There is always a day when you notice it, usually mid-August. There is a slight cool breeze in the air, more amber hue to the sunlight, or a chill when you open the window in the morning. You suddenly realise peak summer has gone, and we are on the run down to Autumn.

In the UK, where we have been waiting for summer to actually start, this somewhat inevitable event is just not great news… and this weekend Twitter or X did not exactly help my mood by cheerily pointing out that this is the last time the sun sets after 8pm (in London) until next April. Great!

For some, those that can, this is a signal to get away to warmer climes.

However, for the rest of us, it is a sign, this bank holiday weekend, to have one last hurrah, pretending it is still summer, before the back to school, and back-to-work, start in earnest next week.

Summer this year has undoubtedly been a bit of an excuse to suspend many of the worries in the world, where I have desperately tried to ignore the news and pretend everything is just fine… (it has been hard I admit)

Yet now having to face the full reality of heading back next week, I am a little worried. I expect most of these uncertainties to still be there, having not gone away… and judging by the toxic soup that seems to infest many comment pages these days, actually getting worse.

So the question at this point is what is to be done about it? (without just booking another holiday!).

Certainly, bad news can have negative effects.

It impacts our mood, our well-being, and importantly can also result in hesitation. Hesitation to make important decisions.

For example, it is all too easy to wait to make important investments, delay developing new skills, products, or redesigning processes…. all in the secret hope that the world will go back to the comfortable previous version… and all will be okay again… if only we wait long enough.

However unfortunately this current reality is most likely here to stay, and we can easily get caught like a deer in the headlights, unable to move.

Yet if we don’t lay down the groundwork now, we are also cutting off our future growth, constraining our ability to adapt and change. A small hesitation in the long run becomes procrastination and costs us more.

Now I am not saying we should all be Pollyanna or stick our head in the sand and pretend nothing has changed. That can also be expensive too (Kodak and Blockbuster spring to mind). However, as hard as it is, making smart investments now and being optimistic, can pay big dividends.

So if like me you are feeling that end-of-summer urge to extend the holidays and ‘hesitate’ a little, maybe we need to take a leaf from the back-to-school mentality…

In academia, it is the start of a ‘new year’, new subjects, new people, and new things to learn. In many ways, every year is a fresh start and a great time time to plan, and set out your vision for the future… Where can I grow my skills, where can I develop new products and where can I find an edge? At this point, all is still to play for, optimism runs high.

So this is my plan this year… a plan to build new things, develop and grow.

And if, collectively, we can shake the growing malaise there feels around us sometimes, maybe we can all feel more positive and move forward.

Fingers crossed… and welcome back.

This week, I was struck down by the lurgy. Not the normal run-of-the-mill sniffles, but the proper ‘I need to go to bed’ feeling type, which is unusual.

Although I did test negative for COVID, it did bring back memories… and not great ones… especially the brain fog.

My suspicion is being crammed in an aeroplane for a couple of hours with lots of other people did not help and from what I have been hearing, a lot of others seem to have had something similar too.

And, having been away a bit the last few weeks, the timing has been tricky.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have two categories of things to do before I leave for a trip:

1. things that must get done – items I don’t want to have on my plate when I am back
2. things that can wait – on my to-do list for when I’m back in the office

Before the break, #1 is the problem… you run around like mad trying to tick things off, and get ready… and with thoughts of beach, late mornings, and all-you-can-eat lunches growing in anticipation of the vacation… the temptation to push some, if not most of them, into category #2 is huge.

But, of course, to do so just makes the challenge, when you do return, even greater… as on your return you again need to run around like mad trying to tick things off to catch up!

So having already a long to-do list, being unwell soon after your return is, let’s just say, not helpful…

It was, however, what it was, and by Thursday I was confined to bed… trying to get some rest.

In our ‘always on’ and ‘remote enabled’ world, especially if time working equates to revenue, switching off is hard. But as I needed to be better for next week, pure rest was prescribed. So the diary was cleared… a whole day just to rest and recuperate.

It started well, with a triumvirate line of mugs… lemon-ginger-honey, Lemsip, and tea. A solid start, yes, but now what?

By 11 a.m., I was bored… just so bored.

Work was not an option; I was not thinking straight; I was not tired so couldn’t sleep… and it dawned on me that being ill is just really really boring.

