Weeknote 2026/01

/ Sharon O'Dea / 2 Comments
Snow-covered street in Amsterdam featuring traditional Dutch architecture, parked cars, bicycles, and a canal lined with boats.
Snowy Amsterdam this week (photo: Sharon O’Dea)

Amsterdam was briefly hit by snow this week, which meant Schiphol ground to a halt and the city centre instantly transformed into an ice rink — if ice rinks also had surprise downhill sections and the occasional canal waiting to claim you. Crossing bridges became a daily exercise in risk assessment, dignity management, and knowing when not to rush.

It turns out this was a fairly accurate metaphor for the rest of the week: a lot of careful progress on unstable ground, a strong urge to keep control, and the uncomfortable realisation that at some point you have to stop edging forward and just… let go.

This week at work

A week largely spent hovering around the finish line, circling it like someone who suspects there might be a trap if they actually cross.

On the book, we made what are, on paper, the final edits to the last three chapters before re-submitting. Final in the technical sense, if not the psychological one. At the same time, we’ve been working with a designer to redraw all the diagrams, replacing our pedestrian PowerPoint efforts with something professional and consistent. There’s something faintly unsettling about seeing ideas you’ve kicked about for years rendered cleanly and decisively, in a way that suggests permanence. These are no longer drafts. They are artefacts.

We also met with our editor to talk about what happens next, which turns out to be the moment where the existential weight really lands. I could keep editing forever. There’s always a word that could be better, a paragraph that could be tightened, a clarifying sentence that could be added to pre-empt a reviewer who exists solely in my imagination. Letting go doesn’t feel like confidence so much as surrender — an acceptance that at some point clarity has to trump completeness, if only for my sanity.

There’s also the uncomfortable realisation that once it’s out there, it’s no longer for us. People will read it in contexts we can’t control, bring their own histories and irritations to it, misunderstand parts, skim sections we laboured over, and quote back lines we barely remember writing. This is, I’m told, normal. It does not make it easier.

Finishing a book isn’t a clean, triumphant moment. It’s a long, slow uncoupling from something you’ve been holding very close. You don’t stop because it’s perfect. You stop because at some point you have to say: this is as good as I can make it, for now. Then you step away and hope it does something useful in the world.

Alongside all that emotional restraint, Jon and I are running an in-person workshop with senior internal communicators next week, so we spent a couple of days working through the mechanics and flow. I love this part: pitching to the right level of seniority, designing something people can genuinely take back to their teams, and making the most of the energy and dynamics of a room rather than pretending workshops are just slide decks with chairs. We also started playing around with a new model which we’re going to preview.

We hope people like it. We hope we still like it once it’s been stress-tested by a room full of smart, sceptical people.

We’ve also had a few sniffs of new business, which meant a couple of quick-turnaround proposals. I always underestimate how much work these take, despite all available evidence. We don’t do rinse-and-repeat proposals, which is the right thing intellectually and the worst possible decision from a time-management perspective. Each one eats at least half a day: thinking properly, costing honestly, and tailoring it to the actual problem rather than the imaginary one the client thinks they have.

This work then disappears into the void, where it may return as a polite rejection, a prolonged silence, or — in the best-case scenario — a win that arrives just late enough for me to have emotionally written it off. I am currently choosing to believe this week’s efforts will not go down in history as some of my finest examples of beautifully formatted disappointment.

Also this week

Several years ago I bought a gorgeous dress for a friend’s wedding. Somehow, while it sat at the bottom of the laundry basket waiting to be hand-washed (for months), it acquired a bleached-out patch — a stain impossible to hide or remove. What followed was a familiar pattern: two further years of sincere promises to take it to a repair café or a tailor, immediately broken by doing absolutely nothing.

Then I spotted an upcycling workshop and signed up. Partly because I’m trying to do more things this year that don’t involve staring at my phone. Partly because I’m committing to buying less fast fashion and dealing more honestly with the clothes I already own.

And so I spent two hours painting my dress.

It was genuinely fun. Meditative, even. I’m not entirely sure the end result is something I will ever wear in public, but it does now exist as a different thing — rescued from the purgatory of I’ll deal with that later.

I remain available for events that feel emotionally robust enough to cope with a hand-painted frock.

A woman closely examines a purple fabric while applying something with a brush, focused on her work, in a stylish indoor setting. Another person is visible in the background.
A paintbrush rests on a table next to a bottle of white paint and a spray bottle, with a blurred background of people engaging in an art activity.
A vibrant pink dress with short sleeves and a pleated skirt, hanging on a clothing rack among other garments.
A vibrant magenta fabric draped over a table, showing brush strokes of white paint, with various crafting tools and cups scattered around.

