After unexpectedly losing the job I moved across the country for In 2015, I published an article called “Creating an Organizational Design Consulting Firm for the 21st Century.” It was an attempt to publicly articulate the kind of work I wanted to be doing - working at a consulting firm that treated organizational design as a living discipline rather than a one-time intervention.

That article did exactly what I hoped it would do. It found its way to the right person, Aaron Dignan, which led to me joining his new company called The Ready, where I spent the next decade doing almost precisely the work I described in that article.

After stepping away from The Ready in late 2025 to explore new options, I decided to run this play again and call a new shot. This time, the argument isn’t about the future of organizational design consulting, but rather why most modern organizations need to bring that capability inside.

The Missing Capability In Most Organizations

Most companies today are decent at optimizing within an operating model, but very rarely competent at evolving the operating model itself.

We have teams responsible for product, revenue, operations, people, technology, risk, compliance and every other function needed to run a given org. Every one of these functions has a legitimate claim on leadership attention and every one of them is incentivized to prioritize its own domain. Of course, each of them is led by leaders who will talk a good game about doing what’s best for the organization, but we all know that when push comes to shove, their first allegiance is usually to their area of responsibility.

Very few (yet more and more all the time!) organizations have a role or group whose primary responsibility is the care and feeding of the organization itself. Not performance this quarter, not headcount planning, not process compliance, but rather the living and breathing system itself.

This concept is called the organizational operating system – the patterns, principles, and practices that describe every aspect of how an organization works and what it feels like to interact with it. Its structures, decision-making, patterns, ways of working, and its ability to change any of them to adapt without falling into chaos. I am talking about creating a dynamic OS where the dreaded re-org is a rarely used break-glass-in-case-of-emergency solution instead of the only tool available.

When this responsibility exists at all, it is usually thinly stretched across roles that already have full plates: the executive team, the COO, the Chief of Staff, the CHRO, the head of transformation. Everyone owns a piece of the org – but no one owns the org as a system.

Our work At The Ready would often be focused on kickstarting this process before ultimately handing it over to an internal team to continue stewarding the work once we left. We were always adamant that there was no finish line for the type of work we were trying to do so while there was always an end date on our contract, the work of continuous evolution never ends. Unfortunately, there were many projects where even though we were obsessed with co-creating with the client and building capacity as we went, there wasn’t really a “home” for the work once our contract ended. It was nobody’s full-time work to continue stewarding what we had been doing together and that often meant it often fizzled out once we left.

“Design Once, Run Forever” is Not Modern Organization Design

For decades, organizations operated under an implicit assumption: design the org, roll it out, then let it run. Even when this worked, it only worked under conditions that no longer exist – relative market stability, slower feedback cycles, and work that could be decomposed cleanly into roles and hierarchies that were unlikely to change much over time.

Today, those assumptions collapse almost immediately. Everything and anything that’s interesting in a typical organization tends to be cross-functional – which means everything feels hard to do. Most orgs can’t easily metabolize cross-functional efforts so even the things that should feel easy rarely are.

But rejecting “design once, run forever” does not mean getting trapped on the re-org treadmill. Constant reshuffling is just as destructive as ossification, but it often seems to be the only available option in the organizational change playbook. Don’t like how things are going? Well, we’re just about due for our 18-month reorg and the massive disruption it inevitably creates. These are the missed opportunities - there are places to intervene and influence an OS other than the entire structure itself.

What’s required instead is a shift in posture: from organization design as a project handed to consultants or an under-resourced People team or a super-human Chief of Staff to do from the side of their desk – to organization design as an intentionally ongoing capability.

An Internal Innovation Lab Focused On The Organization Itself

One useful metaphor may be the internal innovation lab.

Not a skunkworks for products – a standing team responsible for researching, designing, developing, and experimenting with the organizational systems that make future performance possible.

This “lab” is:

• Building the conditions for sustained organizational excellence
• Reducing friction and organizational debt before it becomes existential
• Experimenting safely with new ways of working
• Increasing the productivity of every other team through better inter- and intra-team dynamics
• Creating playbooks and processes for smoother cross-functional collaboration
• Treating the organization itself like a product that needs iteration

In practical terms, this kind of team will work across three modes:

• Research and Sensing: Deep listening, sensing, and pattern recognition. Surfacing credible, human-centered insight about how work actually happens – not how the org chart claims it happens.
• Testing and Design: Architecting and prototyping org-level solutions like structures, decision rights, governance models, talent systems, collaboration patterns, and service blueprints.
• Development & Iteration: Building the capabilities required to sustain those changes through leadership development, change activation, coaching, onboarding, and internal communities of practice.

The output isn’t a single reorg deck. It’s a portfolio of services, standards, experiments, and capabilities that compound over time.

A standing internal organization design team reduces the number of moments where leadership must personally intervene to resolve structural problems. Every senior leadership team I’ve ever worked with has talked about doing things to reduce escalations and almost never have I ever seen them have the capacity to change the system that is creating the need for escalations. It turns strategy into something the organization can absorb rather than something that needs to be enforced. It makes adaptation cheaper, faster, and less disruptive.

Over time, this capability compounds. Decisions get easier and coordination costs drop. The organization becomes more resilient – not because leaders are working harder and longer, but because the system itself is doing more of the work. The best of these teams will bring sanity to the present so they can start freeing up their attention to exploring what their future operating system will need to be so they can start testing out those shifts before they become existential.

Unlocking Potential Energy is the Fastest ROI

Most organizations are sitting on an extraordinary amount of trapped potential energy. Not because their people aren’t capable or because the strategy is wrong, but because outdated ways of working, accumulated organizational debt, and brittle systems absorb an enormous amount of effort before any productive work happens.

This shows up everywhere, and you may even recognize a couple in your own organizations:

• Teams spending more time coordinating than creating
• Decisions waiting on escalations that add no real value
• Cross-functional work slowing to a crawl because decision rights and ways of working are unclear
• Talented people compensating for structural gaps through heroics

From the outside, this looks like execution problems. From the inside, it feels like exhaustion.

The important thing to understand is that this energy is already being spent. It’s just being dissipated as friction instead of converted into results. An internal organization design team only needs to unlock a small percentage of that trapped energy and redirect it toward productive ends to pay for itself.

This is why teams like this often pay for themselves faster than expected. Not because they introduce something new – but because they stop the organization from leaking energy it can no longer afford to lose.

Why This Must Be Internal

External consultants can be useful sparks and accelerants (I know because I’ve been one for the past decade!) but they are rarely good long-term stewards because they don’t have skin-in-the-game or the deep contextual understanding of full-time team members who live and breathe the realities of their organizations everyday. I have been shown over and over, and now firmly believe, that the relevant time horizon for this type of work is far longer than what most orgs want to invest in an external consulting team.

Beyond the time component, this work is also deeply contextual when done well. It requires an intimate understanding of the organization’s history, power dynamics, narratives, and “vibes” – the things people feel but don’t put on slides. Internal teams develop the kind of organizational fluency that makes better sense-making possible. They understand what’s being left unsaid, how informal networks actually work, how decisions actually get made rather than how the on-paper process describes, and how change actually propagates through the system.

We often tell ourselves that giving this work to an external entity to do helps mitigate the inherent power dynamics that are always lurking in organizations. I’ve come to see that consultants aren’t as neutral as they seem, as there’s always leader(s) who are paying for them, who advocate for them, and see them as (even implicitly) as being recruited into “their side.” Bringing this work inside the wall of the org does not eliminate inherent power dynamics, but  it can bring those dynamics to the foreground where they can be discussed and wrestled with more openly.

Isn’t This Just a Transformation Office?

On the surface, this can look like a more mature version of a Transformation Office. But there is a critical and fundamental difference. Transformation Offices exist to deliver specific change on a specific schedule. Internal organization design teams exist to grow the organization’s capacity to change forever.

One is temporary, program-driven, and milestone-oriented. The other is permanent, system-focused, and oriented toward reducing the need for future transformations altogether. In organizations that make this shift, change stops being something that happens to the organization and becomes something the organization can do for itself.

In some ways, I think the best Transformation Offices are the precursors to what I’m talking about in this article. A good Transformation Office understands that their job is not just ramming through the discrete projects on their docket, but integrating these changes in a way that has a chance of actually surviving and therefore generating the desired outcomes. A good Transformation Office is not just a bevy of project managers begging the organization to use a new tool, but trying to ride the waves that come with trying to steward and guide a complex organization toward a better future.

The Future of Work is Right Now

As environments become more complex, organizations need people whose only job is to help the organization increase coherence. To keep it from calcifying on one end or burning itself out on the other. This team does not replace the CEO, COO, Chief of Staff, or the People function. It does something different.

It owns the health of the organizational operating system itself – so that every other leader can focus on results rather than constantly compensating for structural friction. In organizations that get this right, senior leaders spend less time managing around the system – and more time using it.

I’m writing this from experience, not theory. Over the past decade, I’ve helped build and steward this capability inside fast-growing, high-complexity organizations navigating real constraints. I’ve seen what happens when organization design is treated as a living discipline rather than a single intervention – and I’ve seen the cost when it isn’t. The conclusion I’ve come to is simple:

The next frontier of performance isn’t strategy or talent – it’s the ability to change how you change. And that capability can only be built from within.

Context matters too much, learning compounds too slowly, and the cost of trapped potential energy is too high. If you’re a senior leader reading this, the decision isn’t whether your organization needs to change right now, but rather whether you want to build the capacity to change deliberately – or continue paying for it indirectly through friction, burnout, stalled execution, and increasingly risky reorganizations. Organizations that invest in internal organization design teams gain something rare: the ability to change how they change.

