camera, went for long walks, and disconnected from the daily rhythm of stand-ups, pull requests, and deployment pipelines.

It felt strange. As developers, we often tie our sense of worth to what we're building and shipping. To deliberately do neither felt like an act of rebellion.

The Slow Return to the Keyboard

The funny thing is, after about ten days of determinedly not thinking about code, the urge to write some began to bubble up again. But this time, it was different. It wasn't driven by a deadline or a feature request, but by pure curiosity.

This period of low-stakes, pressure-free engagement with my craft was incredibly refreshing. It reminded me that, beneath the job titles and the project plans, I genuinely love solving problems with code. It allowed me to separate the work from the passion, and then let them become friends again.

Ready for a Clean Slate

Now, on the cusp of starting my new role next week, I feel a sense of clarity and energy that I wouldn't have had if I'd finished one job on a Friday and started the next on a Monday. That relentless churn can lead to burnout, carrying baggage from an old role into a new one.

This enforced pause has been a true circuit breaker. It’s allowed me to properly close the door on my last chapter and get genuinely excited about the next. It provided the space to handle life admin, settle into my new (old) surroundings, and mentally prepare for the challenges ahead. I'm not just starting a new job; I'm starting it with a full battery.

So if you ever find yourself on garden leave, my unsolicited advice is this: resist the urge to immediately fill it with a backlog of personal projects. Take a week. Disconnect completely. Let your mind wander. The desire to build things will return, and when it does, it will come from a place of genuine enthusiasm, not obligation.

I can't wait to see what the next chapter holds and to share the new things I'll be learning with all of you here.

See you on the other side.

Cheers,

Jamie C