And yet again, here we are. I’m a sucker for investing arbitrary windows of time with extra meaning, so it’s time once again to look at the past 12 months and try to make some sense of what went down. Actually, scratch that. That puts too much pressure on the exercise. Instead, this is simply about trying to capture in a semi-coherent way, how some of my time and attention was spent in 2025. No promises of grand observations or deep realizations. Just a snapshot of what my 2025 looked and felt like.

Life and Work

The predominant happening in my work life in 2025 was the decision to leave The Ready at the end of October after spending a mostly happy decade there. The full story is longer and less interesting than you might think, but can most easily be summarized as “it was just time for a change.” If you read my seven year career retrospective article you can see some of the early ripples of discontent that coalesced into the decision I made this year.

I’m still in the midst of navigating this change, as I did not have another job lined up when I went public with my decision to leave The Ready. I know my work will continue in the realm of organizational design and the broader intersection of personal and organizational development — but the specific shape it will take is still forming. I’m simultaneously exploring joining an organization to help them develop internal capacity for organizational design and change while also exploring shorter-term projects under the banner of my own company, Deliberate Works LLC.

While the decision to leave The Ready was made in October, the whole year up to that point was marked by a higher than normal amount of stress. A casualty of that elevated stress level was my triathlon training. I had originally planned to do a local half-Ironman as my only race of 2025, but around July I made the decision to withdraw and abandon my dedicated training. What was supposed to be an outlet and stress-reduction activity had subtly turned into another job that I was doing poorly. I found myself getting behind the training plan which meant the predominant feeling after every training session was something like, “Ugh, I’m not where I should be.” I needed to remove stressors from my life, not add them, so I decided to put the triathlon-specific training on the shelf.

In its place, two new practices have re-emerged: walking and weightlifting. Most days I walk for 45-90 minutes and I’ve been lifting several times a week for the past couple months. It has been nice to let myself do (mostly) what I want to do rather than feel like I should be doing something extremely proscribed all the time. And, wouldn’t you know it, once the looming threat of a race I was unprepared for was removed from my calendar, I’ve found myself wanting to get back on the bike and put the running shoes back on (I can’t say I’ve been craving getting back into the water though…)

Somewhat surprisingly, I’m fairly certain that this relatively short but consistent time of lifting again has resulted in me being the strongest I ever have. I don’t have any records from my college days, but I don’t have any memory of having lifted what I’m currently lifting. Not much to write home about for most, but it has been gratifying to see all of those numbers gradually go up.

As a bit of a replacement for my paused triathlon training, I devised a little project for myself I’m calling “FIT40” which is simply the intention to achieve a handful of objective strength, cardio, and health measures by the time I’m 40 (February 2027). I will likely write more about this in the coming year as I continue to refine those goals and how I intend to get as close to them as possible.

A quick grab-bag of additional events and moments from this year:

Getting more involved in the care of my nephew who was born with an extremely rare neuromuscular genetic disorder called RYR-1
Meeting another nephew who was born in February
Moved into a new apartment (down the hall from our previous apartment)
Travel to San Jose, Buffalo, Oakland, and Cape Cod for work and family reasons
Traveled to Ireland for a family wedding and short vacation

2025 was an extremely unsettled year when it comes to my professional life — but has ended on a high note with the optimism that comes with exploring new opportunities. Life-wise, 2025 continued to bless me with loving family and friends.

Reading

In 2025 I read 63 books across 23,138 pages. This is the most I’ve read since 2018 and the fourth most pages I’ve read since I started tracking in 2008. 71% of the books I read were non-fiction. I haven’t done the math, but I imagine it actually looks more like 60/40 non-fiction/fiction if you do the calculation via pages, because there were a few absolute fiction-chonkers this year (e.g. Wind and Truth, Anathem, and Crime and Punishment).

