Wasn't a founder at the time so feel free to ignore the rest of this, but…after five soul crushing, burn out generating, years as the main guy in the dot com era I took a ~7 month sabbatical. It was awesome, totally reset and cleared my head, allowed me to mentally review what I’d learned and separate the good lessons from the bad. But I did not structure the down time well and felt that I wasted about a third of the time I was out. The biggest downside was that on returning…people wanted me to just go back to what I was doing and I wasn't interested in that at all.

My advice: figure out where you want to go first, even if only as a hazy general notional direction. Is your goal to return to the organization renewed and ready to keep going on what you're doing? Or to find a different path?

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827668