Consuming

I am now fully, unashamedly hooked on The Traitors, to the point that I am cancelling other plans when it’s on, as if it were a non-negotiable diplomatic engagement rather than a reality TV show involving cloaks, candlelight, and breakfast-based psychological warfare. This week’s Rachel/Fiona clash alone was worth rearranging my life for. Emerging victorious, Rachel not only survived but materially raised the reputation of Heads of Comms everywhere: calm under pressure, forensic with language, and quietly letting the other person talk themselves into a hole. A masterclass in stakeholder management, reputational defence, and the art of saying very little while meaning everything. It remains a perfect study in group dynamics, overconfidence, and the human tendency to mistake confidence for competence — all set in a Scottish castle and edited like a gothic thriller. I remain obsessed and will not be taking questions at this time.

I also caught Nuremberg at the cinema, which is exactly my sort of thing: a psychological thriller wrapped in historical drama. Russell Crowe is surprisingly compelling as Goebbels — likeable in a way that is deeply unsettling and psychologically awkward to experience as a viewer. You’re constantly aware that this is wrong, that you’re being pulled into the charm, intelligence and humanity of someone who absolutely should not be humanised — and that tension is arguably the film’s most interesting achievement. Richard E Grant is reliably excellent. A slightly hammy performance from Rami Malek tips parts of it into unintended absurdity, which is a shame, because the Crowe-led psychological unease deserved a steadier hand. Still, I was entertained, albeit in a slightly morally conflicted way.

On Saturday afternoon, my pal Lauren and I went to see It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, an achingly beautiful retrospective of a beautiful man. The film is patient and unsensational, refusing the usual shortcuts of myth and tragedy. Instead, it assembles Buckley slowly — through archive footage, answering machine messages, and the intensity of people who clearly loved him — allowing his sensitivity and seriousness about the work to surface in their own sweet time. It’s exactly as he deserves.

It dismantled a lot of what I thought I knew about him Yes, he was Tim Buckley’s son, but Buckley Senior was an absent dad. And no, Jeff Buckley did not die as part of the cursed “27 Club”. What’s left is not a doomed-prodigy narrative, but a portrait of someone still figuring things out. The film sent me straight back into a Grace rabbit hole — an album I played on repeat in my teenage bedroom — and listening now, older and theoretically wiser, I’m struck by how much we smooth artists into symbols once they’re gone, and how much more painful it is to meet them again as people.

That same recalibration landed again this week, ten years exactly since David Bowie died. He released Blackstar on his birthday and then, days later, performed what may be the most David Bowie manoeuvre imaginable: he died and retroactively changed the album’s entire meaning. Overnight, something wilfully strange and opaque snapped into focus as a controlled exit. Not just an album, but a final piece of stagecraft.

I’d forgotten how destabilising that shift felt — how every lyric suddenly became a clue, every image a message delivered late. On the walk from the nail bar to work, sporting these frankly epic Bowie-inspired nails, I put Lazarus on for the first time in years. Which is how I ended up crying in the street. Not because it’s clever or iconic, but because meaning has a habit of arriving late, and without checking whether you’re ready for it.

A close-up of neatly manicured hands displaying a variety of nail designs, including a shiny silver, black with a star, and a white nail featuring a red and blue lightning bolt.
My David Bowie-tribute nails. Design by Magda at Lakwerk.

Coverage

Reworked published a piece this week, showcasing me as one of their Contributors of the Year, which is a very generous way of saying: she has a lot of thoughts and keeps writing them down.

I’ve really valued having Reworked as a home for my writing. The discipline of a regular outlet forces me to finish thoughts rather than letting them linger as half-formed LinkedIn posts that should, frankly, have been paragraphs — or occasionally not posted at all. Writing is partly my job, but mostly it’s how I make sense of an industry that keeps promising salvation via tools, platforms, and dashboards, while quietly making everyone more tired.

I also work largely on my own, so publishing is a useful alternative to standing in my kitchen muttering about governance, notifications, and why “engagement” continues to do an implausible amount of conceptual heavy lifting. I’m grateful to Reworked for giving those thoughts a place to land — and to everyone who reads, disagrees, or sends a message that begins with “this made me feel less mad”, which remains one of the highest forms of professional praise.

