2025 is coming to a close in a few days. It’s been a relatively quiet and uneventful year for me, with most of my time spent close to home and work. In mid December I flew to California for a retreat with a group of about 50 other meditators. I returned back to Australia feeling like something important had consolidated. But what’s coming next? What will 2026 be? I’m not sure, but I’m hoping I (and everyone else) are prepared as best as we can be.
Since January 2025, I’ve published 34 things, the exact same as last year. Most of my writing has gravitated around two major internal obstacles for me: My perfectionism, which causes me endless issues at work and a sort of martyr like approach to life which especially reared its head as I trained for a difficult bike ride in March. I’ve organized the articles below into loose thematic categories. Here’s everything I wrote in 2023 and 2024. As always, all posts can be found on my Substack too.
Working
- Designing with concepts – How to make software that’s more enjoyable, learnable and effective
- Are designers making design hard for themselves? – A review of ‘Why Design is Hard’ by Scott Berlin and Bryan Aug
- Designing like a spreadsheet – How constraints can help your thinking and creativity
- Is this co-design? – Finding a balance between too much and not enough collaboration
- Working well with others – How being a perfectionist ruins teamwork
- In the beginning, there was blame – Why we blame, and why we should stop
- Don’t imitate entropy – How laziness and disorder spread
- Ways of Worrying – Reflections on a design conference
- Your services are no longer required – Musing on a potential inevitability
Striving
- Don’t grind your teeth – How perfectionists make life impossible for themselves
- Swimming under pressure – If there’s no race, there’s no need to keep up
- Don’t die on a hill – I was spiraling, a cold drink brought me back
- Critiquing the critic – How to have a friendlier inner voice
- A study in frustration – What Frank Grimes can teach us about efforts and expectations
- Claws and teeth – Everything I know about anger
Thinking
- The Peppercorn Perspective – When status turns gold into dust(iness)
- Taking meditation seriously – Where exactly do our affinities come from?
- The best course of action – Recommendations are what others think are best for you. But what do you think?
- Sliding doors – How your dreams can help you let go of the past
- Breaking the habit – How do we know when our habits are no longer helpful?
- The Wall – The intelligence of a concrete wall
- Yes? What else? – How to take thoughts less seriously
- Drawer shoving – Why we should avoid avoidance
- Light pollution – How both the ego & shadow constrain us
- Police in plain clothes – Using dreams to find hidden parts of us
Expressing
- The slow and painful way to effective speaking – Following recipes ≠ clear communication
- Writing rightly – 15 ethical goals for publishing words on internet
- Totally and seriously – We’d all be better off if we did things a bit more seriously
- Don’t look at these words – If we don’t look, we can’t see properly
- Chirping clearly – How to speak the truth without losing your filter
- Being wrong for the right reason – Balancing persistence and pigheadedness
- Abstractified – On the refreshing, unusual writing of Temple Grandin
Buddha Bike 