I’m exploring my next chapter with organizations that are ready to make that investment, whether by building this capability from scratch, strengthening what already exists, or finally giving it clear ownership and mandate.

If you believe your organization’s biggest constraint is no longer strategy or talent, but the operating system that connects them, I can’t wait to talk.

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:

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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:

1. 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”).
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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

• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/2024-year-in-review-entertainment
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/2024-year-in-review-entertainment
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/2024-year-in-review-training
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/2024-year-in-review-software
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/2024-in-review-reading
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/what-stayed-the-same-for-me-in-2023
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/2022-state-of-the-sam
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/state-of-the-software-2022
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/2021-in-review
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/2020-writing
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/looking-back-at-a-year-of-growth-grief-and-calm
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/looking-back-at-2018
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/state-of-the-apps-2018
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/186
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/2017-books
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/2016-podcast-review
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/2012-on-the-website
• https://www.samspurlin.com/blog/2012-state-of-sam

Tech and Work

I was fortunate enough to have a few significant upgrades in my most frequently used hardware this year. I was eligible to upgrade my work laptop and went from a M1 MacBook Air to a M3 MacBook Air. I stayed at the 13-inch size because it’s mostly closed and connected to an external monitor when I’m at home and when I’m traveling I want it to be as small as possible.

I used a big chunk of our credit card points to get a new M4 iPad Pro 12-inch with cellular, a Magic Keyboard, and Magic Pencil. This is the first “normal” sized (i.e. non-Mini) iPad I’ve owned in a few years and I’m using it as my personal device since I’m trying to create more of a firewall between my work device (the MacBook Air) and my personal devices (the iPad Pro). I ended up trading in my refurbished iPad Mini earlier this year because I found it frustrating to use because it had such little storage and its performance seemed strangely bad compared to what I was expecting. I’m loving having a powerful device with a cellular modem. There’s something really liberating about not needing to hunt for wi-fi when out and about.

Other than the computer, there are no significant changes to what sits on or near my desk. I still look at a 27” 4K Z27 HP monitor all day every day and the same Logitech BRIO webcam sits on top of it. I still use a Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse as my primary peripherals when I’m sitting at my desk. I still have a Shure MV7+ USB mic on a boom and an Elgato key lightto make me look and sound good on podcasts and video calls. No changes to my nearly decade-old Fully Jarvis sit/stand desk or Herman Miller Aeron chair despite moving this year. If I wasn’t on a podcast I’d be able to massively simplify this desk setup. I think this is as simple as I can make it while still being able to record the quality of audio and video we need for At Work with The Ready.

At the end of 2023 I bought a set of AudioEngine A2 desk speakers because I got tired of trying to use my original HomePods as computer speakers. The HomePods are still in my office but are mostly just there to fail at my verbal Siri requests instead of failing at playing audio from my computer.

I didn’t upgrade my phone this year so I’m still rocking a case-less and mildly cracked iPhone 15 Pro Max. No changes to my daily headphones, AirPods Pro. The AirPods Max are still hanging around but mostly only get used as airplane headphones when they aren’t hanging from a hook under my desk. My daily (and training) watch continues to be the Apple Watch Ultra 2 with cellular.

This year I re-discovered the joy of index cards. I keep a stack of them on my desk and just whip through them any time I feel the need to jot something down or keep my hands busy during a meeting. I have the same brass pen on my desk that I’ve had for years. It’s hefty, takes Pilot G2 refills, and feels great in my hand. I do almost everything digitally nowadays, so I think I’ve been on the same medium, hardcover Moleskine notebook since the end of 2022. It stays on my monitor riser during the day and I make sure to always have it with me when I travel.

Entertainment

Entertainment hardware basically stayed the same except for one extremely significant exception: a new TV. I took advantage of a good Black Friday sale to pull the trigger on a 65” Sony BRAVIA XR A95L OLED TV to replace the 55” TCL we had since early 2018. It’s still early days but it seems like a remarkable piece of hardware.

Everything connected to it, a Sonos Playbase, two Sonos Play 1s, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and Apple TV 4K remain unchanged.

There was actually another TV purchase made this year, but it was much less exciting. In an effort to spruce up my indoor riding situation (as mentioned in my 2024 in Review: Training article), I got a cheap 32” Samsung and put it on a rolling cart with another Apple TV 4K as my dedicated Zwift machine. It is helping to make indoor riding slightly more bearable.

I’m still rocking two original HomePods in my office and two HomePod minis (one in the bedroom and one in the kitchen). They are primarily used for getting frustrated with Siri and sometimes playing very nice audio.

I still do most of my non-iPad or non-iPhone digital reading on a Kindle Paperwhite.

Training

2024 marked my third full year of training for triathlons and the vast majority of my equipment has remained unchanged from the original equipping I did in the summer of 2021. I’m still rocking the same mystery year, Craigslist-attained, Trek Madone road bike with aftermarket aerobars, a Garmin Edge 530 head unit, and Garmin Forerunner 745 watch. The watch, somewhat interestingly though, has mostly lived in a drawer as I’ve learned I can use my Apple Watch Ultra 2 as my everyday watch and training watch. I even wore it during my half Ironman race this year and it had plenty of battery to get through the whole 6+ hour race. The other piece of kit that has mostly lived in a drawer this year is my Apple PowerBeats Pro headphones. These are my go-to headphones to wear when riding outside because it’s impossible for them to fall off but I’ve done much less of that this year. Riding indoors, running indoors or outdoors, and strength training all happen with my AirPods Pro.

I still do the vast majority of my running in On Cloudmonsters. I wear Pudolla running shorts, Amazon Basics tech t-shirts, and the running hats given as part of participating Ironman Michigan 70.3 the past two years. I’ve got Baleaf swim jammers, a Speedo pull buoy, some Omid goggles, and Speedo swim caps. I actually have two pairs of flippers because I thought my original pair didn’t make the move from Arlington, but apparently they did. I have the same basic Shimano cycling shoes I’ve had since the beginning. My Saris bike rack for my car continues to be a stalwart (it was stolen off my car in 2023 and I re-purchased the exact same model).

As mentioned in the previous section, I upgraded my indoor riding room by getting a TV and an Apple TV 4K to give me a better setup for using Zwift. Another part of that upgrade was replacing my Kickr Snap with a Kickr Core. I also bought an Amazon Basics weight bench to keep in that room and it primarily serves as a table for my nutrition during long rides. A generic music stand does a good job of holding my iPad and phone within arm’s reach while I’m riding.

A few other fun upgrades this year was getting a Giro Aerohead MIPS racing helmet and a new Cannondale Topstone gravel bike. I live within easy riding distance of an approximately 9 mile gravel trail that tracks along the Hudson River so I wanted to get something that would let me ride it, especially since I’m pretty sketched out about riding on the roads around me. I also picked up some On carbon-plated shoes to wear during my race, but I got cold feet about actually wearing them for my half Ironman this year since I hadn’t yet done a long run in them. They will be waiting for me next year, though. I don’t think I’d call a new heart rate monitor a fun purchase, but I did have to replace my original Garmin this year and I decided to go with a Wahoo Tickr. My racing kit — one of the development team fundraiser options from That Triathlon Life — was new this year and made me feel faster than I am. My second pair Goodr sunglasses finally de-laminated so badly I couldn’t see out of them any more, so I got a pair of Tifosi’s for my outdoor cycling needs.

Kitchen

No major changes in kitchen kit this year. I remain the primary chef for our family and more or less have everything I need to handle cooking for us.

Starting in roughly chronological order of when I interact with these tools, my coffee setup remains anchored by my Fellow grinder and electric kettle. I get my beans delivered on a schedule from Trade Coffee (use this referral link if you check it out and I’ll get some free coffee) and generally alternate between AeroPress and pour overs, depending on my mood. I have a multi-cup Chemex that I don’t think I used once in the past year, but keep handy for any situation where I need to make coffee for more than just me. There’s also an espresso machine Emily gave me last Christmas, but it’s more for afternoon snacks. In the morning, I’m a simple pour over or AeroPress guy. The Eufy handheld vacuum stays right next to the grinder and kettle and is extremely necessary for cleaning up my coffee grinding mess.

Our Aarke water carbonator gets a lot of work and we keep it supplied with CO2 via a subscription from SodaSense. Our KitchenAid stand mixer is always ready for me to whip up some bread dough or cookies. Our Breville 650XL toaster oven is a total champ (thanks to John Siracusa for the recommendation). Our Vitamix remained underused this year, as Emily has seemingly moved on from her smoothie phase and I keep thinking about making soup in it and then not doing so.

A Belkin charging stand lets us use our phones in Standby Mode while we’re doing things in the kitchen. Our Frigidaire dehumidifier makes sure the apartment isn’t getting weirdly humid. There’s a pizza stone living in the oven — ensuring we’re always ready to make some bread or a pizza. Deli containers are our go-to leftover containers of choice and my Zojirushi travel mug is always standing by waiting to keep my coffee hot for an unnaturally long time.

My knives aren’t particularly noteworthy, other than the fact that I try to keep them all extremely sharp with a nice whetstone session every couple months or so.

Clothing

Some expensive shoe purchases over the past few years are coming to fruition this year in the fact that other than some new running shoes, I didn’t have to buy any other shoes this year. I’m still rocking Wolverine boots from 2018, Rothy’s sneakers from 2022, Velasca sneakers from 2020, Velasca dress shoes from 2021, Teva flip-flops from 2018, Glerups from 2021, and some brown BEDSTU shoes from at least 2018. I was tired of buying shoes that fell apart after a year and were impossible to repair.