I don’t want to do a completely exhaustive retrospective on the year, so instead I’ll pull out a few notable observations and recommendations. My favorite non-fiction books from the past year were Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod, Apple in China by Patrick McGee and The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes. I can picture TBOT and The Sirens’ Call being books I re-read at some point in the future (in some ways, TBOT was already a re-read because I read the original fine art edition of the book Craig put out in 2023 when it was first published).

My favorite fiction from the year was The Etched City by K.J. Bishop, On the Calculation of Volume (Book 1) by Solvej Balle, and Anathem by Neal Stephenson. All three of these books grabbed me like little else ever has and were more or less complete surprises. I had very little expectations about any of these and all of them completely engrossed me.

18 of the 61 authors I read this year have written something I read in a previous year. That means I read 43 authors for the first time this year. A few authors showed up more than once this year: Solvej Balle (two), Cormac McCarthy (four), Tom Holland (two), Dan Jones (two), Katherine Addison (two).

If I had to pull some themes out of this year, the following stand out:

I’m interested in systems under strain: Across politics, technology, organizations, and the self, I keep returning to moments where systems drift, harden, or collapse — macro systems (Autocracy, Inc., Technofeudalism, Dominion, Apple in China, Who Is Government?, The Wars of the Roses), tech-mediated systems (Nexus, Enshittification, Superbloom, The Sirens’ Call, Extinction of Experience), organizational systems (The World Is Your Office, Leading into the Age of Wisdom, Bonfire Moment, How to DAO), or inner systems (The Burnout Society, The Anxious Generation, Meditations for Mortals, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind).
I’m interested in attention, meaning, and limits: I’m obviously skeptical of the modern myth of infinite optimization. Meditations for Mortals, The Burnout Society, The Anxious Generation, Superbloom, The Sirens’ Call, Excellent Advice for Living all form a loose canon about attention as the scarce resource and limits as something to be designed with, not escaped. Even this year’s fiction echoes this: Invisible Cities, The Lathe of Heaven, On The Calculation of Volume Part 1 and Part 2, and the Border Trilogy by McCarthy all dwell on constraint, repetition, silence, or inevitability rather than progress narratives.
I’m drawn to threshold moments: Many of this year’s books sit at edges: collapsing empires (McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, Young Men and Fire, The Wager), technological inflection points (Masters of Doom, Nexus), moral or metaphysical thresholds (Crime and Punishment, Arendt, Foucault, Dostoyevsky, Schopenhauer, Spinoza). What do people do when old maps stop working? How do character, structure, and belief interact when the rules no longer feel trustworthy?

Finally, I’ll say a few words about how I manage to read this much. I don’t offer this as any sort of judgment about how much you read (or didn’t) last year, but only because it’s the number one follow-up question people seem to have when I let slip the number of books I read in a year. Take what’s useful, discard the rest.

First, a few structural realities/privileges that help me read a lot that may or may not apply to you: I don’t have children, I read fairly quickly, I mostly work from home, and I have access to many books via disposable income and a great local library.

Moving into the more actionable patterns you might be able to do something with:

I always try to have one book going in each of the following formats; paper, digital (Kindle and/or Apple Books), and audiobook (Audible and/or Spotify and/or Libby). This means there’s very rarely a context where I can’t read because of a lack of access. I can (and do) read digital books on my phone. I will listen to audiobooks while I work out or drive (and don’t let anyone ever tell you that audiobooks don’t “count”).
This may seem counter to what I just said about having at least three books going at once, but I also try to limit the number of books I read at the same time. Usually not more than three, never more than 4 or 5. I will try to read these books as a pack — meaning I won’t let myself start a new book until I’ve finished the whole set of 3-5. That means sometimes I have to “make” myself finish the last one (usually the one I’ve been avoiding for some reason) in order to “unlock” the ability to refresh my stack. I hold this lightly which means sometimes I’ll immediately replace one I finish even if I’m still working on the others in the “set.” And sometimes not.
I think it’s helpful to have different “types” of books going at the same time so that if I don’t feel like reading one thing there’s a chance I’ll feel like reading something else (again, I’m aware of how this is at odds with the “limit WIP” pattern I describe in the previous paragraph). That might look something like having one “work” book, one classic literature, and one sci-fi. Or maybe two non-fictions about wildly different topics and one fiction. You get the idea. If something isn’t grabbing me at any moment in time I can always shift to something else.
It can be useful to think of part of your reading practice as “attention training.” That means I periodically try to read something I know I won’t understand or is “too hard.” It’s okay if I don’t understand it completely. I think it’s valuable to regularly sit down and put your attention on something difficult. I generally won’t read books like this back-to-back but at least a couple times a year I want to be a little bit intimidated by what I’m trying to read. I trust that this has value for my ability to focus beyond the specifics of any one book.
Finally, my last pattern is to not stress out about it. I don’t read this much because I’m trying to hit some kind of arbitrary number. I read this much because this is how much I want to read. It’s my favorite entertainment activity and what I find myself drawn to whenever I have downtime. The end result is I typically read 50-60 books in a year. There have been seasons where I’ve read less than this and there may be future seasons where I read drastically less than this. I’m okay with it. Reading should be fun. Don’t stress yourself out over it.

Other Entertainment

TV

I watched 13 seasons of television across 9 shows this year. This is pretty similar to the amount of TV I watched in 2024. The only show I watched multiple seasons of was Drive to Survive, where I made it through the first five seasons of the show. Five shows were me watching the latest available seasons: Severance, Andor, Shrinking, Foundation, and Slow Horses. One season was a straight-up rewatch: Band of Brothers (Emily is on a military history kick and hadn’t seen it before). The new shows were Pluribus and Drive to Survive. I watched part of the first season of A.P. Bio but ended up dropping it after a few episodes.

When I look back at the year of TV I’m struck by how there’s SO MUCH great TV that I’m not watching, but want to. The stuff I did watch, though, was really good. Severance, Andor, Shrinking, Foundation, and Slow Horses were all excellent — with Andor probably being the single piece of video that made the biggest impact on me this year.

Film

In 2025 I watched 12 movies, which is five more than I watched in 2024. I thought I was going to be on track for basically the same as 2024, but experienced a veritable onslaught of movie watching in the last two months of the year, with one in November and four in December. I mostly enjoyed everything I watched, with maybe The Phoenician Scheme being my least favorite. I think Wes Anderson figured out how to be too Wes Anderson. And yes, I’m naming it as more disappointing than Jurassic World: Rebirth because my expectations were non-existent for the dino movie and it actually mildly exceeded that exceedingly low bar!

We went on a semi-accidental Russel Crowe binge after really enjoying Nuremberg so we obviously had to follow it up with Gladiator and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

I watched Rogue One (a re-watch) immediately after finishing the last season of Andor and it felt like it added a bunch of emotional weight that wasn’t there the first time I watched it. My lovely wife is the reason we watched Apocalypse Now this year (a re-watch for me) because of the aforementioned military history kick she has been on.

Video Games

In 2025 I played seven video games for a substantial amount of time (at least a few hours) and beat five of them: Inscryption, Bioshock, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Hollow Knight, and Silksong. I would call both Hollow Knight and Silksong truly transcendent video game experiences. Both are now in my top five favorite games of all time and consistently evoked feelings of wonder, awe, and deep emotional resonance as I played them. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was also surprisingly good, especially since it is a remake of my favorite video game of all time which can be fraught territory.

I really leaned into the idea of only playing one game at a time for the majority of the year. I’ve learned that the types of games I like to play really benefit from the familiarity and skill development inherent in not letting too much time elapse between play sessions (all you Hollow Knight and Silksong fans just said, “Yeah, no shit.”) I like games that require you to continuously improve your physical skill and that reward your ability to learn their worlds in a way that you can’t if you’re only playing them once every couple weeks. This is likely something I’ll carry into 2026, too.

