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For the last few weeks I have been on gardening leave, which has been quite nice; time with the kids, project managing the other half to finish his jobs :) and generally enjoying being at home ( I have even been cooking!)

But it has also been quite an eye opener for me.  Now let me make a confession before we start; I love my work, you could say I have workaholic tendencies.   For me, a perfect day is one that passes in a blur, where it has been busy, things have been acheived; clients, collegaues, partners and suppliers have come away happy.  In short I have made a positive impact on someones day.

So, as you can imagine, I am used to a lot of communication, through email, phone, visits, coffee catch ups, lunches and generally, being a purple and quite a social animal, just being sociable.  So when I went onto gardening leave, I felt a little like a long term smoker must feel after quitting.

Its actually pretty hard.  To go from a massive amount of contact and interaction to suddenly sporadic contact and contact that is a little forced in some cases and just uncomfortable in others was very hard for me in the early days of this leave. 

Looking back on it now, I can feel my A Level psychology head wanting to perform a research experiment on the effects of contact cut off, the psychological impact on various work personality and personality types of this concept of gardening leave.  Is it a learned behaviour for example, do you simply need to go through it a couple of times before it seems to make sense, and has no impact or does it affect personality types in different ways.

You see what not working does for me, I turn back into an amateur psychologist :)

Luckily for my family (I think Ive gotten on their last nerves already) I start my new role in a few days, but I will be curious to see what your experiences are of this process.  Whether the expectation of gardening leave has been a positive, neutral or negative experience for you.

So my friends, comments?