I don’t generally think about my clothes very often because I tend to wear the same thing over and over, but this year did result in me changing two staples pretty significantly. After many years of wearing Everlane t-shirts, I got frustrated with their worsening quality and decided to find a new default shirt. I landed on Uniqlo for awhile, but they were somehow too nice? At least, they were too thick. I then stumbled across the Comfort Colors brand in some random article and they’ve become my new default shirt. Cheap and soft and pretty nice fitting.

I went on a similar journey for new socks after wanting to move on from the Everlane/Aasics combination I had been rocking for the past few years. I ended up going with Darn Tough in two different varieties: ankle socks and mid-calf socks. I’m learning to quiet the Millennial voice that yells at me every time I wear socks that extend beyond my ankles.

I had to get some new sunglasses this year after breaking my previous pair and decided to go with some custom RayBan Wayfarers (got them with orange arms and blue frames, which looks good with my orange strapped Apple Watch Ultra 2).

Odds and Ends

A few other significant additions this year include a new Roomba i3+ EVO robot vacuum and a (new to us, but used) 2014 Subaru Forester. When we moved to New York we needed a second car since Emily commutes to an office every day in our 2020 Toyota Camry. I bought a ridiculously expensive, but really good, phone mount for the Forester and now it’s basically perfect for what I need it to do.

A few old stalwarts worth mentioning include maybe the oldest piece of tech I own, a Coway air purifier from 2016 that lives in our bedroom. My Wahl beard trimmer is also still going strong from 2017.

Looking Ahead

Despite this being the longest article in my 2024 Year in Review series, I didn’t actually buy many new physical items this year. I’d definitely like to keep that trend going in 2025. Moving has a way of really clarifying how much stuff you have in a really visceral and annoying way, so even though we don’t have any imminent plans to move again, there’s definitely a non-zero chance we could move again sooner rather than later and I’d love to not live in fear of that possibility more than I have to.

Video Games

It’s funny, I self-identify as a “gamer” and spent most of my childhood pining for the games and consoles I couldn’t afford, but I actually played objectively few video games this year. The only game I fully completed was Final Fantasy XVI, but I played the bulk of it in 2023, only putting the finishing touches on it in 2024. I haven’t touched the DLC, yet, but I plan to. Continuing the Final Fantasy theme, the game that consumed the majority of my playing time this year was Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. It’s a marvel of a game, truly. The original Final Fantasy VII is my favorite game of all time, searing itself deep into my childhood and teenage subconscious. Somehow, they’ve created a game that has honored that hyper-nostalgia without just making a frame by frame remake. I’m enjoying it. Haven’t finished it yet, but hopefully in the first half of 2025.

As far as additional console gaming goes, I played some Helldivers 2, Hollow Knight, and Inscryption. Playing games with strangers stresses me out, so Helldivers 2 ended up on the shelf pretty quickly. I started scratching the surface of the beauty and stellar reputation of Hollow Knight, but hit a couple of spots that demoralized me so completely I put it down to take a break, and then several months had elapsed. I only started playing Inscryption in October, and I’ve liked it quite a bit.

Outside my PlayStation, I’ve dabbled in Finity, Vampire Survivors, and Balatro on my iPhone, with Balatro taking the majority of my attention there.

Music

Music is almost always a productivity tool. I turn it on when I need to focus, which means I listen to almost exclusively instrumental tunes. I also rarely listen to albums, choosing to stick to playlists like Apple’s Chill, Focus, Lo-Fi Japan, Living in the Library and other downtempo/electronic playlists. Tycho is the epitome of the music I’m looking for when working, and there was actually a new Tycho album, Infinite Health, this year that I found myself listening to on repeat for a while.

Other than music-as-focus-tool, my big discovery this year was Petey. I got obsessed. In a true sign of the times, I first became aware of Petey because of his absurd sketches on Instagram. I then heard his music referenced by the triathlon podcast I listen to, so I decided to give him a try. Oh man, it scratches the same itch that Manchester Orchestra and Say Anything and Modest Mouse do for me. Plus, he has connections to Michigan (gotta appreciate any time someone wears a Detroit Vipers jersey). It’s rare when I find a new artist (to me) and they almost immediately pop into my top five favorite artists list, but Petey did it.

Honorable mentions have to go out to everyone’s favorite German partycore band, Electric Callboy, who I continue to adore and their collaboration with Babymetalthis year is a delight. I started to dabble into some seriously heavy stuff like Lorna Shore thanks to my strange obsession with watching drummer YouTube videos as a non-drummer (shout out to Drumeo, for that). Sometimes you just wanna listen to some insanely talented musicians shred and growl like demons, you know?

Oh, and my favorite band of all time, Coheed and Cambria, has been releasing some new singles (and a whole album of covers), so you know that has me looking excitedly toward 2025.

Movies

Boy, I certainly don’t watch many movies, eh? I watched a grand total of 7 this year. Godzilla Minus One, Perfect Days, Gettysburg, and Dune: Part Two fwere great. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was okay. Napoleon and The Creator were bad.

TV

I watch only slightly more TV than I do movies, but the overall hit rate on what I watched this year was much higher than past years. The entire run of Detroiters (S1 & S2), Shoresy (S1-3), The Last of Us (S1) and Slow Horses (S1-S3) were incredible. Fallout, 3 Body Problem, Faceoff: Inside the NHL, and Planet Earth III were pretty okay. Not a fan of The Mandalorian and don’t think I’ll be moving beyond the first season.

I’ve also come to enjoy Dropout TV, particularly the show Very Important People. Two comedians sit down for an improvised interview after one of them receives an elaborate makeover and has to make up a character to go along with it. Some episodes are whiffs, but the ones that hit, hit hard.

There are a few YouTube channels where I generally watch every new video: the boat building-turned-boat-sailing channel, the long-haul hiker who posts daily recaps, the aesthetic triathlon channel and the unhinged but motivating triathlon channel, and a couple of hockey recap and analysis channels.

Podcasts

The champion of 2024 was, by far, The Rest Is History. After hearing people praise it, I finally went face down in it this year. It’s incredible and maybe my new favorite podcast.

I’m not a huge 99% Invisible fan, but their yearlong read along of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with Elliot Kalan from The Flop House was great. They had some great guests, including what felt like out of nowhere, Brennan Lee Mulligan from Dropout.

The current full roster as of December 31st, 2024 is: The Rest is History, Accidental Tech Podcast, Philosophize This!, 32 Thoughts, Upgrade, Reconcilable Differences, Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, Dithering, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, In Our Time, Coretex, Navel Gazing, Robot or Not?, Roderick on the Line, The Talk Show with John Gruber, That Triathlon Life Podcast, Under the Radar, The Vergecast.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the podcast I co-host, At Work with The Ready, even though I have trouble listening to it since I put so much time and attention into making it.

Other Entertainment

2024 was a weirdly sporty year for me. I got into F1 thanks to finally cratering to peer pressure (many years later) on Drive to Survive. I picked up the F1 season about halfway through the summer and watched every race from there until the end of the season, developing the appropriately strong opinions about things I barely understand along the way.

Early in 2024 the extremely mediocre Detroit Red Wings, my favorite team of my favorite sport, went on a bit of a run at the end of the season and almost made the playoffs for the first time in the better part of a decade. Alas, they did not. But it was exciting for a while. Don’t talk to me about this season, though.

Similarly, the Detroit Tigers went on a perhaps even more improbable run at the end of last season, did make the playoffs, and got closer to making the World Series than anybody expected.

And just to round out my sporty year, the Detroit Lions are finally good and after years of heartbreak and then mostly ignoring them, I’ve tried to watch the vast majority of their games this season.

If I had to give my 2024 triathlon training efforts a grade, it’d be a solid B-.

I cycled and swam significantly less than I did in 2023 and 2022, but I managed to run and walk more. My training consistency took a bit of a hit with the upheaval of moving from Virginia to New York, but never completely fell off the rails. I learned how important it is to have Default Run and Default Cycling routines (the running or cycling route you take when you don’t want to think at all about your running or cycling route). When those need to be recreated from scratch in a new location, you can be left feeling a bit unmoored until you’ve landed new ones.

In 2024, I completed 541 miles of running across 106 hours and 4 minutes. In 2023, I did 528 miles and 470 miles in 2022. Moving to the Hudson Valley has helped with this because my new Default Run is on a dirt path along the Hudson River, not the sidewalks of Arlington.

In 2024, I only completed 55,144 yards of swimming, down from 95,350 in 2023 and 98,917 in 2022. This is where my move from Arlington worked against me. In Arlington, I was mostly swimming in a beautiful aquatic center within walking distance of my apartment. In Haverstraw, I’m swimming in a relatively dank gym pool a fifteen-minute drive away. I also did some organized open water swims with my coach when I lived in Virginia, but I didn’t manage to swim outside (apart from my race) once in 2024. This is something I need to fix in 2025.

I cycled for 2,170 miles in 2024, down from 2,236 in 2023 and 2,534 in 2022. Again, this is where my move has complicated things. When I lived in Arlington, I could ride from my front door to a couple different rail trails where I didn’t have to worry about cars. That’s not really the case in Haverstraw. I can drive to Harriman State Park with my bike and do some beautiful (and hilly) rides in relative safety there, but I’m extremely skeptical about riding on the roads near my apartment.