An excuse — not that one was needed — to keep writing in 2026. See you next week.

This week in photos

A person wearing a black puffer jacket with a hood, standing in a snowy urban environment with snowflakes visible in the air. Buildings can be seen in the background, along with a bicycle and snow-covered ground.
A winter scene featuring a snow-covered street in Amsterdam, with bicycles parked along a canal. Two colorful sleds, one red and one orange, are prominently placed on the snowy ground.
Snow-covered street in Amsterdam featuring traditional buildings, a rainbow flag, and a prominent tower in the background, with a quiet atmosphere and vehicles covered in snow.
A snow-covered church with a tall clock tower surrounded by piled Christmas trees and a sign offering Christmas tree disposal.
A person in a black coat taking a selfie in a circular mirror, set against a modern interior with yellow and black geometric shapes and wooden lockers in the background.
A snowy scene in Amsterdam featuring bicycles covered in snow, a canal with a houseboat, and historic buildings in the background, including a clock tower.
A group of people participating in a spin class, with a focus on one woman taking a selfie in a dimly lit, red-tinted environment.
Sunset over a canal in Amsterdam, featuring historic buildings along the water's edge, with a pink and orange sky reflecting on the calm water.

2025 Yearnote

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A woman wearing a colorful traditional kimono stands on steps leading to a temple, surrounded by autumn foliage and architecture.
Looking back at Nagasaki, and at 2025. Photo: Alexandre Le Bris

I don’t do the ‘word for the year’ thing. It always sounds appealing, then it’s January 10th and I haven’t chosen one, and at that point it feels both late and deeply on brand.

That said, if I were forced to name the year that just happened, I’d call it nomadic. I spent more time on the move than I have in a decade — only this time it was intentional, and largely on my own terms.

I worked with clients across multiple countries and time zones, often dealing with boggling organisational complexity. I travelled a lot. I wrote steadily: weeknotes most weeks, articles for other publications, and a book which, at the start of the year, existed mainly as some notes, a few LinkedIn DMs, and a stubborn thought that refused to go away.

There were some visible wins too. I was named on the Women in PR 40 over 40 Powerlist, picked up an award for our consultancy work, and spoke on stages in Europe, the US, and Asia. From the outside, it probably looked like a year of arrival — milestones politely lining up.

It didn’t feel like that from the inside.

Instead, it felt like a series of small recalibrations. Adjusting direction rather than planting a flag. Paying attention to what still fits — and what no longer quite does — across work, health, travel, friendships, and, at times, quite literally.

That gap between how things looked and how they felt became impossible to ignore in June. Around the same time I was publicly celebrating the Powerlist recognition, I saw the photographs from the event — and winced. Not in a poetic way. In a very immediate, who the fuck is that and when did it happen? way.

I hadn’t quite clocked how far middle age had crept in — on my energy, my habits, my waistline — until a professional photographer did it for me. The disconnect between the version of myself I was writing about and the one staring back at me from those photos was sharp enough to puncture whatever story I’d been telling myself.

It wasn’t a rock-bottom moment. There was no vow, no announcement. Just a slightly mortifying realisation that something had drifted, and that I didn’t much like where it had ended up.

So I adjusted course.

Before and after.

I didn’t write about it at the time — partly because not everything belongs on the blog, and partly because I wasn’t yet convinced I’d stick with it. This felt less like a transformation and more like basic maintenance. The sort that only really shows up later, once you’ve stopped pretending you didn’t notice the problem.

Momentum

Progress is easier to recognise when you put some numbers on it (also, I love measuring things).

This year I worked with nine clients — some new, some returning. Much of that work will never make it onto the blog: conversations held in confidence, decisions shaped quietly, direction nudged rather than announced. There are things I can share, and plenty I can’t. That’s the nature of advisory work — its impact often shows up later, elsewhere, and under someone else’s name and in slides that looked better before someone dicked around with them.

Jon and I planned and delivered sixteen workshops this year — still the part of the job that reminds me why I do it. Getting people in a room (or a carefully curated grid), watching a problem reveal itself, and leaving them better prepared than when they arrived. After weeks alone with a laptop, the sudden presence of alert, opinionated humans is both invigorating and deeply tiring.

A group discussion where a person holds a large poster titled 'WHAT WAS YOUR Personal Highlight of the Trip?' displaying sticky notes with written highlights, while another participant listens attentively.
Workshopping.

