I live on a large suburban estate. I know my immediate neighbours; I know a few people within the estate; but basically I live in close proximity to thousands of strangers. Just because I’m happily solo doesn’t mean I want to live disconnected from those around me. It’s important to…

Ensuring that you maintain connections with your colleagues if you are mainly working remotely — Since the first lock-down in early 2020 I have been working remotely for almost all the time. Our offices moved locations in 2020 and the commute took a turn for the worse so I asked for a hybrid solution where I would only go into the office occasionally. On many…

I have been trying to build some new habits this year, with varying degrees of success. One of these is to write a Medium article weekly. If you look through my stories you’ll see that I’ve not done too badly on this front. Not quite once a week but close…

Last month I wrote about how having a dedicated time each day to focus on a ‘highlight’ had been a really successful strategy for me. As I started to tackle my first work highlight task, I wanted to use a timer to help me focus for the period of time…

When an opportunity arises to make plans with friends, often it can take quite some time for those plans to come to fruition. Or perhaps they were not even at the plan stage at all, they’re just part of a “Wouldn’t it be great if we could…” conversation. Maintaining and…

Over the past couple of years I’ve been taking a handful of CDs from my collection and having them in the car to listen to. The car is the only place where I can now play CDs so I decided to review everything and only keep the ones I’d want…

I recently read The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman. This was an interesting and inspiring read on many levels. The one thing that I felt was an immediate takeaway for me boils down to the following advice: Imagine that you are eighty years…

Do you seem to be busy all the time but then realise at the end of many days you don’t feel like you’ve really achieved anything? That if someone asked you what was the best thing about the day you wouldn’t have an answer? Me too! I recently read Make…

2021 was the first time I’d set myself explicitly defined goals for the year. This worked really well to help pull myself out of the hole that the global challenges of 2020 had helped me to sink into. I was going to use the same approach this year, but instead…