How this is built

This page is the plain-language account of what Fallow Year stands on — what is well-established, what is our synthesis, and what is still unproven. The essays and guides carry these ideas lightly; this page shows the working.

The method

The five movements — Release, Recover, Rebuild, Explore, Re-enter — are our synthesis, built for one situation: executives and founders in a designed pause between roles. The ideas underneath them come from long-studied ground:

The structure of transitions draws on William Bridges' work on endings and the "neutral zone," on Schlossberg's transition framework, and on the anthropology of liminal passages. The work of Release draws on research into rumination (which prolongs distress) and structured expressive writing (which has repeatedly been shown to help people process difficult endings, including job loss). Recover draws on the recovery-experience research of Sonnentag and colleagues — psychological detachment in particular — and on the occupational-health literature on exhaustion, which supports recovery timescales of months rather than weeks in serious cases. Rebuild rests on Jahoda's latent deprivation model and the unemployment-wellbeing literature: work provides time structure, social contact, purpose, status, and enforced activity alongside income, and losing those does harm largely independent of money. Explore is built on Herminia Ibarra's research into how working identities actually change — through small experiments rather than introspection alone. Re-enter draws on the psychology of decision-making under fatigue and ambiguity ("seizing" on early answers), on implementation intentions, and on the finding that the benefits of rest fade when people return to unchanged conditions.

Two honest caveats. Most of this research was conducted on general workers, students, the involuntarily unemployed, retirees, or athletes — not on senior people in designed pauses. Where we lean on an analog population (elite athletes at retirement is the closest), we do so because the transfer is plausible, not because it is proven. And nobody has run a study on designed career pauses in this population. The constructs are evidence-based; the five-movement shape is not, yet, and we say so.

Some of the site's most memorable advice — the ninety-day buffer on new commitments, the week "about a third full" — are rules of thumb we suggest, with our reasoning shown. They are design targets, not findings, and the site never presents them otherwise.

The diagnostic

The five-minute reflection is a structured self-reflection, not a validated psychological instrument, and the difference matters.

What it is built on: seven dimensions, each modelled on a well-studied construct — recovery experiences (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007), self-concept clarity (Campbell et al., 1996), intolerance of uncertainty (Carleton et al., 2007), and the four career adapt-abilities of concern, control, curiosity, and confidence (Savickas & Porfeli, 2012) — organised by Schlossberg's transition framework. It uses standard measurement hygiene: several items per dimension, reverse-keyed items to counter the tendency to agree with everything, and attention checks.

What it is not: our items are original (we did not reproduce the published scales), and original items do not inherit the validity of the constructs they are modelled on. The reflection has no reliability statistics yet, no confirmed factor structure, and its bands — lower, middle, upper — are even thirds of the scale's own range, not comparisons against other people. It assigns no type, no score to brag about, no percentile, and no clinical meaning. It is deterministic: the same answers always produce the same reflection, with no model deciding anything about you.

We are collecting a consented pilot dataset to test the instrument properly — reliability of each dimension, whether the seven dimensions are really seven, and where the bands should genuinely sit. Until that work is done, the honest description is the one we use everywhere: grounded, not validated. A reflection, not a verdict.

Boundaries and data

Fallow Year is an educational planning tool. It does not provide medical, psychological, legal, financial, investment, or career-placement advice, and at the points where professional support is the better tool — particularly around persistent exhaustion or low mood — the site says so directly rather than working around it.

On data: your reflection summary is stored under an unguessable identifier so your results page works, and results pages are hidden from search engines. Your raw answers are stored only if you explicitly opt in to the pilot. We ask for no personal information at all to show you your reflection — an email address only if you choose to have a copy sent to you, and never a company name, a salary, or a net worth.

If any of this changes, this page changes first.

References

Naming sources in prose is easy to do loosely, so here they are properly, for anyone who wants to check the ground under this site rather than take our word for it.

The four constructs the diagnostic is modelled on:

• Campbell, J. D., Trapnell, P. D., Heine, S. J., Katz, I. M., Lavallee, L. F., & Lehman, D. R. (1996). Self-concept clarity: measurement, personality correlates, and cultural boundaries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(1), 141–156. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.70.1.141
• Carleton, R. N., Norton, M. A. P. J., & Asmundson, G. J. G. (2007). Fearing the unknown: a short version of the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 21(1), 105–117. doi:10.1016/j.janxdis.2006.03.014
• Savickas, M. L., & Porfeli, E. J. (2012). Career Adapt-Abilities Scale: construction, reliability, and measurement equivalence across 13 countries. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 80(3), 661–673. doi:10.1016/j.jvb.2012.01.011
• Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2007). The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204–221. doi:10.1037/1076-8998.12.3.204

The frameworks the five movements draw on:

• Bridges, W. (2004). Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes (2nd ed.). Da Capo Press.
• Ibarra, H. (2003). Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Harvard Business School Press.
• Jahoda, M. (1982). Employment and Unemployment: A Social-Psychological Analysis. Cambridge University Press.
• Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3), 274–281.
• Schlossberg, N. K. (1981). A model for analyzing human adaptation to transition. The Counseling Psychologist, 9(2), 2–18.

One clarification worth making explicit, because it is the difference between a defensible instrument and a licensing problem. Several of the scales above are copyrighted and some are licence-restricted. We used their construct definitions only — the description of what the thing being measured actually is. We did not reproduce their items, their wording, their response formats, or their scoring keys, and no item in our diagnostic is an adaptation or paraphrase of a published item. Our items were written from the construct up. That is also why we cannot claim their validity evidence as ours, which is the trade we made knowingly and describe above.