But it was a quieter consulting year than the last — a relief after the bonkers intensity of 2024, but also, at times, faintly alarming. A couple of promising proposals were pulled late, and the steadiness began to look suspiciously like stagnation. That’s the psychological tax of self-employment: even good years contain their own small panics.

October provided a snapshot of what momentum looks like up close: I was in the Goto Islands, ducking out of a dinner to do a pitch. In the next room, my newly acquired nomad friends were sharing sushi and stories. Meanwhile, I was sitting on the floor, laptop balanced precariously, trying to project professional calm to a panel of six executives across three continents — while being eaten alive by mosquitos and hoping I didn’t look as sweaty as I felt.

A person sitting at a table working on a laptop, focused and deep in thought, with indoor plants and a fan in the background.
The Life of a Slideshow Girl. Photo by me.

To the people on the call, it probably looked seamless — we won the work. From the inside, it was awkward, faintly farcical, and a tidy encapsulation of the year: progress made in less-than-ideal conditions, with work and life refusing to stay neatly separated.

Alongside all of this, I wrote. Quite a lot, as it turns out. The book, which started the year as a persistent idea and a handful of notes, ended it at 83,298 words. Add to that 56,585 words of weeknotes and blog posts, plus 13 articles for other publications. Little of it was written in long, serene stretches. It was assembled in fragments — early mornings, travel days, stolen hours between calls, late nights at home.

I didn’t write to chase an audience or keep up with formats. I wrote because it’s how I work things out. In a year where much of my actual work remained trapped in Teams threads and slide decks, writing was the only place my thinking was allowed to roam freely.

That’s what momentum looked like in 2025.  Not reinvention. But sustained movement across multiple fronts — work that continued, writing that accumulated, confidence that grew, while looking slightly dishevelled off-camera.

The trail wasn’t obvious day to day. I guess it rarely is.

But by the end of the year, it was there — visible enough to look back at and recognise that, even in a quieter year, things had kept moving in the right direction.

The grind

I spent a little over half the year at home in Amsterdam — a place that still manages to make me happy even on grey days when the sky seems to have called in sick. Home was the anchor. Everything else radiated out from there.

Behind the writing and the polished LinkedIn posts sat the real work. The unphotogenic bit. Researching, advising, persuading, planning. Helping people make sense of complex organisations, imperfect systems, and competing priorities. Most of it never leaves the room it was created in.

The day-to-day reality of consultancy work is thinking, reframing, and translation — work that rarely survives beyond a meeting or a deck. I share what I can here, but most of it lives on in Teams threads, PowerPoint slides, workshop notes, and the heads of the people who were part of the conversation at the time.

Much of this year’s work happened across time zones, and often in sub-optimal conditions. Fiddling with decks on trains with Wi-Fi that exists largely as a philosophical concept. Speaking notes scribbled on planes. Emails written at badly-lit hotel desks. Trying to stay present while jet-lagged, or while the Wi-Fi flickers, or while a dog offers its own commentary in the background.

A foot spa
A workspace featuring wooden tables, a laptop, and a desktop computer against a white brick wall, with a bag and a jacket on the floor.
London
A person with shoulder-length brown hair is sitting at a desk, focused on a laptop in a modern office space with large windows showing a cityscape in the background.
Some co-working space

Then there’s the less visible but sadly unavoidable layer of running a business: Invoicing, contracts, insurance, taxes, admin — the necessary friction of independence. I remain predictably terrible at this part, prone to putting it off until it becomes unavoidable, and then dealing with it in a flurry of irritation and relief. It’s not work I enjoy, but it’s what makes the rest possible.

One of the more useful concepts I picked up in Japan is Enjuku (円熟) — seasoned maturity. Not early promise. Not peak-performance theatrics. Just the point where skill, judgement, and restraint start to cohere.

That feels like where Lithos is right now.

Experienced enough to know what good looks like, and to spot weak thinking quickly. Trusted, but not buffered. Calm, but not complacent. The work is steady, useful, and often quietly impactful — though it rarely comes with the reassurance of novelty or the adrenaline of constant growth.

Recognition sits alongside this rather than above it. That is, it’s welcome, but it doesn’t change the day-to-day reality: a quieter year than the last, the ongoing negotiation between depth and pace, and the occasional moments of wondering whether an empty inbox is a sign of stability or something to worry about.

From the outside, consultancy can look smooth and self-directed. From the inside, it’s persistent, occasionally tiring, and often work that disappears without a trace.

Counterweights

The day job kept things moving. Outside of work, I made a conscious effort not to calcify.

