2025 was not a good year, like the one that came before. I spent it burnt out. My colleague J during my team’s Christmas dinner last week described it as a year in which we had to fight and slay a range of different dragons, and indeed we did.

Every year, since 2010, I post a list of things that gave me some sense of accomplishment, things about which you can say ‘Tadaa!’. This is the 16th edition. And like last year, I’m writing it with hesitance. I’m struggling to write the list this time. Where in other years I looked forward to look back over the past 12 months this time I really don’t. All the more reason to do it, I suppose.

The original reason for this posting is still valid: I tend to forget a lot of the things I actually do, moving on to the next thing immediately, resulting in thinking I haven’t done much at all. Leafing through my notes and calendar at least once a year tends to resurface things and make me more aware of things I take a sense of accomplishment from.

So here goes, in more or less random order.

• We are still standing. My company still exists. The illness and death of my business partner Frank, and the path we walked together, at work as a team, at home as a family was this year’s main focus. In June, me being the de facto CFO since its founding in 2011, I doubted the company would still be there in November. Yet, it is. We didn’t make any progress, but we did reach the end of 2025 in more or less the same shape as we started it. Without Frank sadly, but with everyone else still standing. Shell-shocked but picking up the pieces. Everyone of the team showed up with what they could muster throughout the year. We took care of each other, found new clients and projects, were open about our pain and grief amongst ourselves and to the outside. Friends from around our company’s network had our back too. A dozen households had bread on the table, several felt able to plan ahead for life events, several could afford to become first time home owners, or support their partner migrating from abroad to live here. That counts for something, that our company can be a building block for it. As we sat around the dinner table last week with our team, reinventing our end of year traditions together, and I looked around, I was proud of us, not just as colleagues but as family. We know what we have carried together, and wherever each of us may end up over time, that will remain.
• We, our family of three, are still standing. E and Y both have had to carry all the things I brought home too, my own diminished mental health. I’m immensely grateful to them both. All those days I felt lost, E and Y were why I got up in the morning. Traveling in the past 26 years together has always been healing for E and me, and E made sure we did things together throughout the year. We played in the snow in Switzerland, spent a lovely day building things together at the Lego House in Billund for Y’s birthday, drank in the beauty of Hockney’s work in Paris which left me crying on the floor of the museum, breathed the calm and freedom of the Austrian alps. We had many little day trips, near and further away. Being together is the best thing.
• Being open about my diminished mental health has helped a lot in making space, deepened interactions and connections. All of us carry something. Thank you for sharing.
• Traveling for work is dear to me, and I deliberately did some more of it than in the last few years. I worked in Warsaw, Brussels, Luxembourg, Berlin, Copenhagen, and Milano. I alllowed myself to be there in the present and in a single context. Simply walking where my feet would take me, and doing a few things outside my comfort zone, like buying a last minute ticket to take in a concert in the Teatro alla Scala. I made efforts to keep myself comfortable while traveling, to take care of myself in ways I normally find hard to do. Going swimming in the midst of a conference day for instance, and return refreshed an hour later.
• I reached out to friends and spent two weekends, in May and in November, with them in Switzerland where they live. We normally don’t call or interact much at all, but they recognised me reaching out if I could drop by as the urgent bat signal that it was. Thank you dear friends.
• With our team we spent a week in Sesimbra, Portugal, under the kind guidance and deep expertise and experience of Beverly and Etienne Wenger-Trayner. A week in April that, next to the training and learning, also served to, as a team, get to grips with what was about to happen, and I’m glad Frank was able to come along. We also saw dolphins up close. Bev and Etienne deserve our team’s and my personal deep gratitude in how they accommodated the unusual situation we were in.
• Reading was a source of relaxation and learning. I’m glad I kept up my reading throughout the year. A little over 80 books this year, mostly fiction. And for the first time not a cent of that was spent at Amazon. I fully moved away from Amazon for ebooks and physical books. Once I decided, it turned out to be easier than I thought it would be.
• Writing was helpful too. Even if less of it ended up on my blog. I’ve been blogging for 23 years now, and that’s a stretch of time that gives any writing another layer of meaning. Some of you have been along for the ride all that time, others have been here shorter but reading consistently, and our resulting conversations across the web, through email, and in person are dear to me.
• Letting go of a range of tasks, not being able to keep all contacts going, all juggling balls up in the air, is a lesson I am slowly learning. I transferred my company internal tasks to others on the team and external help. I will not pick those tasks back up when I’m ‘better’ either. It takes time though, and only now after 4 months of purposefully shifting things away from me I’m at the point where I emptied my plate of everything except one client project. Sometime in the next months I’ll start thinking what new and other things I may want to add. I had to let go of various parts of client work and obligations too, and that is something that goes counter to all my impulses, that feels like a personal failure. The grace and understanding with which the clients concerned let me navigate those cliffs I deeply appreciate.
• Tinkering with personal software tools is a source of joy. I’m glad I did some of that this fall. Like adapting my feed reader, so I can write better directly from it. The sight of having self-written bits of coding work like I want them to on my laptop feels like magic always still (even 43 years after writing my first lines of code).
• I stood on stage for a few presentations, one at the UNGGIM Europe plenary and one locally, and enjoyed doing them. Sharing stories and seeing that it reaches and touches people is hugely rewarding. I’ve missed that.
• Went to a few events just because I felt like it, to hear some new things.
• I look at the coming year with some confidence, work for me and my team is largely secure, and though I still need more rest, I also see ways forward for myself.

