Weeknote 01/2025

"We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent. 'here and now' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point blank."

José Ortega y Gasset

I'm not yet ready for 2025. I've greatly enjoyed my three weeks off, spending time with family, celebrating my birthday, hosting my parents for Christmas dinner, watching football on TV, going for walks, reading more than usual, and mixing up my exercise regime.

Due to the weather, we didn't see in the New Year as planned on the Quayside in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The planned celebration and fireworks display was cancelled, so we stayed in. My daughter's football match was cancelled, but my son's basketball was on. He wore his new basketball shoes, played well, and his team won. Today there's snow on the ground so we've built a snowman and then booked a court at the local leisure centre so three of us can go down to play.

On Thursday night, realising that no-one I knew who lives near me would want to go and watch Nosferatu at the cinema, I went by myself. It was great; not only the film but the experience itself. It's only the second-ever film I've seen by myself at the cinema, as usually I go with my wife and/or kids.

I don't have any New Year's resolutions. The more I think about it, the more this time of year feels like the wrong time to commit to any large changes. Spring feels like a natural time to start new projects and objectives, so I've been doing some research using Perplexity.ai on 'Chronoworking' and collated my findings on this page. To my mind, there's too much focus on trying to implement productivity hacks for days and not enough for entire years.

Our building blocks are seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years. My experience is that the first three of these — seconds, minutes, and hours — look after themselves if you sort out sleep, nutrition, and exercise. It's the latter three — weeks, months, and years — that need planning. I've started to notice patterns over the course of a month in terms of energy levels and migraines. For example, here's how I ran 1,000km last year, bearing in mind that running isn't the only exercise I do:

The chart shows have a low-energy week every month which usually comes after a high-energy one. You could say that I 'overdo' it one week and therefore have to recover, but the fact that this happens every month would suggest that it's more to do with a natural cadence. I'm going to pay more attention to this over the next twelve months.

Tomorrow I return to uncertainty: due to the way that projects and funding works, it's not unusual to go back to less work than normal in January. But given the tempestuous nature of the world, I'm not sure I want to keep having to hustle for a living. Perhaps it's time for a change ¯\_(ツ)_/¯