Preparing to prepare for 2025

Four more days of work until my Christmas break. I then have 24 days to decide what 2025 and beyond looks like. Normally approaching Christmas I’m an hot mess of total mental wastage and thanks to only working 4-days/week since July I’m in a significantly improved state.

I’ve been mentally preparing, and even making some brief notes, on the areas I’ll tend to next year. I’m ready to start wintering¹.

The big question

Front and foremost is the question of how I integrate my role as an IT Strategy Consultant with my personal goals of writing about Way of Being and all that entails. I don’t have a clear description of where I want to travel and I need one if I’m to prevent splitting into incompatible, or even competing, tracks.

Proprioceptive writing will help me get the clarity I need and this week I must commit a practise schedule for the holiday and hit at least a definition early.

I’m sure there will be a Blogging target as well. Probably a mix of ad-hoc personal blogging, and more purposeful knowledge writing. I have improved my writing across the last few months and look forward to further development in that area.

Hobby related

There has to be some rationalisation of my hobbies. Too much is left undone and that plays on my mind. Here I have to tread a fine line between committing to finish everything, not leaving time for work coming from “The big question” and failing to leave time for hobbies to do what they do best—provide downtime.

I’m certain I’ll follow the Nerdforge model of placing 100 dedicated hours into learning a skill²³⁴ and put 100 hours into learning photo editing techniques in Affinity Photo.

I would also like to complete Danish ships cross-stitch and painting my Sylvaneth Treelord Ancient.

Health related

I’ve joined a local gym. Still to have my first session. My commitment is to attend every Friday with the goal of firstly building up my strength.

I may offer to cook Friday night’s, but that’s a bit scary.

Reading and TV and movies and gaming

Plenty of “professional reading”. I’d like to finish Plato - Complete Works and more of the Complete History of Philosophy series.

I’m trying to finish TV series before starting another and I have a few movies to catch up on as well. Most likely I’ll get to them in the holidays.

Hoping for Astro Bot for Christmas.

Footnotes

1. Le Cunff (2024), The Art of Wintering ↩

2. I hate perspective painting, so I did it for 100 hours - YouTube ↩

3. Can I Learn to Draw in 100 Hours? - YouTube ↩

4. We spent 100 hours learning Blender - YouTube ↩