A year in the life

“Has it been a year alredy?” / “Has it alredy been a year?”

Both ways to apply the word “already” came to my mind when looking at the feed of pictures I get in my Timehop about events and activities on the same day N years ago. This time around, there happened to be nearly identical pictures, from the same place, exactly 5 and 1 years apart:

The 5 years old picture on the left is me with my personal laptop, starting to work at the previous company, on the first day we got the keys to our very own office space. It took a while before I got my “corporate” Surface Laptop 3, so that trusty ol’ Dell XPS 13 was where all the pre-launch planning and preparation for the founding of a company took place.

The picture from 1 year ago on the right is me leaving my second “corporate” machine, Lenovo Thinkpad [something] behind, along with my key fob, and stepping out of the office for the final time. From switch on to switch off – a journey of four years.

It got me thinking how much of what we do at work involves nothing else physical than just small devices like that. The things we create through our computer, as well as the things that our computers make us do (via signals from others) feel oh so important while we are working on them.

When you switch off, what remains?

The natural outcome is that we just keep on looking at what’s directly infront of us, not bothering to make a note of what has already happened. Without making a conscious effort to record our actions and experiences, they are in danger of being stored only in RAM and getting wiped away once you switch off.

So, here’s a bit of effort from me in putting the memories into a format that can be revisited at a later date. In this post I’ll be doing some reflection on the changes that have taken place during a year in the life of someone being me.

My physical and digital office today

The very first thing I started to look for after returning the office keys in the picture was another office. Not as in a job but as a physical space that I would hold the keys to. That was an important aspect for the sense of phsychological safety that I learned from the past four years of mostly working from home. Sure, it was possible to get work done there. Yes, a lot more efficient than commuting to the real office for Teams calls. But it often also felt like this:

Home was primarily for the family now. It’s a beautiful thing on its own. However, I also needed the ability to be away from home, mentally and physically. After no longer being a part of any organization, could it now be possible for me to design the work part of my life specifically for my own needs?

It turned out to be possible. After a few weeks of exploring options, I landed on a spot that not only was conveniently located in the same part of the city where I live. When I stepped inside to have a look and saw the big window opening up to a view of (almost) nothing but trees, I was sold.

The digital office of my own business was something that could wait. I had just started to build my newsletter and it felt like I shouldn’t stretch myself too thin with all the publicly visible stuff. Stepping out from my previous role had opened up the doors for many new one-to-one discussions with both old and new connections in my network. Better to enjoy that moment and not do everything at once.

Later in the year, I began feeling less and less satisfied with having the quick landing page that I had put together with no preparations whatsoever in March:

“Last Wednesday, I sat down to create a quick landing page for Niiranen Advisory Oy, my private company. I did it pretty much in one go. Knowing that I only needed a single page rather than a comprehensive WordPress style website, I did it on Carrd. The platform I had used for simple landing pages before – and also for delivering digital gift cards to family members during Xmas and birthdays.”

By now, I knew a bit more about who I was & what I could offer to people. The only way to refine it was the trusty old “thinking through writing” method, which meant I had to expand from a one-page intro to a multi-page website. Finally, a year later, I was ready to make that V2 site public at niiranenadvisory.com. See a quick promo video below:

Built with Squarespace, this new website allowed me to again see the world of web content publishing from a new perspective. As I mentioned in my previous post about my platform choices, the vibe around WordPress had gone bad and I felt it was time to try something else. It’s not impossible to think that a year from now I’d again be using some other tool. Heck, maybe AI can “vibe code” my next website on its own…

Back to life

If you’ve been following my blog, you may recall how I’ve written about the personal challenges I’ve faced with becoming tired. In late 2023 things got to a point where I had to take an extended leave as the symptoms became too severe to handle otherwise. This was a blessing in disguise as it both allowed me and forced me to stop doing what I’d always been doing. 2024 was then the year when I got to practice how to be alive again – instead of just living.

One reason I wanted to step away from the Microsoft MVP award program was to gain more control over my attention. I had made that decision already at the start of 2023, yet I stayed in the program until the end of my award period of July 1st, 2024. It was a similar day as turning in my laptop and office key. Now my technical access to official and unofficial MVP channels was finally removed. I didn’t have to battle with myself on what messages, signals and feeds to react to and which ones to ignore.

Cleaning up your virtual desk makes a difference. The longer you are a member of a group, the longer you work on specific projects or tasks, the more they end up owning you. You maybe become better at processing stuff as it becomes more familiar to you. Experience doesn’t mean you can scale yourself to an ever-growing pile of mental obligations, though. Experience primarily helps in navigating the territory. It doesn’t help you run faster and further with more load on you back – because we also become older as we accumulate experience.

Dropping some of that load is therefore the key. Depending on your personality traits, there’s also the question of how do you become motivated in general. I’ve become increasingly aware of my impatience to keep working on the same tasks over & over again. Stability and predictability are good to a point. Beyond that point, oh dear lord how bored I can become! When that boredom then threatens my motivation, I keep scanning for more and more issues to pay attention to. Then the vicious cycle starts turning as new things enter my consciousness and there’s no process for offloading the old thoughts.

In a perfect world, you might offload those thoughts at the end of each day, when stopping your working day. In the reality where I’ve learned to live, there are no time clocks to punch when exiting the office. The tools I use and the things I do are indistinguishable between at-work and off-work. Netiher the body nor the mind knows the difference. Often the only real difference has been that during the day I’d track my hours (working as a consultant, that’s kind of a must) and in the evening I’d do non-tracked tasks that relate to work.