I think it may have been the only time I was grateful for TikTok; allowing me to waste an entire hour easily. Maybe this is what it should really be used for, although the dangers of Lemsip-related changes to your algorithm should not be underestimated.

It was just really hard to switch off.

Eventually, coaxed by some very mindless shows on Netflix… it was cake btw… I did manage to drift off.

In a smaller sense, this echoes the same battle we have with work-life balance.

We know we need to get some balance, but when faced with the reality of switching off it is hard, especially when you know full well that there are things that need to be done, piling up and waiting for you when you return.

The easy choice is to just keep going, especially in the short term… but by keeping going we don’t get the rest we need and our performance dips. Over the long term, we burn out and don’t get much better.

Yet, after a full day off, I definitely feel on the mend.

With the holiday season in full swing, my reflection this week is how it is important that we all take a proper break, look after ourselves and stay healthy.

So, have fun on the beach, be careful not to catch anything on the plane back, and most importantly, make sure you leave the laptop home.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

The last couple of weeks I have been away.

For one of those weeks, I had the delight of a journey across Japan. Japan is a country I have been to before, but only briefly for work many years ago, so it was an opportunity to get out of the office and find out a little more about what life is like there.

Now typically before you go anywhere you have preconceptions about what to expect.

For England it is probably cups of tea, biscuits and the Queen (to be fair the first two are pretty accurate) and for Japan my expectation was everything was going to be super expensive, super high tech and super different. It’s like living in the future!

Pre-conceptions of course can be quite dangerous. More often than not they turn out to be wrong, especially when confronted with details and reality of normal life on the ground. In most cases, things are more similar and relatable than you may expect and this was the case with Japan.

Expensive? Not particularly, both food and train travel were cheaper than the UK, and by quite a margin. Imagine my delight rushing through the Japanese countryside at 180mph having bought not one but two packs of Japanese sandwiches (and a fruit sandwich at that), with extra snacks.

High tech? In many ways, it did deserve this high-tech future moniker. This was especially true in terms of the transport and digital infrastructure (the latter a legacy of high labour cost or low labour availability I suspect).

Granted in some areas, it does remain old-fashioned and traditional mind you…some areas of Tokyo, at night in the rain, did remind me of Blade Runner, although this would make it less 2024 and more 1982 I suppose with is about right I suspect.

Bringing something back

Yet throughout the trip, there were a couple of things that really struck me and I wanted to bring home.

The first was the approach to kindness. Japan has a reputation for being polite and respectful. Undoubtedly acts of simple kindness, like offering to give up your seat for someone were warmly acknowledged and appreciated.

What surprised me was how this generated such a degree of reciprocal respect, to the extent that it made everyone feel better about themselves. It was just lovely and within a week we were racing to see who could be more generous… tidying up after ourselves, double check to ensure we had taken our trash with us and being extra quiet so as not to disturb others. I would say this is not behaviour I typically see on the 7:45 to London on a grimy November morning for sure (Yes, I am talking about you, Mr public, on speaker, video caller on the train).. Maybe it is something we need more of here.

The second area was the changing use of technology, in this case when travelling.

I have written before how easy access to cell phone data is changing travel, be it calling home, booking a taxi or navigating on maps. On this trip, however, it was the use of AI.

Using apps, such as Google Translate, to read signs, menus and labels is a game changer. All of a sudden the fog of a different language evaporates and you actually start to know what you are buying for lunch.

And then we have LLMs. For the first time, I saw the use of this really in the wild. Reach a new city, what is there to see…? Simply ask chatGPT and generate an itinerary, or be the guide, question and answer, style to find out all the weird and wonderful stuff that you are interested in…. ‘is there really such a thing as spam sushi….yes there is, it is called Spam Musubi’… I did not know that.

Then another use case.

Looking for a Manga book, as a gift in a random store, and needed to buy something vaguely suitable… given my Japanese reading ability is absolute zero, what to do?…. of course, these days you simply take a photo of the cover and ask chatGPT for a brief outline of the story in English… it really works, amazing

(btw … it also worked for deciphering food dishes for lunch – what is this – and also strangely extremely useful in deciphering the buttons on the Japanese toilet, thereby avoiding colonic irrigation and actually finding the flush… this was a use case I did not expect!).

All in all an interesting week. Certainly, the ideas around kindness and reciprocity will stay with me. It is something we used to have, and having seen it again may be something we need to get back to. Food for thought.

Have a good rest of the week all… more on the second week soon.