The counterweights were concrete and occasionally ridiculous. I went to 26 gigs — from Little Simz to a Bosnian ska band I didn’t know I liked until I did. I finally made it to the Barrowlands to see Supergrass. Live music remains one of the quickest ways to reset me: turn up, stand in a room, let sound do the work.

Three women smiling and posing together at a lively event, with a colorful background and concert-like atmosphere.
A performer on stage wearing a sleeveless vest and holding a red object, surrounded by yellow stage lights and musicians in the background.
A live performance by the band Dubioza Kolektiv, featuring members in matching yellow outfits, engaging with an enthusiastic crowd in front of them. The stage is illuminated with colorful lights, and a large backdrop of the band's logo is visible.

Reading for pleasure took a back seat this year, crowded out by the demands of actually writing the book. I still managed around 20 books, mostly potted histories of the places I visited. I like to understand what makes a place tick, and why it is the way it is. Unfortunately, history is largely the story of bad people, which is how I ended up reading about Idi Amin, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Enver Hoxha, and a series of other deeply unpleasant men.

There were also hundreds of soporific podcasts, listened to not for insight but in the hope they’d help me drift off to sleep. Many failed, but the ritual stuck — along with a worrying amount of trivia that may yet come into its own in a pub quiz.

I’ve had a regular exercise habit for well over a decade, and it still feels slightly out-of-character to acknowledge how much of my life now revolves around it. I guess I’m… a gym person now?

103 spin classes, plus regular weights and boxing — not as a performance metric, but because I need to burn off energy and spend some of my waking hours not staring at a screen. Less optimisation, more showing up. Moving because my body seems to require it.

Travel for fun featured too, carefully ring-fenced from work. Hiking in Albania with friends. Festivals in Finland and the Netherlands. Dancing salsa in Cartagena. Boeuf bourguignon at my favourite restaurant in Paris. Playing tejo in Bogotá. Paddling in the Indian Ocean with my husband. Staring a lion in the face in Kenya. And a perfectly pointless road trip in Japan to look at fruit-shaped bus stops — undertaken simply because they exist, which felt like sufficient justification.

A person standing in front of a large, colorful lemon-shaped structure near the water, with a blue sky and scattered clouds in the background.
A person leans casually against a large green and white melon-shaped structure that serves as a bus stop, with a scenic waterfront view in the background.
A woman walking past a large, brightly colored bus stop shaped like an orange, with a lake and blue sky in the background.
A person standing in front of a large tomato-shaped structure with a smiling expression, wearing a white shirt and blue jeans, against a blue sky with clouds.
A person sitting inside a bright yellow, fruit-shaped bus shelter with large windows and a green leaf on top, surrounded by greenery.
A woman standing next to a whimsical bus stop designed to resemble a watermelon, with bare trees and a blue sky in the background.

Losing weight meant dressing a different body, but it also prompted something more reflective. I started letting go of clothes that belonged to earlier versions of me — or to people I thought I should be. Pieces bought for roles I no longer play, or phases I’ve outgrown. In their place came experimentation: trying things on without a plan, paying attention to what I actually enjoy wearing, not just what feels acceptable.

Somewhere along the way, I also found myself — to my mild surprise — being influenced by over-40s fashion TikTok. Sensible women with strong opinions about tailoring, trainers, and the perils of clinging to clothes you no longer recognise yourself in.

I bought more earrings this year than I did in the previous ten.

Not all the counterweights were light, or playful.

There was also a trip to the Auvergne with my family, to scatter my grandmother’s ashes. Returning her to the place she was born over a century ago. Standing together, looking out at the view she had carried with her for decades, and finally understanding why it never left her. In a year defined by motion, that was a different kind of stillness — one that reached backwards as much as it did outwards, and quietly reset the scale of everything else.

None of this advanced anything.

None of it fed a framework, a deck, or a deliverable.

But it did something important. It restored proportion. It reminded me that not everything valuable needs to be useful, and that not all grounding comes from pleasure — some of it comes from perspective.

A reasonable use of my time

And then, in the autumn, there was Paris.

I took an objectively absurd trip — a return train journey to Paris, just for an evening — to attend a Sanctum class inside the Sainte-Chapelle. No meetings. No sightseeing. Just a mat, a pair of silent-disco headphones, and the decision that this, apparently, was a reasonable use of my time.

