What's Been Keeping Me Busy Over the Past Few Months?
Time for a Recap:
Back in mid-June, I wrote about an Approach to Life Post Redundancy and What Have I Done in the Last Three Months and What's Next?. As I'm now approaching seven months in, I thought it worthwhile revisiting those posts, thinking about where the time has gone, and what might come next.
The Last Four Months:
Four months is a reasonable chunk of time since those two posts, so where has the time gone? I have managed to keep up the daily diary, so looking at that I would say that the basic structure of my time broadly is taken up with:
- Exercise and Fitness 🏃: running, swimming, hot yoga - all remain key to obviously keeping fit, but also keeping a reasonably healthy and clear mind.
- Keeping Sociable: catching up with old colleagues, friends, family - either in person or online.
- Learning Italian 🇮🇹: slowly keeping going with this.
- Exploring and Experimenting: this has largely taken the form of exploring GenAI and Agents, and as I'll write about in another post shortly (now written - see Experimenting with GenAI, LLMs & RAG - Part 1: Building a RAG Application, I spent quite a bit of time creating a small application that is based around GenAI and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). But I've also experimented with a few ThreeJS ideas that didn't go anywhere particularly useful.
- Keeping Curious - Trying New Things: E.g. going to a UK District Energy Association Heat Networks Expo 2025 when I knew nothing about Heat Networks.
- Volunteering 👐: Still volunteering and helping out at The Flower Bank in Barnet 🌻
- Mentoring 🤝: Mentoring charity leaders via The Fore. This has been particularly interesting & rewarding, mentoring people in subject areas where I'm not an expert!
- Refined Practice: did a little bit of work here.
- Finances £💰: Keeping a super-close eye on incoming money (not much so that's been easy 🙂), and out-goings (rather more important! so lots of spreadsheet time 📈💰📊)
A few other things took up time:
- Family challenge with an elderly relative
- Festival trip! 🎼 🕺🪇
- Holiday to Spain 🇪🇸
- Did some active researching into Non Executive Directorships via Dynamic Boards
- Some super-helpful and interesting workshops via Brave Starts
And most days, helping out much more around the house, e.g. alot of caugette cooking 🧑🍳 🥒 after the allotment suddenly started cranking them out at speed.
One other thing that has crept in which I have loved, is doing a couple of courses at The London Sound Academy 🎼 🎶 - no idea where this will go, but a huge amount of fun.
Challenges:
- The biggest thing stopping me doing the things I want to do: social media. Absolutely no question. Instagram, Reddit - total time sinks.
- I've also had a couple of dips in mood 💚🎗, finding myself a bit lost, not totally sure where I'm going or what I'm doing. One thing that helped was something from a Brave Starts workshop - "Make your decision on the basis that everything will work out all of the time" - trying to believe this has certainly helped.
Power of Swimming 🏊♂️:
During the past six months I've started swimming once/week. Initially, when I started I found thinking things like "I've got X lengths to do, only just started, this will take ages, etc". More recently, having done this regularly now for six months this has morphed into "Just starting, but by doing one at a time, I will complete this" - and have started incorporating this approach as much as I can elsewhere - including writing these posts & working on my own projects. Found this quite helpful.
Where Am I Going & What's Next?
I'm in the very fortunate position of not being in any particular hurry to find serious work, so I think I'm taking a long-term view: what's next not just in the next year, but in the next twenty years? And so to that end, I'm more trying to find out a rhythm that works and that balances the many things I've highlighted above. So I think I'm going to focus on the things I want to do rather than feel I should:
- Exercise
- Music
- Italian
- My Own Projects
- Volunteering
- Mentoring
- Supporting my family however I can.