More a sense of gratitude than of accomplishment, more a sense of weariness than one of results. In recognition of the love received and moments of joy through it all. It is what it is. Kintsugi.

I’m not looking back at 2024 with lots of excitement. I spent it mostly feeling burned out, grumpy and tired, and that carried detrimental effects for my family and my colleagues. Reading back last year’s overview I see I felt much the same then at the time of writing (my burn-out I now know goes back to the fall of 2022, so not a surprise I see it shining through in last year’s review). This time too I don’t feel much like making the annual review. Likely that makes it more important to do so. I’ve been doing this every year starting in 2010, making this the 15th edition. The original reason is still valid: I tend to forget a lot of the things I actually do, moving on to the next thing immediately, resulting in thinking I haven’t done much at all. Leafing through my notes and calendar at least once a year tends to resurface things and make me more aware of things I take a sense of accomplishment from. I’m also slowly moving to a place where I see things opening up again, moving away from burn-out, even if I’m not there yet. So here are the things that I count as some level of accomplishment in 2024, in more or less random order.

• While my burn-out is obviously not making this list as an accomplishment, I am glad that once I realised what was happening (or rather Y and E helped me see) I sought assistance from a psychologist and actively worked to change things.
• Gaining new habits in order to address my burn-out, that also helped me change long standing patterns, and taking up systems again that have been helpful in the past but had fallen aside. If anything it makes my note making more key to my functioning in the various aspects of my life. Interstitial journaling is the latest addition to these habits, and it tends to make the difference between a good day and a bad one.
• My company has been doing well this year. We added 4 people to the team this fall, including an office manager. We’re now a dozen people. Business was good, we achieved our budgeted turnover, meaning revenue grew by a third. Our portfolio for 2025 is already filled up to 75%, which is a very solid starting point. Most important of all we worked on data policy, data governance, digital and AI ethics projects that are meaningful beyond the scope of the projects themselves, and had a good time doing so. I’m amazed at the bright and fun people I get to work with all the time.
• We created new internal structures, holacracy based, spreading the ownership of roles and tasks across the entire team, and doing away with me and my businesspartners as management and sole decision makers. Colleagues stepped into new roles, one joining me on the financial management side of things, another doing amazing work w.r.t. recruitment. My burn-out stems largely from trying for too long to close gaps left by others, and the changes in our organisation this year have contributed much to my ability to let go of various things because team members stepped in so well.
• This is also now resulting in me looking at my company more like something that is also there to support me in what I want to achieve, as opposed to something I’m only in service to in order to keep it afloat.
• In 2023 with our company we took a Systems Convening training, which more or less puts method under my natural behavior of making connections where they are missing, of taking into account a much wider context when considering interventions. This year with one client I’m pleased to see that I’ve been able to more purposefully move with them to a different position, where they have more agency towards their core mission.
• I’ve been slowly but steadily losing weight again, by avoiding carbohydrates mostly. I easily overindulge when I’m stressed, and the past few years it showed. I’m down 9 kilograms since the summer, about half way to where I’m comfortable. It took me a bit to start the process, but once I could it hasn’t been hard to keep up.
• There wasn’t much travel this year, something I missed. Yet I did enjoy visiting several conferences, including the Belgian national geographic conference BeGeo where I organised and hosted an entire conference track on the European (Green Deal) Data Space(s), with different DGs of the European Commission.
