Planuary

2025 was a difficult year almost across the board, regardless of industry or sector. There are plenty of reasons, none of which I feel like rehashing here, but the end result is that lots of people are feeling burnt out at the moment, and desperately hoping that 2026 brings a change.

I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions. In my experience, big, life-altering changes are easy to promise, but difficult to keep. My plan for 2026 – in both business and personal life – is to make smaller, incremental adjustments to improve things in a comfortable and sustainable way.

Only a paragraph ago I talked about burnout. This is something I’ve experienced myself in the past, and I want to avoid putting myself in that situation again. Any changes I do make will be with that in mind, and I’ll be careful to be sure that anything I do is sustainable over the long-term.

On the business side, I want to make improvements to:

• Marketing – Finding more people who would benefit from our services and telling them how we can help.

• Reporting – Giving our hosting/maintenance clients more and clearer information about the work we do behind the scenes to keep their websites running smoothly.

• Admin – I’m a developer, so it’s too easy to focus on that side of the business, reacting to admin tasks as they come up, rather than planning ahead. 

In my personal life, the focus areas are the same as ever:

• Health – Last year, I completely changed my diet, and the effects on my health were massive. My next step is to get a regular exercise programme in place.

• Home – There are so many small, easily put-off jobs hanging around the house, waiting for me to get to them. Hanging pictures, fixing a broken curtain rail, that sort of thing. I’d like to get better at prioritising these, and actually ticking a few off my to-do list.

• Hobbies – The last decade or so has been quite full on, but as the children are pretty well independent these days, there should (in theory) be more time for Nadine and I to find time for ourselves. Nadine has just joined a weight-training group at the local gym. I’ve got a list of films to catch up on from the last few years. We’ve already got a couple of trips planned to see various bands in concert. Hopefully this will end up being a fun year.

I’m broadly happy with how things are going, so I don’t feel the need to throw everything out or reinvent the wheel. I just want to carry on doing what I’m doing, but a little bit better.

These weekly updates, of which this is the first, are part of that. Rather than trying to plan and write a series of articles – which I have tried and failed at many times in the past – I want to start writing something small, that I can easily fit into my week without it taking up the best part of a day (or even more), but consistent, so that by the end of the year I have built up a collection posts.

As such, there will be no particular topic for these posts. They’ll probably be part diary, part random musing, partly a place for me to share interesting things I’ve found during the week. Almost certainly a complete lack of actionable insights.

I’m not even sure at this stage who the audience is – maybe just me, and that’s fine. I’m going to be writing these for my own benefit, and sharing them partly in case somebody finds them interesting/useful (probably not useful), but mainly for accountability. A public announcement that I’m going to publish every Friday makes it harder to skip a week. At least that’s the theory.

I probably need to find a better way to end these, but for now, goodbye.

– Sam