Interior view of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, showcasing ornate stained glass windows, a high vaulted ceiling, and chandeliers, creating a colorful and serene atmosphere.
A group workout session inside a historic chapel, with participants wearing glowing headphones. The ornate interior features intricate stained glass windows and soft lighting, creating a serene environment.
A view of the stunning stained glass windows and vaulted ceiling inside Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, showcasing intricate designs and vibrant colors.

The chapel had closed to the public. Evening light poured through the ancient stained glass, saturating the space in colour — blues, reds, purples shifting almost imperceptibly as the sun dropped. Lying flat on my back on the stone floor, headphones on, I was acutely aware of how strange the situation was: lycra-clad adults stretched out in a thirteenth-century royal chapel, listening to Alan Watts talk about the nature of existence.

His words rang in my ears, set to some lo-fi beats:

“Finally, you would dream where you are now.
You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.”

Without much analysis — and to my own slight embarrassment — my reaction was immediate.

Yes. Yes, I absolutely would.

This life. This place. This moment. This imperfect body. Ridiculous, privileged, but undeniably good.

Despite — or perhaps because of — the headphones, the chapel, the idea of calling this a “workout”, I recognised the life I was in. Not perfected. Not optimised. Just, well, mine.

And then, about twenty minutes later, I was somewhere else entirely — dancing like an absolute twat, arms in the air, to Florence and the Machine — feeling the same unselfconscious “fuck yes!” in a completely different register. Louder. Sweatier. Just as joyous. Just as perfect.

Different moments. Same feeling. It didn’t feel like an ending. It felt like briefly noticing — without overthinking it — that life is good.

And then just cracking on with it.

My 2025, in One Second Every Day

Weeknote 2025/52

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A person wearing a festive Christmas sweater with a snowman design and a Santa hat, smiling in front of a beautifully decorated canal lined with holiday lights and ornaments.
What ChatGPT thinks Amsterdam looks like at Christmas. It does not look like this.

A low-drama week, light on novelty, heavy on retrospection, turkey, Brussels sprouts, gravy, and the slow erosion of self-control via Lindor balls. Editing the book, revisiting earlier decisions, and discovering — once again — that momentum leaves a visible trail. Christmas did the rest.

This week at work

Final edits on the book, which turned out to be less of a victory lap and more of a bracing encounter with our past selves.

After handing in the last three chapters, I looped back to the beginning and immediately felt it: the first couple of chapters were… fine. Competent. Sensible. But slightly anaemic. Somewhere along the way Jon and I had clearly loosened up, found our rhythm, and started writing like People With Opinions. The second half has energy, confidence, and a voice. The first half sounded like it was still asking permission.

So this week was about corrective surgery. Trimming the flab. Replacing polite vagueness with the language we actually use. Making sure the opening chapters don’t just explain things correctly, but explain them like us.

It turns out momentum is visible on the page — and so is caution. This week was about choosing the former, retrospectively.

Also this week

Honestly, not much. It was Christmas, so the days blurred into a perfectly pleasant loop of over-indulgence, leftovers, and vague time-blindness.

I did manage a spin class on Christmas Day, which allowed me a brief but intense bout of moral superiority. It passed quickly, as these things should.

Consuming

📺 Watching

The Muppets Christmas Carol and Elf. As is right and proper.

Coverage

Reworked named me one of their Contributors of the Year, which was a genuinely lovely thing to land just as the year wound down.

At the start of the year I made myself a small, specific commitment: one piece for Reworked every month. No grand strategy — just a regular prompt and a place to think in public. I managed 11 out of 12, which given I also managed to write an entire book I’m unreasonably pleased with.

I’ve really enjoyed having that rhythm: a clear outlet, a monthly theme, an intelligent audience, and enough editorial constraint to stop me disappearing down my own rabbit holes. I’d like to get my Red Hot Opinions in a few more outlets next year.

This week in photos

A person wearing a knitted hat and a scarf stands outside a shop holding several rolls of festive wrapping paper.
A mirror reflection of a person in athletic wear holding a water bottle, standing in a fitness studio with a sign that reads 'ROSTUDIOS.' Various fitness equipment and other individuals are visible in the background.
A person smiling while holding a glass of orange drink, wearing a red shirt and a plaid jacket, with a blurred outdoor background.
A festive dining table set for a holiday meal with three men wearing paper crowns, surrounded by food and drinks, and a bookshelf in the background.
A festive dinner plate featuring various cooked meats, roasted potatoes, Brussels sprouts, carrots, and gravy, with glasses of red wine and champagne in the background.
A cozy living room scene featuring a television displaying a scene from 'The Muppets Christmas Carol', with a collection of vinyl records visible in the background.
A DJ stands in front of turntables, wearing a patterned shirt and glasses, with a large screen displaying a musician in the background.
A decorative sculpture of two stylized birds sitting on a metallic box against a brick wall.
A scenic view of a canal flanked by traditional Dutch buildings in Amsterdam, featuring a mix of brick and colorful facades under a cloudy sky.