I was already kind of anxious about road riding, and then the Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau tragedy happened over the summer, and it sketched me out even further. To counteract this, I let myself invest in improving my indoor riding setup this fall in hopes of not letting that affect my training too much. I also bought a gravel bike in October so I could start riding the trail I mentioned earlier.

When I set up my race schedule for 2024 I didn’t know I was going to be moving to New York. That meant the two Virginia races I scheduled because they were convenient suddenly became very inconvenient. I bailed on both and ended up only doing the Michigan 70.3 in September. This was my second time doing the race, so it was nice heading into it knowing what the course was like and how to handle all the logistics.

Remember how I said I didn’t do any open water swimming this year? Yeah, it showed up big time in this race with some mild panicking early in the swim, but eventually calming down and finishing it without incident (but slower than 2023). I was determined to do something better than the year before, so I focused on going hard (probably too hard) on the bike and ended up improving on my 2023 time by at least fifteen minutes. The run, though, was back to disappointment as I paid for my exuberance on the bike by just absolutely death-marching the admittedly much hotter than expected run to a significantly slower time than 2023.

Looking Ahead to 2025

Now that we’re settled into our new place in New York, I’m excited about a less disrupted year of training. I’d like to sit here in a year and report that I had my biggest year of training ever. I’ll need to figure out the open water swimming situation (I’ve got my eye on a couple of options, and it’s unfortunate that having a river in my backyard hasn’t made this simple) and figure out how to balance the soulcrushingness of indoor cycling with the danger of riding outdoors, but I’m feeling optimistic I can have a good year.

Regardless of how the year goes, trading the miserable Arlington, Virginia summer for the cold and hills of the Hudson Valley is a net-win, in my book.

Communication

Superhuman remains my email client across all devices. It’s ultra fast and allows me to use keyboard shortcuts without modifier keys (i.e. just hitting “E” to archive a message, hitting “C” to start a new email, etc.). That being said, I did spend some time with Apple’s Mail apps this year with very little interruption to my workflows. I don’t like the Archive Message keyboard shortcut on macOS and I have no need for the new Apple Intelligence automatic categorization features, but I do find its design to be otherwise clean and attractive. I’ll be sticking with Superhuman for the time being but if I ever got into a situation where I (rather than my company) had to pay for it then I’m pretty sure I’d bail to Apple Mail and not feel any worse for wear.

The Ready continues to use Slack for all our internal text-based communication even though I feel like I can see it deteriorating. I can’t remember a new feature they’ve introduced that actually useful. It’s getting more complex and worse every day.

We continue to use Zoom as the default video calling service at The Ready and most days I don’t really need to think about it, which is high-praise for a video calling platform. I find myself occasionally using Webex, Teams, or whatever the Google equivalent is called this week when certain clients call for it, and they all feel worse than Zoom.

Loom continues to hang around as a quick and useful way to make and share videos with each other at The Ready and with clients. It has become a mainstay in my asynchronous ways of working toolbox.

Personal text-based communication happens almost entirely in Messages.

Haven’t touched Audio Hijack in over a year but that’s more a function of “Fields of Work” being on hiatus and me not being involved in the production of “At Work with The Ready” (where we use ZenCastr).

Project Management

All my work continues to flow through Things. Emails that represent tasks get forwarded to Things, stray thoughts get captured into Things, next actions from meetings get extracted into Things — basically, anything that needs to become some sort of productive action on my part probably went through Things at some point. I periodically try replacing it with Reminders and it always feels like I’m trying to run through mud. Other than being blazing fast and having rock solid sync between my devices, the key feature that Reminders doesn’t have that Things does is the ability to “defer” a task or project until a certain date (basically, make it disappear from my system until a certain date). I use this all the time to help me focus on the stuff I can only do right now vs. the stuff I know I want to handle in the future.

The slight wrinkle to my Things-based utopia is that I have to work with other people and Things remains a resolutely single player app. The Ready uses Notion for project and knowledge management, so I have several different team-based kanban boards that I’m regularly monitoring and using. I will often manually extract tasks from Notion into Things but that sometimes gets unwieldy. If I could have my various Notion kanban boards automatically stay in sync with Things (and vice versa) I would be in heaven, but I don’t think that’s possible.

I’m no longer on any projects where we use Trello as our shared project management software.

I continue to use Fantastical with a Google Calendar backend. I’m an incredibly heavy user of my calendars because not only do I use them to keep track of upcoming appointments, I turn them into fairly accurate historical archives of what I was working on throughout the day. I experiment with the native Calendar app from time to time and I think I could probably make do if Fantastical disappeared one day. The one feature I’d miss the most, though, would be the ability to hide an event. I have a couple active calendars that are basically information radiators and once an event goes by or I have the information I need in my head I no longer want to see the information but don’t have the ability to delete it.

Reminders continues to hold a handful of recurring reminders I call Life Scaffolding as well as a shared grocery list that I collaborate on with my wife. It also is where I’ll throw any short-term reminders via Siri.

Documents, Decks, and Deliverables

Despite using Notion, The Ready still relies heavily on Google Docs, too. That’s where most of my document creation happens as I haven’t found anything where multiplayer collaboration happens smoother. We use Pitch for collaborating on most decks in real time. We use Mural for collaborating on a virtual canvas in real time (with occasional sojourns into Miro for a couple of client projects this year). I have small gripes with most of these tools but most days they feel pretty smooth and get the job done.

A lot of my early thought gathering happens in the notes app Bear. From there, that text may get shuttled over to a Google Doc or an email or a Pitch deck. I like how it looks and feels and how it handles Markdown. If I’m writing something, it’ll probably start in Bear and it may even stay in there for the duration of a project. If a piece of information is what I’d call a “Reference” it probably lives in Notes, though. For a long time it felt like I had to use Bear or Notes, but not both. I realized there are reference notes I look at pretty regularly (e.g. Weekly Review Checklist, Gift Ideas, hours the pool is open at my gym, the menu for the restaurant I order lunch from frequently) but don’t want cluttering up the space where I’m doing active work. I moved those things to Notes which allowed Bear to be an “active working space” for writing. So far, that distinction has felt pretty good.

Of course, it couldn’t be that simple, as I’m actually writing this in Ulysses. Why not Bear? Bear is for notes whereas Ulysses is where I write longer things that are destined to be articles or newsletter issues. That distinction feels useful in my brain, so I’m rolling with it.

And what about Obsidian? Obsidian is where I try to build an active “knowledge garden” with notes from the books I read, articles I write, and other pieces of knowledge building activities. I guess Notes is where I keep “life reference” material whereas Obsidian is where I keep “knowledge reference” material. It’s a quasi-Zettelkasten but if I’m being honest with myself, I’m not particularly stoked on how I’ve used/nurtured it over the last year but I’m not ready to pull the plug on it entirely.

Browsing and General Internet Things

I spent the vast majority of this year using Arc as my macOS browser. There are lots of things about it that I really enjoy (particularly the sidebar history and ability to put things in a split screen view). A couple weeks ago, though, I switched back to Safari and tried to invest a little bit of time in learning some of the “new” features that I never bothered to learn when they first came out. Web browsing feels like the number one thing to try to keep first party if at all possible. I’m not sure why, but it feels so central to the experience of using my devices I like when I’m able to use Safari across all of them. So, for now, that’s what I’m doing even though I remain a fan of Arc.

I can only go so far with Safari, though. I know it has a read later service built into it (Reading List), but as much as I try to use it I can’t make it stick for me. For 99% of this year I’ve used Matter as my read later service. I’ve been a big fan of Matter for a few years now but just recently started feeling like it’s trying to do too much. I noticed it was actually too good at surfacing other things to read that it thought I might enjoy (it was often right). I’d open the app to read an article I had saved only to be distracted by a bunch of other stuff. In the last couple weeks I re-installed my first read later love, Instapaper, and am going to try using it instead of Matter. I’m guessing its simpler design and less audacious aims might actually result in me reading more.

I’ve tried to get back into using RSS a bit more this year and have used NetNewsWire across all my devices to do so. I don’t remember why I switched from Unread.

ChatGPT (and to a lesser extent Claude and Perplexity) have grown in how much I rely on them throughout the day. I’d say I interact with ChatGPT basically every day. For awhile, I had it mapped to the Action Button on my iPhone so I could invoke it as quickly as possible, too. I’m pretty sure this whole family of apps, particularly ChatGPT, is going to continue gaining in importance for me across 2025 and beyond.

When I left Twitter a few years ago I thought I had maybe excised social media from my life permanently. With the growth of Threads and Bluesky this year, though, I’ve found myself getting pulled back into this world a little bit. I don’t post much on either one, yet, but both have a way of capturing my attention more than I’d prefer. I think Bluesky will become the place where I post more consistently in 2025 and I’ll probably continue to look at both more than I want.

Entertainment

Overcast is the only way I listen to podcasts. If it disappeared tomorrow I guess I could make the Podcasts app work, but there’s so many quality of life features built into Overcast I would miss.

Apple Music has emerged as my default music streaming service. It feels like one of those services where it has advantages over third party apps (e.g. Spotify) in how it interacts with the OS. While its algorithmic recommendations are definitely worse than Spotify there are aspects of its design I like much better. I’m also utterly uninterested in audiobooks or podcasts in Spotify and it feels like they continue to junk up their app with everything other than music.

Audible is where my audiobook listening happens. It’s fine.

I split my digital books between Apple Books (40%) and Kindle (60%). I wish I had one unified digital library but it feels like that ship sailed a long time ago.

