My last working week of the year. This period always has a strange feeling about it. The trains are slightly emptier, and the office is quiet. The cogs of the office are turning and everything is going through the motions, but the soul has dissipated, ready to return next year. As we approached the end of the week, more people started to drift away. My brain and body seemed to know that a rest was around the corner, as by Friday afternoon I felt exhausted. I’m ready to finish the year.

I wasn’t in the office as much as I originally planned, as a lot of the week was spent at hospital appointments with my wife. We went there on Tuesday with only a vague idea of what the specialists would say and do. After more examinations, they booked her in for surgery on Wednesday afternoon. I hastily rearranged my work diary so that I could take her there and bring her home. Unfortunately, she had to have yet another vitrectomy — her third — and laser surgery to repair her retina further, which then resulted in needing to live with a new gas bubble in the eye, eye drops every two hours and being told not to exercise or drive for a while. Our son drove her to a post-op check-up on Thursday, and we have another next week to make sure things are progressing well. We’re both crossing our fingers that there won’t be any complications from this point onwards.

This was a week in which I:

• Visited our shared meeting floor in our office now that the building contractor has finished and the space is back in our control. The work to install and configure our audio-visual equipment is going very well and the rooms are looking great. We did some basic testing of our large boardroom space with multiple Logitech Sight cameras ahead of drilling holes in the table to accommodate them.
• Met with our firm’s external auditors and gave them an overview of our part of the organisation.
• Had a call with our internal audit team about their plans for 2026, highlighting the audits that we will need to participate in.
• Met with the project team for our document management initiative to brainstorm the data dashboards that we need to create as part of the project. It was another great session, creating shared agreement around a whiteboard.
• Made some more updates to our bill of materials for a new office in a country where we recently set up business, adding a column for the next action so that we can clearly see what we can get on with now and what needs to wait until we’ve signed a lease.
• Validated the costs for a service agreement between our organisation and a sister company.
• Agreed what snacks we will continue to provide staff with for free once the company cafe reopens in January. Hopefully we are striking a good balance that will be appreciated by our staff.
• Made my final updates to my team’s year-end written appraisals and had the appraisal meetings with each of them. It’s good to have this all done before the year is out. Managing people and helping them with their careers is a part of my job that I really love.
• Had my monthly meeting with my executive partner from our technology advisory vendor.
• Ran our final all-team meeting of the year as an online PowerPoint Karaoke session. It was the first time for all of us. Seven people had signed up to take part ahead of the meeting and they did a brilliant job. Each one had to present a 10-slide deck within a six-minute time limit, having never seen the deck before. I love how people see things in random slides that I hadn’t noticed, weaving them into a narrative across their talk. We had a lot of fun. I think it would be even better in person, with some in-room laughter as people present.
• Had a lovely impromptu and reflective year-end catch-up with my boss. We’ve been working together on and off for 15 years now. The end of the year inevitably makes me think about where I am and what’s next work-wise. I need to think more about this going into next year.
• Enjoyed the final M365 Change Community Round Up meeting for the year. This meeting doesn’t yet attract a large audience, but it should. The next one is on 22 January; if you’re responsible for Microsoft 365 tools in your organisation, it’s worth joining for a look at what’s coming down the pipe — and as an added bonus, not all of it is Copilot-related.
• Searched for roofers to come and have a look at the leak we discovered last week. One roofer that was recommended to us by a neighbour came round and gave a quick assessment of the job, sending us an estimate later that day. Another roofer that we found through Checkatrade came over on the same day that we contacted them. After a quick look, he used a drone to explore what could be going on. I was amazed when he showed me that one of our roof tiles had slipped, leaving what looked like a 10–20cm gap. We could peer in and see that the felt also had some holes in it. From street level, it was impossible to see that the tile had moved. He then had his colleague scramble up a ladder and across our roof, making a ‘ladder’ on the roof itself by shifting some tiles up, so that he could put the slipped tile back in place as a temporary measure. I was so grateful, and couldn’t quite believe that they would do this there and then. As we are on a hill and have a three-storey house, the roof is so high. Even the guy that went up there remarked on how high he was and took some panoramic photos of the view across the valley. We’ll need to get the roof fixed properly, but hopefully this will stop more water from coming in over the next few weeks.
• Had a wonderful evening, meeting with a couple of old friends from school, one of whom I probably hadn’t seen in 20 years. She was one of my closest friends for a very long time. But then life happened — getting married, moving house, having children — and I’ve never been a great one for planning and instigating get-togethers. You know you are good friends with someone when you see them again, even after such a vast amount of time, and you immediately pick up from where you left off. It was a late night as I dropped everyone home after the pub closed before heading back myself, but it was totally worth being tired the next day.
• Spent Sunday at my mum and dad’s house for a fabulous Christmas family gathering. It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since we were enjoying an incredible Christmas all together in Mexico. My parents made an excellent Christmas dinner and we topped off the evening with some YouTube-powered karaoke.
• Enjoyed a relatively sedate weekly cycling club ride. It was good to be out of the fancy dress this week.

Media

Articles

• Writing my team’s annual reviews made me think about what I’ve heard Ben Thompson say on various podcasts: focus on doing more of what you’re good at — not necessarily what you enjoy — and find other people to do the things that you aren’t as great at. Steve Kamb wrote this up as The Glass Cannon Strategy.
• Paul Sinclair, the man behind the excellent Super Deluxe Edition website, has been profiled in the Financial Times. The website is a must-read if you buy physical music, particularly classic albums from the 1960s to the 1990s, as it profiles upcoming reissues, and highlights where there are bargains to be had. In recent years, he has been issuing limited pressings of albums on Blu-ray discs that include Dolby Atmos versions. I don’t have the equipment to play these, but I wish I did as the feedback about them has been universally positive.
• An amazing story about how Amazon detected that an employee wasn’t who they said they were through observing a longer-than-usual lag from their keyboard input. It turned out that the IT developer was based in North Korea. This is very impressive cybersecurity detection work.

Video

• Finished watching the remastered Beatles Anthology on Disney+. It’s a long documentary, but it still feels like a whistlestop tour that barely scratches the surface of their story. I remember being so excited to watch it when it came out in 1995, and then later my wife bought me the DVD box set as a gift. It’s weird to think that at the time we were 25 years on from the break-up of the band, and we’re now 30 years away from when the Anthology first came out. Given that the Get Back series that covered just a few weeks in the lives of The Beatles was nearly eight hours long, covering their whole career in 11 hours still feels like I’ve been short-changed. Give me the mega director’s cut anytime.
• Continued watching Pluribus on Apple TV. It’s really drawn us in. We have no idea how the series will end.

Audio

• Still have tracks from Gang of Four’s Entertainment! buzzing in my brain.

Next week: Christmas.