Archives for February 2025

Whether it’s a promotion, a birthday, or new skill learned, make a point of celebrating.

Don’t move on too quickly to the next thing without soaking in the good that happened today.

Chances are I’ve written about this before, but there’s a saying at work that’s been consistently useful: it’s not prioritisation until it hurts.

We can’t do everything. But to avoid the pain of prioritisation, we keep everything on our plates and it leads to pain in the long run.

It’s better to make the tough choice now.

There’s a joke that doing the washing takes a couple hours, but putting away the clothes after drying takes 4-5 business days.

There’s an illusion of progress, but the job ain’t done until it’s done.

There is a temptation to measure everything: metrics, progress, process, and performance.

Just because we can measure everything under the sun doesn’t mean we should.

At a certain point, too much measurement is crippling. It can tie teams in knots and overwhelm them with complexity.

Knowing when to stop measuring is a skill worth learning.

When we know where we want to go, 95% of the new ideas, things, or opportunities that come across our plates are a distraction.

It takes immense discipline to get to the destination with a tonne of detours.

Digital file formats theoretically don’t have a size restriction. However, today I learned that Adobe Acrobat sets the size limit for their PDFs to 15 million by 15 million inches. That’s over 145,000 square kilometres.

Here’s a photo of what the max PDF looks like superimposed over a map of Europe.

Good luck finding a printer.

Crisp is a pizza restaurant in London that books out 2-3 months in advance. That sounded crazy to me, but today I tried them for the first time, and I wasn’t disappointed.

I had their hot honey pizza, which is their best seller making up more than 50% of their sales.

Long time readers know I’m a big fan of companies that focus on one thing, and do that one thing so damn well. That’s Crisp Pizza. And I’m here for it.

Maru recently cut off 30cm of hair—almost 3 year’s worth of growth—to donate to the Little Princess Trust. They’re a charity that “provides free real hair wigs to children and young people up to the age of 24, who have lost their own hair through cancer treatment or other conditions”.

The reason why Maru waited til her hair was long enough to donate 30cms is the Little Princess Trust has a shortage of longer hair, and a surplus of shorter hair.

I’m really proud of her. It took multiple years and a lot of hair care to get here. And I hope her donation will make a child very happy.

If you’ve lived in London, or ever asked a Londoner for a food recommendation, you will likely have heard about Dishoom.

Dishoom is a restaurant, an institution, a London culinary staple. Its decor, ambiance, and Bombay-inspired menu come together to make it justifiably one of London’s favourites.

One of Dishoom’s ten spots is right next to my office. When I head home from work, without fail there will be a massive line outside the restaurant. The wait is easily 1.5-2 hours.

I wouldn’t wait, but clearly the experience is good enough for hundreds of others to do it. I marvel at the brand strength, loyalty, and longevity of restaurants and companies like this.

Note: my personal Dishoom tip is to go for breakfast. Much quieter, and the breakfast menu is better!

In my career thus far it’s been really clear when I’ve worked with someone who cares.

Whether they care about the product, the results, their craft, or their team members, there are many flavours of carrying, but there is an undeniable energy about these people. It’s impressive, admirable, and infectious.

They’ll move mountains because they want to.

Maru and I are getting a bunch of vaccinations in preparation for our upcoming honeymoon. We’re going to a few remote and rural places which mean vaccinations against diseases like Rabies and Japanese Encephalitis are important.

I thanked past-Dan this week when I pulled out my little yellow vaccination book. I’ve got almost my entire vaccination history in there from when I was a young boy.

Although I haven’t had many vaccines in recent years, it was a breeze to show the vaccination clinic my past records and for them to immediately recommend what vaccines to get before my trip.

A little bit of organisation and preparedness can save money and headaches down the line.

The pain of a missed warm up may not be felt during the game, the run, or the workout. But it’s often felt afterwards.

I was running late to a tennis match today, and I raced on to the court and began playing with a token warm up. Barely a few lunges and leg swings. To make matters worse, I haven’t played in a many weeks.

I’m sure the tightness and aches in my back I’ve been feeling the rest of the day are directly tied to this (poor) decision.

This isn’t a lesson I want to learn a second time.

Firstly, apologies if you’ve replied to my blog in recent times and haven’t received a reply. I’ve had a few issues in migrating from Google Workspace to an another solution, and thankfully my friend Harry pointed out last week that my email address was bouncing replies. It took a number of days to debug, and should be working again.

Secondly, I’ve also been a disappointed that I’ve fallen behind on replies over the last few months; I was much better at this in the past. When a reader takes the time to send a thought or opinion, I appreciate it and intend to reply promptly. I’ll endeavour to improve on that.

Entropy is the natural decline of things into disorder.

Our bodies age. Software gets bugs. Things in our home break. Relationships can fray.

Without intervention, this stuff is unavoidable.

However, the moment we get comfortable with this as a law of nature, the better we’re able to respond to entropy’s challenges.

We can age gracefully whilst maintaining cardiovascular fitness and strength. We can add automated tests and alerts to our software. We can send our appliances off for repair. And we can invest in building stronger bonds with family and friends.

When the topic is too complicated to unpick in my mind, I write.

When the trade-offs are hard and painful, I write.

When there’s an important message to deliver, I write.

As more and more people lean on AI for their writing, I still find putting my own words on paper to be a major help in clarifying my own thinking.