How to stay on track during Sabbatical / code retreat

I'm starting my very first sabbatical which is going to be six long months atleast.

I have two questions:

I want to explore more about distributed systems. Plan is to build a KV database using Erlang. What do you think about this?
I will be learning about existing DBs and Consistency problem, Storage optimisation etc as part of this.

How do I ensure I stay on track and won't lost focus. I know this is a broad questions. If you have done something similar would like to know the experience.

Rough plan : read books to get concepts, write code, blog, talk at relevant local meetups regarding my learning/work.

Starting off with :
Designing for scalability with Erlang/OTP

Designing Data intensive applications

Comments

[Alan Barr]

Designing Data intensive applications is a great book!

[Adarsh.K.Kumar]

Also checkout this video by the author "Turning the database inside out."

[Alan Barr]

Nice, i'll have to check that out. I'm very interested in his work on CRDTs.

[Adarsh.K.Kumar]

I might apply for RC as well. It would be much better if we have more people to bounce our thoughts with.