• I didn’t interact much socially or with friends this year. Yet I did enjoy it when I did. Visiting dear friends in Switzerland in February, which included an awesome private viewing of great art, visiting other dear friends in Switzerland for their 50th birthday in June, and having friends visit from afar. It is a wide variety of kinds of wonderful to me to see how ripples of interaction spread out, how networks of meaning emerge. Awareness of intermingling layers of complexity is where my sense of beauty resides. Working through my burn-out to a large extent is about strengthening my original sense of wonder, and the webs one weaves with friends are a good source of it.
• I helped shape a European conference on personal knowledge management, PKM Summit, that took place in March. I got involved because I wanted to make it more pan-European, varied, and less strictly formatted. I helped find a wider variety of speakers, introduced several things to loosen up the program and do away with the distinction between speakers and audience. I also aimed to not just have people speak who have turned speaking about PKM into their main professional activity. I like people who normally just do PKM to talk about what it helps them achieve and how. It was a fun event, and I was happy to bring several of my colleagues to it as participants. Also because I think PKM is a prerequisite for the systems convening I mentioned above. One participant who had been to Reboot in 2005 remarked to me about how it achieved that sense of wonder and inspiration. I’ll take that compliment! The event also helped my company to do more with PKM internally and across our team. Preparations for next year’s edition have just started again.
• Around the conference the national government academy for digital awareness and skills for civil servants had programmed a monthlong series of webinars and events about PKM and digital skills. It was fun to do a webinar with them, and I enjoyed creating an overview of my perspective on PKM (in Dutch) and provide people an insight into how I do things for myself.
• One of the outcomes of that PKM conference for me was doing more with visualisation in my notes. I have never done much of that, because any illustration tends to be a frozen artefact, an outcome even, of an otherwise ongoing iterative process. Thanks to Zsolt’s Excalidraw plugin in my Obsidian note making tool, text and image are now part of the same note and seamlessly interact and flow into each other. That integration has been key for me.
• I’ve enjoyed making tiny software tools for myself. Such as a local small form to directly search my Flickr.com photos by date, or creating an RSS-feed from the things I bookmark in Mastodon and import that into my notes. Even better when it turns out such a tool is useful to someone else, such as the person who let me know they adopted my Mastodon RSS thingy because their RSS reader is the only way they can interact with the web.
• It’s been 22 years now since I started blogging. The past 12 months I didn’t write much, but did keep up my weekly notes, and have changed some of the ways how I write and prepare blogposts. Hopefully that will manifest itself in the form of more postings in this space over time.
• I’ve read over 75 books this year, half as much as last year, about 90% fiction and just over 10% non-fiction. Reading fiction is key to my wellbeing. I’m also pleased that I’ve found better habits for myself to read non-fiction. Even if it doesn’t really show in the number of books, interacting with non-fiction works consistently during the year (about 1 book per 6 weeks or so) is something I enjoyed.
• Watching Y, now 8, grow and develop is a delight. Like me and E she reads a lot (and listens to yet more books), and we have many fun conversations based on things she picks up on in her reading. Exploring Roman history in our region and in nearby Germany, the etymology of words and names, and visiting locations she reads about like the Botanical Gardens in Berlin. Her creativity, her music and sense of humour, and the general sense of wonder behind it I hope she can sustain for a very long time.
• Traveling together is something we’re good at. E aims to come up with something most weekends to go do or see somewhere, and during school holidays we plan various day trips or go away for a few days. We spent time vacationing in France, Germany, Luxembourg and Switzerland, and made a city trip to Berlin. We visited museums and different cities in the Netherlands. I still strongly appreciate what a difference it makes that since some years we live in the exact center of the country, bringing so many things within easy range.

That concludes this year’s Tadaa! list. Still a good number of things to mention all in all, despite the grey veil that covered my year. Onwards!

E and me during a walk earlier this week along the Laak river, silhouetted over the fields by the low sun in our backs.