My LinkedIn break - six weeks in

This post was published on February 1, 2026

About six weeks ago, I decided to take some time away from LinkedIn. I won’t go into the reasons behind this decision again, you can read all about that in the post I just linked to, but I do want to take some time and look back on the past six weeks and the things that not spending so much time on LinkedIn have brought me.

First of all, moving away from spending an hour or two on LinkedIn wasn’t as easy as I thought. Especially early on, thoughts of ‘am I missing something?’ were in my head pretty much all the time, and yes, that led to me logging in and checking to see whether there was something I needed to address - DMs to answer, invites to accept - a few times.

After a few weeks, though, and after seeing that there wasn’t much of importance, or really anything at all, that I missed, that feeling slowly faded. It’s still there, sometimes, but I don’t feel the ‘need’ (it’s more of a ‘want’, really) to log in as often as I did in the beginning.

When I started my break, I was hoping for several positive side effects. It’s still early, too early to draw conclusions, but so far, things are looking pretty good:

• The contents for my brand new ‘Valuable Feedback, Fast’ course is coming together slowly but surely, and I’ve got 3-4 companies interested in booking me to deliver this course in 2026, with one of them confirmed. My target is to deliver it at least three times in 2026, so things are looking good.
• My training business is off to a good start, too, with 5 full days of training already delivered in January. I was off to a much slower start in 2025, so this makes me happy. I’m also working on different ways to bring my training offerings to the attention of potential clients. One thing I’m thinking about is starting a YouTube channel with instructional videos, to give people an idea of my teaching style and the type of content they can expect when they book me to teach a course.
• I’ve already published 4 blog posts, including this one, where I only wrote 13 in all of 2025. I really hope to keep up this pace.
• I’ve definitely been reading more, too. Mostly fiction, including the fantastic Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell, but I’m also slowly working my way through Taking Testing Seriously by James Back and Michael Bolton.
• Outside of work, I’m definitely taking my cycling much more seriously. Even though January wasn’t the best cycling month, because of snow, the flu and some other things that got in the way, I have a training plan in place, I have set some ambitious but not-too-crazy goals, and I hope those will lead to my first century as well as my first 200k and even a 300k before the end of the year.

Because of that last bullet point, and especially the time that training for long-distance cycling events takes, I have decided to pretty much entirely focus on my training business in 2026, as that is simply more flexible than consulting. This doesn’t mean I will not take on any consulting gigs at all, but the ones that I do will be of a very part-time nature. I don’t want to do all the cycling I want to do in the evenings and weekends only, if only because there’s no better feeling than going for a long bike ride at a time you know most other people are in the office ;)

Needless to say, I’ll remain absent from LinkedIn for the foreseeable future. Yes, I might log in once every other week to quickly check DMs and invites. You might see a very occasional post from me promoting my training services, but that will be once a month, tops, and probably even less than that.

I have zero interest at the moment in getting back to regular posting, commenting, sharing and liking. My brain relishes the quiet, the absence of that background noise that was present when I was spending a lot of time on LinkedIn. Plus, it has given me the time and attention it needs to do more valuable things, and I’m not ready to give that up again. Don’t expect me to write an update like this every month, either. As the months go by, I’ll probably think about LinkedIn even less, especially now that I’ve seen that I’m not really missing out on a lot.

As I said before, email is a much better way to get or stay in touch, so if you have a question, something to share, or you just want to catch up, email me at bas@ontestautomation.com, and I’ll happily talk to you. I’ve had some great conversations already, and I’m looking for many more of those.

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