Last year I took the month of October off from volunteering on Python to prevent burn-out and to just take some time to reflect. It turned out to be a great decision as I came out of the break feeling much better about volunteering to work on Python and what I needed to do to stay grounded (it has even led to a new talk topic that I will be testing out at JupyterCon and talking about for the next 12 months whenever I speak at conferences on how to try and re-adjust everyone's view of open source to prevent burn-out and frustration for everyone involved).

Since I was so happy with the result last year I'm repeating it again this year, but in September (it overlaps with my vacation so it actually scales back the amount of absolute time I take off). Just like last year this means I'm only looking at critical Python emails weekly and completely ignoring non-critical ones until the month is out. I will continue to work on Python in September, but only on work time and not personal time so it will be highly constrained to pretty much only working hours on Fridays when I typically do my paid open source thanks to Microsoft.

The reason I'm making this announcement now is I know this coincides with the core sprint next month so if anyone has anything they want to ask me before that, now is the time. Workflow stuff should all have a bus factor greater than 1, so if you can think of something that doesn't then please let me know so I can fix it.