I continue to do my sporadic personal journaling in Day One.

Logging what I play, read, and watch happens in Sofa (as well as managing the backlogs for each). I continue logging my reading in Goodreads mostly out of inertia.

Utilities

Weather nerdery continues in Carrot. Travel nerdery continues in Flighty. Training nerdery continues in TrainingPeaks and Strava. Password management is getting annoyingly split between 1Password and the new native Passwords app. Backblaze continues to silently back up my computer. Mela handles the handful of recipes I find myself referring to periodically. Rocket continues to help me put emoji everywhere and anywhere. Magnet got bumped out because macOS gained the ability to snap windows.

It’s by far my preferred relaxation activity and my favorite entertainment medium. Most mornings I spend at least thirty minutes, often more like an hour, sitting in my living room with a cup of coffee and a book. I’ll occasionally finish my day with a book, too, but that’s a bit rarer. The vast majority of the books I read are digital, with maybe a 60/40 split of those between Kindle (primarily on a Kindle Paperwhite) and Apple Books (primarily on my 11” iPad Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max). This year was skewed heavier toward Apple Books than usual. I always have one audiobook (via Audible) going at all times so I can keep reading even when in conditions where it’s difficult or impossible to read with my eyes. I also usually have one hard copy book in the mix, too. Sometimes I just want to feel those pages between my fingers, you know?

I’m not particularly precious about choosing what to read. I do maintain a backlog in the app Sofa, but I’d say I grab my next book out of there only 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time I either have something specific in mind I want to read or I’ll let the algorithmic recommendations in the Apple Books or Kindle stores put something in front of me. I tell myself I only read one book at a time, but as I’ve already described, I typically have at least one digital book, one audiobook, and one paper book all going at the same time. To not let something linger for too long, though, I try to finish reading the whole “batch” of three before starting anything new. This year I also actually managed to abandon a couple of books I wasn’t feeling. I’ve always been an inveterate “finisher” but I’m turning a new leaf (page?), apparently.

By the numbers, 2024 is a bit down from 2023. I finished 46 books (compared to 61 in 2023) across 17,335 pages (down from 21,829 in 2023). I definitely went through stretches this year when it felt like I was just taking little sips of whatever I was reading, with increasingly long times between major gulps. I tackled a handful of particularly gnarly books (e.g., Godel, Escher, Bach, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, and The Life of the Mind to just name a few) this year which are just naturally slower to get through.

I read approximately two books of non-fiction for every book of fiction, which feels like a major skew toward fiction as compared to previous years. I actually had trouble using the fiction/non-fiction categorization because a handful of books I truly enjoyed this year seemed to straddle that line (e.g., When We Cease to Understand the World, The MANIAC, and A River Runs Through It).

My favorite fiction (or fiction-adjacent) books this year were When We Cease to Understand the World, American Gods, and Children of Time.

My non-fiction reading seemed to hit a few key themes:

1. Personal development, self-exploration, and the philosophy of living well (On Becoming a Person, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, The Life of the Mind)
2. Systems-oriented perspective on interconnected social, economic, and ecological systems (Systems Thinking for Social Change, Complexity, The Regenerative Business)
3. History, power, resilience, and societal structures (Gulag, Kissinger, History of the Peloponnesian War)
4. Epistemology and the boundaries of knowledge and consciousness (Godel, Escher, Bach, I Am a Strange Loop, Knowing What We Know, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne)
5. Contemporary sociotechnical and cultural phenomena (Filterworld, Number Go Up)

I’m most proud of myself for having finished Gulag, Godel, Escher, Bach, Hermeneutics of the Subject, The Peloponnesian War, and The Life of the Mind. The book I’m most likely to re-read at some point is probably Slow Productivity and Liberalism as a Way of Life. I was most positively surprised by The Goblin Emperor.

I read a handful of authors for the first time this year, and I’m excited to read more from them: Norman Maclean, Anne Applebaum, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Katherine Addison, and Ted Chiang. A handful of old stalwarts showed up as well: Cal Newport, George Saunders, James S.A. Corey, and Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Reading in 2025

I’m committed to keeping my reading practice as simple and robust as possible. I know I read a lot, and I’m okay with that. I don’t really feel the need to read more (even though this was a “down” year compared to 2023). I think I’d continue to benefit from reading more fiction than I currently do, and I’d like to see myself dig into more classic literature. If there’s one thing I’d like to do differently in 2025, it might just be trying to be a bit more deliberate about continuing to explore specific lines of inquiry. I started that a bit this year with my Foucault, Hodot, and Montaigne reading all falling around a similar theme. I think there’s more of that to be done, particularly around topics related to AI and consciousness (and really any of the themes that showed up in 2024).

Aside from books, which make up 95% of my reading time, I do try to consume some magazines and newsletters. I used Matter as my read later service for the vast majority of the year. I saved tons of articles into it and read only a tiny percentage of them. I use NetNewsWire as my RSS reader, and I’m looking forward to leaning much more heavily on it in 2025 as I try to limit my exposure to algorithmic recommendations as much as possible. I get physical copies of The Economist, Harvard Business Review, Nautilus and Palladium. I continue to pay for and enjoy Stratechery. I’ll continue to tweak what non-book related writing I pay for in 2025 as I’m committed to directly supporting more of the authors and sources I enjoy.

You can follow me on Goodreads and see my entire 2024 reading list here.

All glory is in the new. Every January there are countless words written about what people are going to do differently. What about everything you deliberately (or not so deliberately) decide to keep the same? I think consistency and looking at what has remained constant over the past year can be even more enlightening.

Software & Hardware

Like most years, I went through a multi-month phase where I used almost all default apps across each category where there is one. That meant using Apple’s Podcasts, Notes, Music, Mail, Calendar, Safari, Keychain, Pages, and Reminders apps as my productivity stack for well over a month (probably closer to two). And like every other time I’ve done this experiment, I ultimately ended back with a bunch of my tried and true third party apps that are a better fit for how I like to work and what I want out of my tools.

Specifically, that meant Fantastical, Things, Ulysses, Bear, Spotify, Superhuman, 1Password, CARROT Weather, Day One and Overcast were all frequently and (mostly) happily used just like they have been for many years at this point. Some of these have been in my toolbox over a decade and are so deeply embedded in my muscle memory they feel like a natural extension of my very being.

Other mainstays include Magnet, Rocket Emoji, Audio Hijack, Backblaze, Unread, Flighty, Due, Mela, Strava, and TrainingPeaks. All have been in use for many years and do their jobs well.

On the work front, not much has changed in The Ready’s productivity stack as I still find myself using Slack, Google Docs, Zoom, Trello, Loom, Notion, Mural/Miro, and Pitch pretty continuously to get my day job done.

The centerpiece of my computing hardware remains unchanged, a M1 MacBook Air (2020) that I have plugged into a 27” HP monitor (2019) and an old Magic Mouse (unknown) + Magic Keyboard with Touch ID (2022) combo. My desk headphones are AirPods Max (2020) and my walking around headphones continue to be AirPods Pro (2019, re-purchased in 2023). My desk remains a Fully Jarvis sit/stand desk (2015) and my chair is a well-loved Herman Miller Aeron (2015). My two original full-size HomePods (2018) are still chugging away and their little brothers, a pair of HomePod Minis (2020) are still around and doing their thing.

My Nintendo Switch (2017) continues to be the least portable portable gaming system I’ve owned (I swear, my hands must be anti-Switch shaped). My TV remains some random TCL (2018).

PowerBeats headphones (2021) are my go-to training headphones. My Garmin Forerunner watch (2021) and Edge bicycle head unit (2021) both continue doing their respective jobs in the triathlon training realm. My mystery year Trek Madone Craigslist bike (bought used in 2021) continues to be my only training and racing bike and my Wahoo Kickr Snap (2022) continues to let me avoid riding outside in the winter.

In the kitchen, my KitchenAid stand mixer (2020) is a tank and used at least weekly to make bread, the Arc water carbonator (2020) gets a continuous workout, and my Fellow water kettle (2020) and grinder (2022) are the mainstays of my morning coffee routine.

Life & Work

I continue training for triathlons, as I have since the summer of 2021. 2023 marked my second full year working with a coach and consistently training throughout the year. I completed two races, one of which was the half-Ironman distance I’ve had my eye on since I originally started training. I cycled 2,236 miles (down from 2,542 miles in 2022), ran 528 miles (up from 472 miles), and swam 95,350 yards (down from 97,558 yards) across the whole year of racing and training. For the second year in a row I participated in a training camp on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with my coach and some of the other athletes he coaches. This remains almost the only time I train with other people. 99% of my training time is spent alone.

I still read quite a bit. In 2023 I finished 61 books and 21,751 pages (up from 44 books and 18,159 pages in 2022 but down from 22,123 pages in 2021). I re-read three books; How to Do Nothing by Jenny O’Dell, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier, and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

I continue to watch only a little bit of TV (eight seasons spread across eight shows) and movies (13, four of which were re-watches). While I don’t watch much scripted TV, I do continue to watch most Detroit Red Wings games on TV. In a given season I’ll probably miss fewer than 10 games (out of 82).

Sampson Boat Co, That Triathlon Life, and Lionel Sanders remain the handful of YouTube channels I consistently watch.

