Year 2025 in review

A Year in Review should be a reflection of the decisions we’ve taken, not about the outcomes that materialised. In this post, I'll try to remind my future self of what I did, but unlike previous years, there's a lot less public work (side projects, blog posts), a lot less book reading and generally, I think, a lot less.

Work

2025 has been work, work and work alone. At work, to collaborate with teams in different time zones, my day started with SGT and ended with PST. Being available across three time zones left me little to no energy to work on things outside of work. I was able to write a couple of posts, but that was it.

• I enabled Dropbox on Kobo eReader to read books from Dropbox.
• I published my notes from the Range book.

I read the following books.

1. University of Berkshire Hathaway: 30 Years of Lessons Learned from Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger at the Annual Shareholders Meeting by Daniel Pecaut & Corey Wrenn
2. Building an Effective Dev Portfolio by Joshua Comeau
3. Software Engineering - The Soft Parts by Addy Osmani
4. Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly
5. Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel
6. The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life by Morgan Housel
7. The Art of Execution: How the world's best investors get it wrong and still make millions by Lee Freeman-Shor
8. Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings by Philip A. Fisher
9. Peaks and Valleys: Making Good And Bad Times Work For You - At Work And In Life by Spencer Johnson
10. One Up On Wall Street: How to Use What You Already Know to Make Money in the Market by Peter Lynch
11. Getting Things Done by David Allen

I donated to Kaniyam Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Wikipedia, Let's Encrypt, and Mozilla Foundation.

Family

For the whole year, it was challenging to balance work and family. I learnt the hard way that you only have a finite amount of energy every day. You need to manage your energy levels before you manage your time. If you've time but no energy, you'll be grumpy, and your kids will sense it. So, the solution was to prioritise doing NOTHING that puts me on a guilt trip during my ME time every day. So, I had to stop all the usual things that I do every year, like side projects, reading books, to conserve energy and to be in a good mood all the time. It stayed the same way until December.

The biggest personal highlight of the year was my sabbatical. As a reward for completing 5 years of service, my company offered a 4 weeks of paid sabbatical. Ever since my school days, I had wanted to stay home during Margazhi and sleep well, so I timed my sabbatical in December to align my children’s school holidays, and to plan our family vacation better.

To avoid any regrets, I split the time evenly. Two weeks for my family and two weeks for myself. During the family time, we travelled to Kerala, Pudhukottai and two other places before the year end rush. For my personal time, I want to learn a new skill. So, I read about 8 books on two topics - stock picking and being organised. Exploring ways to get more things done with less time.

Presence > productivity: For the 2nd time in a row, I'm publishing year in review during Pongal holiday week, intentionally stepping away from my usual year-end ritual.

Looking back, the most important lesson of 2025 was fluidity: using energy as my compass, letting go without guilt, and adapting without forcing balance. Some years are about acceleration; others are about alignment. I think our 2025 was about alignment.

Previously 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014