Weeknote 2025/51

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A nighttime view of traditional Dutch buildings lining a canal in Amsterdam, illuminated by warm lights, reflecting off the water.
Christmas week on the Prinsengracht. Photo by me.

Today is the shortest day of the year. Winter’s nadir. The moment the light turns back in the right direction, however grudgingly.

I find winter utterly miserable at the best of times, and this year more so for having skipped the opening act by being in Japan, only to return and take the full European version in one concentrated hit. It’s faintly reassuring to know that, technically, things improve from here, even if January and February — the grimmest months — are still very much ahead.

Still, direction matters. And as it happens, this week has been full of looking back at moments that felt bleak, uncertain, or poorly timed at the time — and recognising them, with the benefit of distance, as the point at which things quietly started to turn.

From here on in, it gets brighter.

This week at work

We kicked off a new project with a new client, which is always a small thrill. We have a fairly standard approach to kick-off meetings — getting clear, early, on who actually needs to be involved, what we’re trying to achieve at a high level, realistic timelines, and the immediate next steps that stop everything dissolving into “we’ll come back to that”.

What’s exciting about this one is the ambition. The brief talks openly about building an AI-ready — even AI-first — communications infrastructure. But crucially, there’s a shared recognition that none of that will be achieved by simply bolting on new tech and hoping for the best. Instead, the foundations are the unglamorous but essential things: well-managed content, clarity on roles and responsibilities, and governance that enables rather than constrains. Get those right, and you create the conditions for a genuinely flexible, hyper-personalised channel ecosystem — one that adapts to people’s needs, preferences and ways of working, rather than forcing everyone through the same narrow funnel.

I’m already very excited about making this real. Proof, if any were needed, that I am a massive nerd.

Less exciting: the inevitable end-of-year admin scrum. Last-minute requests, frantic emails, and invoicing going right down to the wire. Very much the yin to the project work’s yang.

And while we submitted the final three chapters of the book last week, this week marked the start of the second review pass — looping back to the opening chapters to tidy, tighten and make sure the full narrative holds together as a coherent whole. Less triumphant finish line, more careful stitching. Which, in many ways, feels about right.

Also this week

It marked ten years since I left my job, with nothing to go to, a few days before Christmas. At the time it felt reckless, frightening, oddly calm — and also inevitable. The kind of decision that only makes sense once it’s already been made.

It felt like the right moment to reflect properly on what happened, how it felt then, and what’s unfolded since. So I wrote a short series of three blog posts: not a triumphalist origin story, but a more honest account of discomfort, drift, relief, uncertainty — and the slow accumulation of orientation rather than any single turning point.

Here’s the three posts

The response has been… a lot. The comments have been generous, but it’s the DMs that have really been on fire. So many women saying how closely it mirrors their own experiences: the erosion of confidence, the sense of being managed out rather than supported, the quiet calculation that leaving might be less costly than staying.

On the one hand, it’s reassuring to know I’m not alone. On the other, it’s deeply depressing that this pattern is so common — and that so many talented, experienced women end up circulating through the freelance market not out of burning entrepreneurial ambition, but because organisations make it structurally and culturally difficult for them to remain. Not a talent pipeline so much as a slow leak.

In London this week, I went to the annual Christmas Carol fundraiser for The Food Chain — a small but vital charity providing nutritional support to people living with HIV. The charity was formed in 1988 by a group of friends who simply delivered Christmas dinner to people living with HIV, who faced stigma and loneliness as well as as the illness.

The service struck a thoughtful balance: a lovely choir, extremely enthusiastic singing from me and friends, a genuinely funny speech from Jay Rayner (the charity’s patron), and a more sombre one from the CEO on why this work still matters — even now, when HIV is clinically manageable but inequality, isolation and food insecurity remain.

Somewhere between the carols, the message about feeding the hungry, and the sheer warmth of it all, it finally put me in a Christmas mood.

Consuming

📺 Watching

In what has now become an annual tradition, I hosted my Feminist Film Club. The format is simple: we re-watch a classic film and drink whenever we spot an instance of problematic behaviour. It is, as methodologies go, robust.

