What I Want Next Year

What Matters

Last year, a lot of my time went into managing how work appeared rather than what it produced.

It meant spending time on visibility and alignment. None of this is unusual. It is how many technical roles function once they sit close to decision-making.

Over time, this shifted where my attention went. Less time was spent inside the technical work itself—the level where understanding deepens and things genuinely improve.

The result was work that felt shallow and constrained. It left little room for creativity. I arrived at a fairly obvious conclusion: being busy was not fulfilling.

Next Year

Next year, I want to focus on work that is.

I want work defined by sustained technical engagement—time spent thinking, building, and revisiting ideas rather than constantly moving on. I want to go deeper on a smaller number of projects and see them through.

In practice, this means consolidation. A smaller, more deliberate set of projects that I maintain and understand. Work that produces insights I can return to later without having to reconstruct the context.

It also means choosing topics differently. I want to work on topics that raise real questions: where assumptions fail, and where careful investigation still reveals something new. These are problems that require patience and reward depth, even if they remain invisible for long periods.

I want to focus on work that compounds over time. This involves building internal libraries, reusable analyses, and notes that accumulate value gradually. Work that reduces friction in the future.

The goal is to build a foundation of technical understanding that holds, closer to how work functioned at university, where research relied on a growing back catalogue of ideas rather than constant output.

My aim is slower, narrower work that is more demanding. Progress is measured by clarity, with value emerging over time.