Now, after setting up my private office, with a desktop PC that sits in front of that big window, I can at least recognize when I’m at work. Often when I leave in the afternoon to pick up my kid from daycare, I’ll still say to myself “I’ll continue on this task later in the evening”. Like I always used to convince myself. But now, I’ve learned to say “fuck it” to those promises that my busy mind makes at the moment its capacity is constrained. In the evening, nine times out of ten, I won’t work on any of those things. Technically I could, of course. I just don’t.

The ability to control my own schedule during the days has been crucial for the recovery. Knowing all too well that long periods of social interaction or the need to be “masking” for a specific role among the crowd can drain my mental battery rapidly, the important thing is being able to manage the charge level with confidence. Likewise, having the freedom to not stay at the office 9-to-5 if on any given day the energy for focusing on work is just not there – that’s truly the most precious thing.

My main goal hasn’t been the effective completion of work tasks. I’ve consciously set aside the kinds of metrics and habbits that were pushing me into getting things done – even when the significance of “the thing” was unclear or even questionable. By traditional standards, I’ve allowed myself to be not searching for success at this time.

Success is something determined by others. Happiness can only be determined by you. This is a thought that came to me today when reading one tech startup founder justify why he is sacrificing his evenings and weekends for work. He said he wasn’t optimizing for happiness, rather he wanted to succeed in building a multi-billion company.

I found this to be sad yet accurate, and somehow refreshingly honest. It reminded how I had often felt anxiety and distress in moments where technically I was “successful”. Now that I’ve taken a break after 4 years of being a co-founder and chasing success as defined by others, I am much more at ease with myself. It is financially not a sensible choice. There’s no badges and awards to be won from this. But at least for a moment, I get to be something rather than trying to achieve something – for someone else.

As I sit in that office today, writing this personal blog post, I get to answer the old voice in my head that says “shouldn’t you be working on something else?” That voice isn’t something one can just put on mute. What you can learn to do is give a firm response to its questions. Acknowledging your own needs and being more forgiving towards yourself first. So that you could also do that for the people around you.

The past year has consisted of a lot reflection on what are the patterns in life. Which thing leads to what outcome. Getting to the “why” behind the emotions and recognizing if there is a chance to do something that breaks the patterns leading repeatedly to exhaustion. While at the same time accepting who I am and what parts of me are unlikelt to change.

Are my problems fixed now? Not exactly, at least in the sense of everything being back to what it was for me many years ago. Because in life there’s no going back. We can only go forward in life and learn to both enjoy as well as deal with whatever comes our way.

The world around us

Reading the news of the world, it sometimes feels like some people are trying to turn the clocks back to the 1930s. The direction of the society here in my home country of Finland has been clearly negative in 2024, thanks to the current government’s conservatists and populists pushing their right-wing agenda. Yet looking at what’s now happening across the Atlantic in 2025, that all feels quite moderate in comparison.

For someone who has spent most of their professional career working in the ecosystem of a large American corporation, the rapid erosion of trust between USA and Europe gives a new reason to pause and reflect. Do I need a plan B if the Microsoft cloud would suddenly become hostile towards users from my country – or if it would simply no longer be trusted by customers round here? It’s not a question I’ve had to seriously consider ever before. But times change, and maybe in 2025 it is time to plan for the unexpected.

It’s not merely the political movements that are causing instability in what the future of our world looks like. As we’ve entered the era of GenAI being available everywhere and being injected into everything, the question of how we determine anyone or anything being trustworthy is becoming increasingly hard to answer. I’ve recently written about this in a fairly long article called Trusting big tech in the age of AI that explains my reaons for concern:

Thanks to being an independent advisor who doesn’t need to represent any company, I’ve been able to speak freely about the opportunities and threats of AI. Often this has meant making fun of the forced deployment of Copilot in absolutely every Microsoft product. This is the easy target for critique, of course, compared t the long-term impact that AI may have. Seeing tech giants from Google to Apple stumble in their efforts to launch “now with AI!” editions of their products shows us how difficult it is to figure out what exactly is the winning formula in applying LLM based technology for products and services.

The past year didn’t radically transform the work and life for someone like me. Neither did I see entire professions being wiped away by the almighty AI. Visions of agentic, autonomous AI have been primarily the creation of those who seek to justify the relentless spending of money on this technology. I have become a regular users of AI as an assitant for myself, especially helping someone working as a solopreneur to bounce around ideas and be a virtual teammate. And still, whenever I open Microsoft’s Copilot Studio and try to think “what would I want to use this for in my daily life”, I’m unable to come up with a single problem where a Copilot agent is the best answer.

None of this means that AI would not be highly impactful. In a way, the concept of democratizing code that I was vocally advocating when going all-in with low-code – that’s now more likely to happen via computer generated code instead. I don’t think Power Platform would disappear anytime soon, and yet I certainly am not as confident that low-code is the mainstream solution to business needs as I was 5 years ago. Just because AI hasn’t been the magic bullet the tech vendors claimed it to be, that doesn’t mean it won’t shake up a lot of what I’ve spent my time and effort on in the field of business apps consulting. I bet it will, and I want to keep my mind open for ways to disrupt the patterns that have led me to this point.

Almost nothing changes in one year. Nearly everything can change in a decade. That is my own version of “gradually, then suddenly” when it comes to analyzing the trends in technology, business, society and life. It can act as a motivational poster of sort when applied to aspirational goals and the strive for progress. Similarly, it works as a caution for making assumptions that just because you’ve been able to rely on something earlier in your life, it will remain reliable.

Cover photo by Daniel Mirlea on Unsplash