Music

Music is almost always a tool for me. Meaning, I primarily listen to music while I’m working or writing. Which isn’t particularly conducive to really appreciating what it is I’m listening to. This is also why I sometimes don’t recognize a couple of my most played artists in my end of year streaming wrap-up because I spent most of my time listening to playlists I didn’t make. That being said, I can almost always count on Coheed and Cambria showing up somewhere in my top five, like they have for at least the last decade. And, in a repeat of 2024, Petey was once again my most listened to artist of the year. Can’t get enough of my angsty and absurd boy.

Other Entertainment

It was a light year for live entertainment and probably would’ve been even lighter if I wasn’t married because I was not the driving force behind either of these outings. I saw Nine Inch Nails live because Emily really wanted to. I really only know NIN via listening to the radio in the late 90s and early 00s, but the show was surprisingly good.

And maybe my most memorable entertainment moment of the year, I saw the musical Titanique! with exactly zero foreknowledge about what it was. I knew the Titanic was involved… and that’s it. To say I was impressed and surprised would be a huge understatement. Highly recommended, would see again.

Does going to a book signing/author talk count as a live event? Let’s say yes, which means I can throw seeing Craig Mod in Beacon, NY with my brother into this category as well. His Things Become Other Things book was one of my favorites of the year and it was cool to share physical space with him for an evening.

Software & Hardware

You could read my 2024 Hardware & Software review articles and they would be 95% accurate for what my 2025 consisted of, too. There were no notable changes to my hardware setup this year. I’m still rocking the same M3 MacBook Air, M4 iPad Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, old-ass HP monitor, older-ass Aeron Chair (that I did have to amputate the arms off of this year…), and everything else I listed in last year’s article. The only new things involve a slightly better webcam than what I had before (because Jack got tired of editing my janky video for At Work with The Ready), and some fancy Studio Neat Mark One pens.

I noticed some burn-in on my monitor for the first time a few weeks ago, so I’m wondering if that is a precursor to something more catastrophic happening sooner rather than later. I’m hoping it can hold on long enough until Apple updates their display product line. By the time next fall rolls around, I’ll be rocking a 3-year old phone so I would imagine a new one might be in the cards by then. It’s still chugging along just fine, though, so I’m gonna try to keep it going as long as is reasonably possible.

Things are almost as static on the software side of the house, too. The major changes are casualties of no longer being employed at a company that expects me to use certain tools. I’m spending much less time in Slack, Notion, and Loom. Sadly, my Superhuman account expired shortly after my employment at The Ready ended and I can’t justify dropping hundreds of dollars on an email app, as much as I enjoy it. I’ve replaced it with Airmail for the time being, but have also used the default Mail app in its place.

The core of my productivity stack has remained the same, as it has for probably the last decade or so. Things, Fantastical, Bear, Ulysses, Day One, Overcastare still the apps I spend the most time in. ChatGPT remains my default LLM but I’ll occasionally dip into Perplexity or Gemini to compare/contrast. I’m switching back and forth between Arc and Safari as my mood dictates. I’ve tried most of the AI browsers for a hot minute and so far have not seen the light in terms of what they are bringing to the table.

I started using an app called Strong again to help me keep track of my weight training progress. I first used it many, many years ago and it is still really good. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how well it has been maintained and how easy to use yet full-featured it is. My favorite piece of new software this year is probably Monarch. I used to be a pretty deep user of Mint, back before Intuit bought it and destroyed it. I took the time to get fully set up into Monarch in the middle of the year and it has helped me get my arms around my finances in a way I didn’t really realize I was missing until I started using it. It’s a surprisingly delightful piece of software.

Conclusion

What should be gleaned from this year? A year that contained some of the most monumental changes I’ve experienced in years (leaving The Ready, stopping triathlon training) along with pure stability in others (hardware, software, how I allocate my entertainment attention). Perhaps the stability I seek in many aspects of my life is what gave me the foundation to have the clarity and confidence to make some of these large changes? Or perhaps I revert to familiarity when other aspects of my life feel out of control? In all likelihood, it’s probably a little of both and neither.

Previous Yearly Review Articles