Professionally, I don’t think I have ever had as much exciting opportunity juxtaposed against so many frustrating limitations as we experienced in 2025.
I’ll admit that as the end of the year approached, I was begging for just a few more months to squeeze that little bit more work in before the end-of-year shutdown, but somewhere in there – despite my best efforts, I reached the point of diminishing returns where I should have listened to my body and slowed down, but I flailed my way to the final moment and only really allowed myself to unwind once I knew everyone else was already on leave so I couldn’t do any more even if I wanted to.
My holidays quickly filled in with moments of warmth and laughter with friends and family, preparing for the New Year sermon I was asked to share, playing Mario Kart with the kids, listening to audiobooks and, in the few fleeting moments I had available, I took the time to reflect on how to make 2026 better.
Inputs
During the break I binged my way through an excellent book called Slow Productivity by Cal Newport.
I felt personally attacked 🤣
The premise of the book is that the productivity of knowledge-workers is not measured by the appearance of busyness or the number of task-list items checked off, it is measured in long-term arcs of time where you can see progress that is often invisible at the daily or weekly level.
He highlighted the importance of large blocks of protected time for creative thinking, prioritising tasks that bring you joy despite them not having direct utility for your mission as they trigger creative thinking and often lead to breakthroughs that just grinding on essential tasks will never provide.
I also listened to interviews with successful business people from my industry (Jake Goldman, Gary Vaynerchuk, Mark O’brien, Aviral Mittal, Daniel Priestly) and looked at how they solved the problems we are facing.
Priorities
I spent the latter part of 2025 looking for short-term fixes to our business challenges but this was largely misplaced energy.
There are rarely short-term fixes for long-term problems, instead I need to focus on playing the long game.
What does that look like in 2026?
I will be prioritising three things:
- Content Creation – Every single success story that I evaluated over the break attributed either the majority of their success or in some cases all of their success to their disciplined content creation efforts (I have tried to be more present in this space recently, but as it is something I enjoy and is not directly related to revenue I have tended to deprioritise it).
- Partnerships – As our software products are reaching their launch dates, it has become increasingly apparent to me that software sales is hard work if you don’t have distribution figured out. Partnering with others who already have access to our customers is the shortest path to growth.
- Outbound sales – Over the end of 2025 our sales efforts improved considerably but due to the bespoke nature of the outreach we have been doing our outreach volume has been very low. In 2026, I intend to build systems around this to increase our outreach volume.
Schedule
In the book Slow Productivity, Cal takes a significant amount of time to demonstrate how to set a schedule that is conducive to doing great work…
Very little about how I structured my time last year lines up with his recommendations. So as I enter into 2026, this is how I’m attempting to structure my time.
- Creative/Strategic deep work: Tuesday and Thursday mornings (I will generally only take calls or meetings in these times if something is literally on fire).
- Meetings/relationships: Monday and Wednesday mornings are when I will attempt to batch meetings (This is the one I expect to be the most flexible, as I know we work across so many time zones, but this is at least the plan).
- General work tasks: Giving design feedback, writing reports, working on proposals, admin work, catching up on emails (and the 101 other small tasks that clutter my list) will populate my afternoons from Monday to Thursday.
If you are wondering why Friday does not appear, I’m trying to leave that unallocated to ensure there is slack in the system for the inevitable unfinished tasks from the rest of the week .
Personal Changes
Outside of work I plan to make more time to be kind to my mind and body, this will be in the form of:
- Better sleep
- More regular runs + working out at home
- More creative outlets
I started all of these over the break, I just need to stick to it.
The Big Picture
In this post I have focussed on my personal roles and responsibilities, but there is a lot more to Blue Vineyard. In case you are not familiar with it, BV consists primarily of two sides – the Agency business (which includes our web projects and BV Audio) and the product business which includes:
That is a lot of moving parts, but each one plays a specific role in the ecosystem. In my next post I’ll expand more on what that ecosystem will look like.
In the meantime I wish you all the best for 2026. May your year be full of serendipitous connections, major wins, healthy families and more.
Let’s get into it.
