December already? It feels like the year just started, yet here we are in its final chapter.

This time of year always sneaks up on me. Time for reflection, connection, glühwein and maybe a little chaos.

Some things I did this week

Ok, more than a little chaos. This week was A LOT. Three impending deadlines have left me and Jon chasing our tails a little.

But the end is in sight.

On one – a scoping and business case development project – I started the week feeling a bit overwhelmed, trying to put finishing touches to 114 slides. Then midweek I made the decision to strip it right back to a simple 10-ish page deck with a stronger, clearer story, and put all the detail in a supporting report.

Decision-makers aren’t going to read the detail; they need to be convinced and reassured. The short report makes a punchy case for change and has a clear ask on resources and timeline.  The full report is there to provide answers to questions and give confidence that we’ve fully worked through the detail. Which we have.

It’s in a much better place now. We still have a few details to finalise, but it’s so close to done. Phew.

On the other big project, we have an intranet due to launch in a week. We did a state of the nation on Friday and we’re in a great place. An intranet planned, configured and built, and hundreds of pages of content written in a little over three months. I’ll reflect on that more post-launch.

On top of that, I’m prepping for a webinar I’m doing on hybrid work trends for 2025 for Modolabs. I love thinking about future trends, so I’ve enjoyed getting stuck into this one and trying to translate noise about global megatrends into the practicalities of workplace comms and collaboration in the year ahead. I always forget how much work creating entirely fresh presentations is. But also how much I like doing that focused reading and research (I’d enjoy it more if I weren’t quite so busy on the other projects, mind you).

With month end yesterday this has also been a heavy and occasionally stressful admin week. Always my least favourite part of the job.

Some non-work things I did this week

On Wednesday this story about Cyberia, the world’s first internet café, fell into my feed. It’s a great read about the enthusiasm and utopianism of early internet entrepreneurs. And the connections between Cyberia and the music scene of the mid 90s.

But my memories of Cyberia are different. I went there on a school trip, sometime in late 1994 or early 1995. It was the first time I’d ever been on the internet. I was fascinated by it immediately. The prospect of connecting with ideas and people beyond my experience as a painfully shy, nerdy schoolgirl. I was hooked.

Reading that piece on Cyberia I reflected on how much that one school trip changed my life. I haven’t been offline since, and that’s given me so many wonderful experiences and opportunities in the 30 years since.

But by coincidence I’d signed up to an event on Wednesday night called The Offline Club, an initiative here in Amsterdam that offers “offline events and detox hangouts to unplug, relax and connect with like-minded people”.

I’m beyond terrible at being and staying offline. I have to go to extreme lengths to make myself disconnect. And I mean really extreme, like taking myself to an island with no electricity and no phone signal.

After 30 years, I’m not sure I even know who analogue me is. But I signed up to Offline Club weeks ago, in an effort to find out.

Wednesday’s event was their biggest yet, with over 300 people gathering at the Westerkerk, the big 17th-century church opposite my house. I’d followed the joining instructions and packed things to do and read, and a blanket to keep warm.

I handed my phone in and was given a cloakroom ticket to claim it back. My instinctive reaction was to reach for my phone to take a photo of it in case I lost it. But… oh yeah.

I slipped the cloakroom ticket into my back pocket, grabbed a cup of green tea and found a seat. The founder gave a short introduction, explaining the evening would be split into three sections. 45 mins of getting in touch with yourself, quietly, followed by an hour connecting with other people, and finally 45 minutes alone time.

Quiet time was accompanied by a piano recital. I grabbed a spot in a pulpit to read a book, which after a childhood of Catholic schooling felt vaguely subversive. It was here that I had a revelation. That revelation was that my PowerPoint was far too long. I was reading Ros Atkins’ The Art Of Explanation at the time. The Lord does indeed move in mysterious ways.

For an interminably long time – it felt like about six hours, but was probably about 20 minutes. I don’t know because I didn’t have my Apple Watch on – I felt troubled by my inability to Google every bizarre thought that entered my mind. So I wrote them down in my notebook so I could look them up later.

What was Rembrandt’s first name?
Does the universe have a middle?
Whatever happened to Zig and Zag?
If a Phillips screwdriver is the cross one what’s the flat one called?
What was that village that crowned a chicken as its king? (I think it was a chicken?). What was all that about?

When quiet time was over I wandered around the various activities designed to encourage meaningful connection and conversation. Some giant origami. Debating whether Ayr is a real place, and thus the answer to one of the clues on the massive wall-mounted crossword. Halfway through I realised I wasn’t really in the mood to people at all so found a spot in the choir stalls and listened to a lecture about the philosophy of place via some headphones while knitting a scarf. Who even am I?!

The final section. More introspection. A beautiful harpist played on a stage in the middle of the church. I drank my fourth cup of green tea huddled under my blanket sitting on what I later realised was a gravestone. I remembered that Rembrandt is interred somewhere under this collection of people reading books and drinking tea, and wondered what he’d make of it all.

But mostly I was just bitterly cold. The kind of cold that seeps into your bones leaving you wondering if you’ll ever be warm again.

Did I enjoy Offline Club? I think so. Would I do it again? Probably. But in the summer. 3.5 hours is just too long to spend in a cold church in November.

Has it made me rethink my digital dependency? Of course not.