Most of the podcasts in my roster have remained unchanged, with the following being shows I tend to listen to every episode of and have been in rotation for many years (some, over a decade): Cortex, 32 Thoughts, Accidental Tech Podcast, AppStories, Connected, Dithering, My Brother, My Brother, and Me, Philosophize This!, Reconcilable Differences, Robot or Not?, Roderick on the Line, Sharp China with Bill Bishop, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson, Stratechery, That Triathlon Life Podcast, Under the Radar, and Upgrade.

I continue to aim to go to bed around 10:00 PM and wake up around 6:00 AM on most days. My morning routine has remained unchanged with coffee (AeroPress or pour over) and miscellaneous mess-around-on-my-phone time until 6:30, reading a book until 7:00, making and eating breakfast until 7:30, and generally starting my work day around 7:30. I’ve fully embraced my early lunch tendency and generally eat lunch between 11 and 11:30 most days. I try to finish work by 4:00 PM so I can workout before it gets too late and all motivation leaves my body. Sometimes I’ll do an early afternoon workout and work until 6:00 PM instead.

I continue to try to be the last person on the airplane (unless I can be one of the first) and I continue to view the ability to travel for my work as a privilege.

I continue to mostly embrace minimalism as an aesthetic, principle, and quasi-hobby.

I continue to make dinner most nights (while Emily is in charge of clean up). There’s probably about 10 dishes I regularly make for us, but I haven’t learned a new staple to include in the rotation in a while. Our default dinner continues to be “dope salads” (lettuce, miscellaneous veggies, roasted sweet potato, and some sort of protein, usually roasted chicken). My default breakfast is oatmeal with blueberries and too much brown sugar and butter to really consider it particularly healthy. I continue to lean on DoorDash more than I should when I’m feeling unmotivated to cook.

I continue to be the family Chief Logistics Officer. I’m in charge of groceries, other household supplies, general maintenance, and all travel logistics. I enjoy this role.

I continue to write sporadically, at best, with only three issues of The Deliberate published in 2023 and only one article published on SamSpurlin.com. My brother, Max, and I continue to record our podcast, Fields of Work, with seven episodes published in 2023.

I still work at The Ready and split my time between various internal initiatives and leading client projects. I continue to think that what we’re trying to do is exciting and that I’m well-suited to do the type of work I do. I continue to feel grateful (almost) every day about this.

I’m still married (2021) to my best friend and the best person I know, Emily. We still live in Arlington, Virginia in the same apartment we moved into together in December 2017. We continue to take a summer vacation on Cape Cod every year so we can visit Emily’s parents. We get back to Michigan to visit my family at least once a year, too.

I continue to think about the intersection of attention, personal development, organization design, and philosophy a whole lot. I continue to struggle with walking the balance between wanting to see myself grow and being okay with who and how I am. I think I’m getting better at it.

Want more? Sign up for The Deliberate, my continuously intermittent newsletter.

That being said, I do think there’s something to be said for intentionality. I think themes are a nice way to put some very light guardrails around some intentions without turning them into a yearlong goal-slog. Even better than guardrails, articulating a theme is a way to create a useful attentional lens that you can use in surprising ways to notice what’s going on around you in new ways.

I’ve used theme(s) in the past, but I’ve never tried to use them in explicit conjunction with my other favorite method – the personal experiment. It seems like an obvious connection, though, right? Set a theme or two that basically gives a useful directional heading for the year and then use relatively short (one to three week) personal experiments to explore within those themes. So, that’s what I’m going to try this year: set a couple broad themes that describe the general areas I feel like I need to explore this year and commit to running as many experiments that investigate, challenge, and push against those themes as I can usefully metabolize over the next twelve months.

In no particular order, here are the three general themes I want to use to bring some structure to my personal experimentation in 2023.

Focusing

As David Allen says, the better you get the better you’d better get. I’m seven and a half years into an intense consulting career. As I’ve gotten better at my job I’ve found myself in progressively more complex environments that seem to regularly come with higher-stakes moments than ever before. I love it, but it requires that I keep getting better at what I do. If I stay stagnant I will get overwhelmed. One way to stay stagnant is to constantly feel like I’m being pulled in many directions simultaneously and not actually developing deeper expertise in anything.

One of the things I’ve learned about myself is that because I have such well-considered and robust systems for being productive, I have a tendency to take on way too much. Because my capacity for work is high, it’s very easy for me to fill that capacity with relatively low-impact busywork that fills the hours but doesn’t necessarily create the outcomes I want to see. It’s time for me to really start figuring out how to eliminate those attractive nuisances and focus on the highest impact stuff that only I can do.

Possible Areas to Experiment

• What kinds of caps/rules/limits can I put in my days/weeks that will force me to get better rather than just working harder?
• What commitments feel inviolable but are actually distractions? Do I have what it takes to step away from them?
• How do I better match the type of work to the energy it needs? How do I build the most important work I have to do into my most naturally energetic periods of time?
• What does it look like to take my existing hobbies and interests deeper?
• How can you be a curious person and also focused?
• What does it look like to always take the most direct moves from where I am to where I want to be?

Relating

I often focus on myself too much. I can take my interest in personal development too far and in doing so become insular. I often lose sight of the fact that I’m part of a network of relationships that are incredibly important to me. I’m a new husband as of this year. I have four younger brothers who are my best friends but also live many states away. As The Ready grows I have friends/colleagues who I used to work with side-by-side every day but now only seem to see or talk to a couple times a year. I have friends from graduate school who I only periodically exchange text messages with. I don’t need to sustain every friendship forever and I don’t need every friendship to be deeply intimate. But I wonder if I’d feel better about myself and my life if I spend more time and energy on my relationships in 2023?

Possible Areas to Experiment

• If Emily and I are going to stay in the Washington D.C. area long-term, as it looks like we might, are we building relationships with people and building community here?
• What’s the right cadence and format for keeping my most important relationships healthy?
• How can I be a better friend? Brother? Son? Husband?
• I’ve neglected my social life pretty consistently for most of my life. Is that something I want to do? Am I missing something by being aggressively reluctant to “do things”?

Creating

A solid 75% of my journal entries from 2022 were me lamenting that I wasn’t writing enough and how terrible that made me feel. I know I only tend to feel my best when I’m consistently writing. I used to think this was evidence of some kind of latent narcissism that was looking for a way to express itself. I worried that my writing was a way to demonstrate my intelligence to people I admired. Writing as head-pat-mechanism, basically. I’ve recently learned I really don’t think it’s about that for me (although I won’t turn down a head-pat from someone I admire). It’s the fact that writing consistently means I’m thinking consistently. And, on the flip side, if I’m not writing it means I’m not actually thinking very deeply about much of anything. I want to be a deep thinker. I want to wrestle with big questions and make sense of the world around me. I can only do that if I’m regularly prioritizing the time to make my thinking visible (even if only to myself).

When I don’t write enough I feel like I’m wearing a damp sweater that I can’t take off. It’s profoundly uncomfortable and all encompassing. Every subtle movement is a reminder that this sucks. Sometimes, it even seems like I don’t have the power to remove it. Which is stupid, right? I can just take it off. I could just write more. That’s it. Simple. It’s time to hang the Damp Sweater of Non-Creation in the closet and never look at it again.

Possible Areas to Experiment

• How much do I need to write in a given day, week, month to feel like I did enough? Is it time-based? Page-based? Publication-based? Something else?
• How much can I write in a week?
• What types of writing should I experiment with more?
• What would it look like to make a concerted effort to actually participate in social media more (rather than primarily as a consumer)?
• How can I lean into working-in-public while still having the patience and discipline to spend the right amount of time to create something really great?
• Can I build some sort of momentum around a body of work related to The Deliberate?

My intention is to use my Deliberate Pattern Library as the ongoing record of what experiments I’m doing throughout the year and what I’m learning from them.

I imagine I’ll write about most of the experiments as I do them in The Deliberate, too. I’m not necessarily going to hold myself to always be running an experiment (it can be nice to take a break) but I imagine more often than not I’ll be doing something toward one of these themes (even if it’s quite small or simple). I’m also not saying that I won’t do an experiment that doesn’t align with one of these themes if it feels useful or interesting.

Ultimately, I’m hoping the commitment to both themes and a rhythm of experimentation will help me uncover the things that I’m not even thinking about right now. These three themes of Focusing, Relating, and Creating have interesting overlaps, tensions, and implications that I can’t see from my vantage point today. Only by digging into them through experimentation will I start to uncover what they have in store for me.

Ten years ago I wrote a yearly review that I cheekily called State of the Sam. I was going into the last year of a positive psychology master’s program at Claremont Graduate University and was a couple weeks away from hearing that I was accepted into the PhD program (which I would ultimately drop out of several years later – but that’s a different story for another time). I was 25 years old. I had been dating a girl for about a year and a half. We had just gone camping at Joshua Tree National Park. She visited me in Prague when I lived there over the summer. Now, we’re married.

I wrote about the software I liked, particularly Things and Fantastical. Things and Fantastical are still the backbone of my daily productivity. All that is to say, ten years is a long time, things change, and even more things, maybe surprisingly, stay the same.

It’s fun to look back and see how a year went and it’s even more fun to look back 10 years later and see what felt like it was worth mentioning. So, to give 2032 Sam something to read, let’s do it again: another State of the Sam.

The Year of Work

I’m tempted to punt on this first section by simply pointing you to one of the very few articles I wrote this year that happened to be a long retrospective about my career. I mean, it’s pretty good so if you’re extremely curious about how I’m thinking about my work as an organization design consultant at The Ready (my employer for the last seven and a half years), I recommend you check it out.

