Author: tahmidchowdhury

Managing the existential questioning after the holiday period

The last two weeks have been a lethargic period for many people. For me, I’m noticing that I’m probably more frazzled than I was before this ‘rest period’ started.

It is often the period of rest that allows issues to surface. When we are too busy, we don’t give space for the bigger questions in life to arise. For me, this has been a new layer of existential questioning of who I am.

There is no escaping the fear and confusion. It is part of the process. Running away from it does not make it go away, it just merely prolongs the experience.

What does 2024 hold in store?

One of the great things about writing articles weekly is that it’s pretty easy to go back to them and see how life panned out in 2023.

These last few days I’ve been resharing some of the most meaningful articles that I’ve written this year. It’s a good way of being able to reconnect with the ebbs and flows of the last 364 days.

So in my 52nd and final article of 2023, let’s first look back to help me look forward.

What did I even do in 2023?

Before logging off work, I wrote a recap email of all the things our team had achieved this year.

It was meant to be a short thank you email with a summary. But I realised that this would not really be doing the task justice. So instead, I spent some time properly trawling through our achievements.

I’m not sure I totally did it justice, but I’m glad I wrote it out rather than just saying ‘we wrote 3 reports and did 5 events this year’.

We can really downplay the accumulative effect of what we have achieved. So I thought I would also do a similar exercise for myself, blending in the personal and the professional.

Why we don’t need to be constantly improving ourselves

We’re nine days from Christmas, and I’m feeling pretty exhausted. Usually, I would start feeling reminiscent about what I had achieved around this time of year. But right now, I honestly don’t really feel like it. It just doesn’t seem very fun to reflect right now. I’ve had an ample share of emotional intensity for the last few months, so adding more doesn’t feel like a fun thing to do

Navigating the turbulence of the December work rush

One thing I’ve noticed is that lots of people (including myself) have been radiating stress. This is probably caused by the squeeze of work before the year end.

Christmas is usually a busy moment, but tied along with increased workloads and tired souls, I’m noticing an extra level of fatigue.

Either that or perhaps it’s just what I’m experiencing for myself anyway.
As both a human being experiencing these things and as a manager, it can be tricky to know what to do, or how to respond.

An invitation to stop using time-saving hacks

Last weekend I volunteered to help make food at an event. It was a pretty basic task. I had to restock the drinks bottles on the shelf, refill the snack bowls and make some pizzas in the oven.
I was surprised to find it was the most relaxed I’ve felt when making food in about a year. The basic task of cutting up pizza slices was bringing me more joy than similar tasks usually do.
The big difference was that I was taking my time.

The power of understanding our productivity fluctuations

In the past four weeks I’ve been doing more public speaking than I’ve done in the last six months

On Wednesday I gave the final push to a paper we’re launching at COP on the social aspects of circular economy. In practice, this meant mass reviewing 1000 revisions on track changes and comments to a semblance of a clean document.

Unsurprisingly by Thursday I was knackered. I remarked to one of my colleagues that this was one of the least productive days that I’ve had in months.
When I gave myself the grace to realise how much I had been pushing myself over the last two weeks, I could see that this was a natural cycle of energetic flow.

Being an outsider in a room full of insiders

This week was a European tour for me. I started in Brussels, then went up to Amsterdam to speak at the Sustainable Packaging Summit. on Wednesday I came straight to London (with a small box of chocolates for my dad’s birthday) to speak with a group of Spanish cleantech startups. I’m now going back to Brussels this Sunday (and speaking at another event on Monday there!)

I’ve been posting quite a lot recently about the importance of getting out of our comfort zones if we want to get wider perspectives. This week was me putting this into action

The balance between being right and being effective

This week, I’ve been reflecting on the idea of ‘being right’. After all, so much of what we do is based upon finding the correct answer.
But what does being right really mean?
For a long time, I saw being right as synonymous with the best way to do things. In my mind, once we reflected upon something for long enough, there was more or less a single answer that was correct.
Looking back, I’d say I was pretty naive.

Finding the balance between reflection and overthink

The last few weeks I’ve kept my days clearer and my evenings quieter.

Some call this ‘slowing down’, though I find that term a bit confusing – because whilst I am doing less activities, my mental space doesn’t feel particularly less active. If anything, it feels like I think more, rather than less.

It’s been an interesting experience for sure. Having freer evenings has allowed me to lounge around and enjoy spending time alone. When I tried ‘doing less’ in the summer, I ended up getting fidgety and felt quite miserable because I didn’t know what to do with myself. I think I’m having a better crack at it now though.