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”3024”] A typical shot of my home office in 2022. [/caption]

As far as 2022 goes, though, I suppose I could dive into the weeds a bit more. The first part of the year I was 100% supported by The Ready to co-lead our DAO and web3 exploration. The full explanation of that work is probably outside the purview of this article (and this article I wrote from late 2021 is a pretty good summation of where my head was at in early 2022). I got to spend a bunch of time learning a completely new area, building relationships with people who work in that space, and generally trying to figure out how to bring The Ready’s work to a community and movement that could absolutely use our assistance, if we could just figure out how to package it in a way that resonated with them. It’s hard to say how successful we’ve been because this work happened to coincide with a particularly nasty downturn in the crypto markets.

Roughly halfway through the year The Ready decided we could keep that work alive while shifting some of our time and attention to other (revenue generating) projects. That meant that for the first time in a long time I was going to be sinking my teeth into another (hopefully) long-term transformation project with a more traditional client. I had wrapped up my last major engagement early in 2021 and then went on my 4-month sabbatical only to immediately jump into our DAO work when I returned. I was actually really excited to get back into some work that felt like it was more squarely in my wheelhouse. What started as a project designed to take half of my time with a partner turned into a full-time project that I worked on largely by myself for the last four months of the year. I really enjoy the client and the work we are doing together. I vacillate between whether I like working as almost a free agent within The Ready or whether I miss having a teammate to help shoulder the load and push me to be better. It really depends on the day.

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”3024”] Dinner in NYC for another The Ready company retreat. Also, tiny little shorts. [/caption]

I think I’m doing very good work with the client and they’re happy (we just extended our arrangement for at least the first three months of 2023). Without going into too much detail, one of the things I’m helping them with has the potential to be a repeatable and generalizable program/product that I think The Ready could scale. I hope to validate this initial pilot version with this client in the first quarter of 2023 and hopefully have enough data to bring it back to The Ready as something we can try to sell elsewhere.

I still feel great about The Ready and I’m proud of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. We’re growing in headcount, impact, and influence while sticking to our principles. I really can’t imagine a better place to let me bring the best version of myself to bear on gnarly problems. I’m grateful for the flexibility that allowed me to take time off for my wedding and honeymoon (more about that below!) in addition to a normal summer vacation. My year did feel a little bit fractured with extremely large and disruptive (in the absolutely most positive sense) events so I’m looking forward to really dialing myself back in as a senior member of the The Ready who can do a lot to help improve the organization for everyone else and as a consultant who is constantly trying to elevate my own practice.

We held three full company retreats last year; one was virtual (the tail end of the Omicron outbreak was happening), one was in New York City (it was kind of surreal to remember that I used to live there), and the last one was in Miami (good call for a late fall retreat location, right?). I did one quick jaunt up to Toronto to meet with my DAO Circle co-steward, Tanisi, for a full-day in-person strategy meeting. I attended a conference called ETHDenver in, well, you can figure it out. And I had one trip to Boston to facilitate an in-person workshop for a client. A relatively light year of work travel, all things considered.

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”7942”] Full company retreat in Miami. [/caption]

My hardware setup has remained almost completely unchanged. I’m still using a stock M1 MacBook Air as my only computer, a 27” HP external monitor, a Logitech webcam, AirPods Max, a Blue Yeti mic on a boom arm, a Fully Jarvis sit/stand desk, a Herman Miller Aeron chair, and an iPhone 12 Pro Max. The only new piece of hardware was upgrading my old Apple Wireless keyboard to a new Apple Wireless keyboard with a built-in TouchID sensor. Wanted to live that fingerprint-as-password lifestyle, you know?

The Year of Life, Travel, and Relationships

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”4242”] I should probably use a more dignified picture of our wedding, but I think this one sums up the true vibe the best. [/caption]

I got married this year! After a decade of being a couple and roughly four years of living together, Emily and I tied the knot in Naples, Florida at an absolutely perfect event hosted by her parents. Really, I’m not sure it could have gone smoother. Being surrounded by friends and family for a couple days of pure celebration is one of those things I have a feeling you never really forget.

We decided to not immediately leave for a honeymoon, as various uninteresting logistics considerations made it make more sense for us to go at the end of September. Which we did with a Mediterranean cruise that started in Rome and hit Naples (the Italian one), Barcelona, Mallorca, Marseilles, Florence/Pisa, and back to Rome. We capped the trip with a flight back to Barcelona so we could attend Emily’s brother’s wedding. All-in-all, a truly once-in-a-lifetime travel experience and well worth the several month wait.

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”4032”] Third annual Spurlin Brothers weekend in Columbus, OH. [/caption]

Another highlight from the year was doing our third annual Spurlin Brothers’ Weekend. Every year my four younger brothers and I try to find a location that is a.) interesting(ish) and b.) in a relatively central location for all of us. Previous locations have been a cabin in Michigan along Lake Huron, an Airbnb in the woods in Pennsylvania, and this time around it was an Airbnb on a farm just south of Columbus. This has quickly become one of my favorite traditions that I look forward to every fall. Since we are all super nerds, it’s basically a 2-day marathon of board games and frozen pizza.

Other trips included a pre-wedding trip to Florida to do some preparations (I had a near run-in with a ~10 foot alligator), a trip to Cape Cod to visit family and have a vacation, and a trip to Michigan to have a second wedding celebration in my parents’ backyard for family and friends who couldn’t make it to Florida. Closer to home, I did a several day triathlon training camp on the eastern shore in Maryland, a race a couple hours drive south of us, and two races in Williamsburg, Virginia.

New Hobby Alert: Triathlon

After yet another concussion during beer league in 2020 I decided I needed a less dangerous athletic hobby. After properly mourning the end of my hockey “career,” I decided to give triathlon a shot.

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”3024”] Getting ready to ride my bike, but really just happy to no longer be swimming. [/caption]

I technically started my triathlon journey in late 2021 by hiring a coach and getting started on a regular training schedule, but 2022 was my first full calendar year of consistent training and racing. I went into the year with the goal of finishing three races: a sprint distance in April (750 meter swim/12 mile bike ride/3.1 mile run), an Olympic distance in June (1,500 meters/24 miles/6.2 miles), and a half-Ironman (1,900 meters/56 miles/13.1 miles) in September. I did end up doing the three races, but they were slightly modified after I developed tendinitis injury in my right foot after the second race. Instead of rushing myself back from injury too quickly, I decided to step my planned half-Ironman race down to the Olympic distance to allow myself the proper time to heal without the looming pressure of a very long race on the horizon. That was a good and smart move that I’m not sure Sam from ten years ago would’ve made. I’ve been telling myself that I’m in no rush to do anything overly specific in triathlon. I want this to be something I can and want to do for the next twenty years, not something I burn out doing after two.

This warrants a longer article at some point, but I’ve loved my experience training for and doing triathlons. I’ve brought a level of consistency to this endeavor that I wasn’t sure I was possible of. It isn’t about ever becoming “good” at any of the three disciplines. I will never be fast enough to compete for a podium in my age group. I’ve always said that my only goal with all my races, at least so far, is to “finish with dignity.” So far, I’ve been able to do that.

According to TrainingPeaks, the software I use with my coach to plan and record my workouts, I’ve completed the following in 2022 (with one week of training yet to do): 2,491 miles of cycling, 459 miles of running, 98,900 yards of swimming. More importantly, I’ve truly enjoyed the vast majority of these miles and yards. It has been incredibly gratifying to see myself go from not being able to run more than a mile or two without my shins hurting to running for well over an hour without a problem. To go from gasping for air after 50 yards in the pool, to being able to swim nonstop more or less indefinitely. To go from considering a 20 mile ride as particularly noteworthy to finishing my first ever 100 mile bike ride.

If you’re curious to follow along with my training, I use Strava to track my training pretty consistently and you can follow me there.

The Year of Creative Output

My creative output was spread across a few different projects. My brother Max and I continued our podcast called Fields of Work all about our very different experiences of work (he’s a small scale organic farmer and I am very much not). We recorded nine episodes, which is probably a few fewer than we would have liked to have recorded. The show now has 63 episodes in total and we’ve been doing it since the summer of 2019. We’re both very happy to continue our very non-professional approach to it because the last thing either of us wants to do is suck all the fun out of what is really just two brothers having a phone call and catching up on each others’ lives every so often.

My newsletter, The Deliberate, continues, at least in theory, as I only managed to publish it three times this year.

I published seven articles (not including this one) on my website, SamSpurlin.com or on The Ready’s Medium publication this year. The only one that felt like a meaningful attempt at pushing forward my independent thinking and writing around deliberate work was the one I published in March, “Stop trying to change your habits and start playing with Deliberate Patterns instead.” This was my first attempt at trying out the new nomenclature I had been developing – “deliberate patterns.” Another article I published this year that I’m kind of proud of because it felt real and personally therapeutic was also from March, “I never properly mourned the end of my hockey career.” The remaining articles were a look at bringing the idea of operating systems to DAOs, a race report from my first ever triathlon, an experiment in going “monk mode” to work on something difficult, a seven-year career retrospective, and a look back at the software I used in 2022.

Related to my writing about The Deliberate, I finally made progress on some of the ideas that I tried to pull into a book proposal in 2021 before realizing that I needed to go back to the drawing board with some of the basic ideas. It has manifested as a public Notion board that I call the Deliberate Pattern Library where I’ve started gathering examples of these deliberate patterns – little recipes that I, and others, can either experiment with or try to internalize. It’s still very much a work in progress but it felt good to finally start chipping away at this amorphous intention that has been floating around in my head for the better part of a decade.

Finally, I had the opportunity to appear on a couple podcasts this year. First, I was on an episode of Bounty Hunter (now called Quorum) talking about the work The Ready is doing with DAOs. Second, I was on a very long episode of The Clique Podcast talking about organization design and DAOs. This one happens to be available as a three-part YouTube series, too.

Ultimately, I’m deeply unsatisfied with how much I created this year. I wanted to do more writing for The Ready. I wanted to do more writing for The Deliberate and SamSpurlin.com. Hell, I even wanted to do more personal journaling just for myself. I need to figure out how to make this be the last time I ever write a yearly review where I lament the fact that I feel like I’m leaving my creative potential on the table.

The Year of Entertainment

Books

I made the intention to read more fiction in 2022 than I had in previous years. There have been years in the recent past where I’ve read 50-60 books and fewer than 10 of them would be fiction. That was something that needed to stop and I’m happy to say I read more fiction in 2022 than I ever have before. I completed 18 pieces of fiction including a couple of absolute chonkers like the Iliad and Rhythm of War. A few of my favorites: the “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” series by Liu Cixin (blew my mind), the “Millennium” series by Stieg Larsson (maybe the most addictive books I’ve ever read), and the two-part “Daemon” series by Daniel Suarez (incredibly compelling). I feel like I’ve seriously tapped back into my love of science fiction and fantasy over the past year and I intend to go much further down that rabbit hole in 2023.

My big nonfiction win for the year was finding the author John McPhee. Something about the way this guy writes is utterly mesmerizing. I found his 716 page book about geology hard to put down. If a dude can write in a compelling way about rocks then he’s obviously a master of his craft. I read a couple other books of his, including one about his writing process (Draft No. 4) and now I can’t wait to work my way through his entire bibliography.

The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander was another important book for me this year, as it gave me the “pattern language” idea and terminology that I’ve been using in my The Deliberate thinking and writing.

Overall, it looks like I’ll clock in at 44 books read this year. This is quite down from the last few years (58 in 2021, 53 in 2020, and 60 in 2019). In terms of pages, I’m at just over 18,000. That’s about 3,000 pages fewer than 2021, 400 more pages than 2019, and about 1,000 pages fewer than 2019. That brings things more in line with what I’d expect a year of reading that included multiple 700+ page books to look like.

Reading, as you might expect from what I just shared above, is the primary way I spend my time when I’m not working. Meaning, the next few sections are going to be pretty short.

TV

My TV year has mostly been consumed by an ongoing re-watch of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that I’ve been doing with my wife, Emily. We don’t watch very much TV (maybe 2-3 episodes of a single show per week) so it has been taking us a while to work our way through it (we’re on season 13 so we’re almost done). Other shows we tucked into this year include the second season of The Witcher (feels like the wheels are starting to fall off…), Severance (so good), season 2 of I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (Tim Robinson quotes comprise the vast majority of our inside jokes as a couple), and Prehistoric Planet (surprisingly good).

As far as solo shows go, I finished the final season of The Expanse (pretty good), The Queen’s Gambit (pretty good), and House of the Dragon (pretty good). I’ve delved into YouTube a little bit more than in previous years and have really enjoyed the Sampson Boat Co. project channel (restoring a wooden sailing yacht by hand), a couple of triathlon-related channels (That Triathlon Life and Lionel Sanders) and a chess-related channel (Gotham Chess).

Movies

I watched a grand total of six movies this year. Jurrasic World Dominion because I’m a sucker for nostalgia and dinosaurs and Elvis were the only two I saw in the theater. Rewatching The Matrix for the first time since it came out was like watching it for the first time (thanks terrible memory!). Encanto was fine and Hunt for the Wilderpeople was maybe my favorite movie of the year. Nope was weird and good.

Games

I went incredibly long periods of time this year where I barely touched one of my favorite hobbies, video games. The games I did finally sink some time into, though, were very much worth it. Two in particular, Control and Hades, are among the best games I’ve ever played. Starcraft 2, my old mainstay, was around for most of the first couple months of the year but fell away hard after about May. Slay the Spire and Vampire Survivors have been great mobile games that are actually just great games, period.

The game that really signifies 2022 for me, though, is chess. Specifically the Chess.com app and the constant ongoing games I have with a couple of my colleagues. I’m still terrible at it, but I’ve been making some progress in actually learning some of the basics that might help me not get absolutely stomped every single game.

Podcasts

Podcasts remain the primary audio entertainment that kept me company (probably too much company, to be honest) throughout 2022. Most of the roster has remained unchanged for years at this point. I’m the type of person who doesn’t really browse through various podcasts. I have a handful that I listen to almost every single episode of and a few where I’ll pick and choose episodes based on topic. For the curious, the former group consists of: 32 Thoughts, Accidental Tech Podcast, The Adventure Zone, Connected, Cortex, Dithering, Exponent, Fields of Work (yes, I listen to my own podcast), The Always Sunny Podcast, My Brother, My Brother and Me, Reconcilable Differences, Robot or Not?, Roderick on the Line, Sharp China with Bill Bishop, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson, Stratechery, That Triathlon Life, Under the Radar, Up First, Upgrade, and The Vergecast.

The newcomers in 2022 are the two new “Sharp” podcasts that are part of the Stratechery bundle. Both have been very good right from the beginning. Philosophize This! has been the one podcast where I’ve been working through the 150+ episode back catalog. The only other notable development in my podcast listening is that the back catalog of You Look Nice Today has somehow become my “go to sleep podcast” whenever I’m going to sleep by myself. Weird, I know.

Music

Any year where a new Coheed and Cambria album comes out is a good music year in my book.

Miscellaneous Good Things

• Getting all my consumable household supplies on an automatic schedule with Amazon has been rad. Have done the same with the vast majority of my groceries, too. I’m always looking for ways to automate the things I have to do on a recurring basis and both of these have been big in 2022.
• Combining finances with Emily after our wedding was smoother and simpler than I thought it would be. A shared checking account, a shared savings account, a couple shared investment accounts, and a couple individual investment accounts (through our respective employers). We use the same shared credit card (points, yo!) for all our shared expenses and pay it from our shared checking account. Don’t think it really gets much simpler than that.
• I mislaid my wedding ring almost immediately after getting married. I now have a bag of silicone wedding bands that I keep in a drawer next to my bed. I initially felt terrible but now I feel totally fine about it. It’s more comfortable, looks fine,  and I don’t have to worry about any inadvertent grievous injuries caused by getting my ring stuck on something.
• I experimented with letting go of specifically tracking or even trying to do my Anchor Habits for a large portion of 2022. My Anchor Habits were daily intentions to Move, Sit, Read, and Write. I was rarely hitting all four of them in a day and realized the low-level bad feelings that created in me weren’t particularly helpful or wholesome. I let go of the intention and so far haven’t felt the need to bring them back. Most days I Move and Read just fine. Some days I Write. I haven’t Sat (meditated) consistently in months. Right now, I’m okay with that.
• I experimented with getting on a very consistent sleep schedule (bed around 10, awake via alarm at 6). I also experimented with going to bed as consistently as possible (still around 10) but waking naturally (usually between 6:30 and 7:30). I went back and forth on what is better for me and have decided, for now, that I’d rather have the predictability of the same wake time every morning even if that means I’m slightly underslept. I realized I could get the benefit of both, though, if I let myself go to bed a little bit earlier if I was feeling sleepy, so that’s what I’ve been doing.
• Writing up my internalized Deliberate Patterns has been fun. There are too many to name here, so check out the Deliberate Pattern Library if you’re curious.

Making Sense of the Year

It’s a cliche for a reason, but every year feels like it flies by faster than the last one. I kind of can’t believe I’m sitting here a couple days before Christmas and writing a recap for a year I could’ve sworn was just getting started. It makes me realize that my obsession with learning how to become more deliberate, and sharing what I learn along the way, is definitely worth the effort. When I was younger I could let years pass without being particularly deliberate and still feel like time was basically dripping by. Those days are over. Time has become a torrent and I’m lucky if I don’t get swept away by it. Being deliberate is the only way for me to get my bearings, anchor myself, and actually have a shot at navigating my life in a way that feels aligned with who I am and who I want to be.

While I’m in awe that the year is over, it’s obvious that it was a monumental one for me. Getting married to Emily, celebrating with friends and family in Florida and Michigan, going on a honeymoon to Europe, doing meaningful work at a cool company, spending a few days in a rented house with my four younger brothers, developing a new hobby and fitness routine that has pushed me to new levels of achievement and health – the highlights are almost too numerous to list. For that, I’m grateful.

My creative output, or lack thereof, is the main blemish on what I would consider a very good year. There is a part of me that I have not honored to the level that it deserves. It wants to be creating, specifically writing, much more than it has been. It’s easy to tamp down that voice when work is busy and when I can tell myself that even though I’m not doing much writing publicly, I’m doing a bunch of writing in the course of my day-to-day work. Or that the conditions are never quite right (“I’m too tired, I have too much to do, I don’t have any ideas that feel worth writing about, etc. etc.”).

That voice is getting harder and harder to ignore. Even if I could ignore it, I don’t want to.

This article originally appeared on SamSpurlin.com, which is where I publish all my new writing first. Add it to your RSS reader and/or subscribe to The Deliberate. The Deliberate is a periodic newsletter I publish any time I’ve written something new on my website. Subscribing to it is probably the best way to be aware of when I publish something new. Or, if you’re a masochist like me, you can follow me on Twitter.