Previous years have seen us reassess Love Actually through a feminist lens (spectacularly problematic; blind drunk) and Pretty Woman (surprisingly progressive; mild surprise all round).

This year, we tackled Dirty Dancing. And to my surprise holds up remarkably well. Bodily autonomy. Class politics. A woman allowed to want things, choose things, and not be punished for it. A quietly feminist film hiding inside a watermelon-based cultural memory.

We still got drunk, obviously — it was the weekend before Christmas. But it was a genuinely lovely girls’ night in, equal parts cultural critique and joyful nostalgia.

Connections

Also in London, I caught up with fintech OGs Sarah Kocianski and Harriet Allner for lunch and the traditional end-of-year ritual of putting the world to rights.

A close-up selfie of two women smiling at the camera, with a blurred background of bright overhead lights.
With Sarah Kocianski this week

Coverage

My latest piece appeared in Reworked this week. This month’s editorial theme — next-generation self-service — finally gave me the excuse to write something that’s been brewing ever since I first came across Jamie Bartlett’s idea of “techno-admin”.

The piece isn’t really about self-service so much as the quiet redistribution of administrative work onto employees. Technology doesn’t remove the work; it just relocates it — updating records, fixing errors, navigating opaque systems — all framed as empowerment, and rarely acknowledged as labour.

I argue that genuinely next-generation self-service should reduce admin rather than disguise it, designing around human reality instead of system convenience.

Travel

My trip to London marked my last trip of the year. According to Flighty, that makes 59 flights in 2025 — which is bad, even by my standards. A frankly unhinged amount of time spent hurtling through the sky, drinking tiny cups of bad coffee and being a #LoungeWanker.

But here’s the strange bit: for the first time in… I don’t know, a couple of years? I have no travel booked. Nothing pencilled in. No flights lurking ominously in January.

It feels deeply unnatural. Like I’ll wake up like the mum in Home Alone with the sudden realisation I’ve forgotten something important.

Until then, I’ll enjoy being gezellig at home with my favourite people. Merry Christmas, Fijne Feestdagen to you and yours.

This week in photos

A laptop with stickers on it is placed on a table next to a bottle of Coca-Cola and an Irish passport, with a view of a pebble-strewn ground outside.
A side view of an EasyJet airplane at the airport, showcasing its distinct orange branding under a cloudy sky.
Interior of a beautifully decorated church with a Christmas tree, featuring ornate architecture, wooden pews, and chandeliers.
A woman and a man taking a selfie in a vintage-style mirror located in a restaurant or bar, surrounded by old brick walls and wooden flooring.
A high-energy indoor cycling class with participants exercising under red lighting, creating a dynamic and intense atmosphere.
A scene from the film 'Dirty Dancing' showing two characters on a bridge, with one character holding a watermelon.
A serene sunset over a canal, with warm orange and yellow hues reflecting on the water. Silhouetted trees and buildings frame the scene, while a person in a kayak paddles along the calm water.
A group of people gathered in front of a decorated entrance, smiling and posing for a photo, with a floral wreath and festive lighting in the background.

Orientation, not arrival

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A person walking along a dirt path towards a city skyline, with a signpost indicating the direction, under a clear blue sky.

This is the final piece in a three-part series reflecting on ten years of self-employment — what led me to leave my last employed role, what came after, and how I now think about work, identity, and change.

(if you haven’t read Part One and Part Two, read those first)

Ten years on, I’m not especially interested in tidy origin stories or triumphant endings.

What I have instead is orientation.

For a long time, I thought comfort meant stability: a role you could explain in one sentence, a trajectory you could sketch on a whiteboard, a sense that you were “on track”. I no longer think that. Comfort, as it turns out, isn’t the absence of change. It’s the ability to exist inside change without being overwhelmed — or taking it personally.

That distinction has taken years to learn.

Earlier in my career, I absorbed the idea that legitimacy had to be earned constantly. In the banking environment I worked in, surrounded by people who seemed far more confident, polished, and socially assured than I felt, I carried a low-level sense of being a chancer. Someone who’d slipped through a side door and needed to justify their presence.

So I worked harder. Stayed later. Took on more. Put my hand up when others didn’t. I treated exhaustion as evidence that I was doing it right. If I could just make myself indispensable enough, visible enough, useful enough, then my credentials couldn’t be questioned.

It’s not hard, in hindsight, to see where that leads.

These days, I’m better at holding uncertainty without immediately turning it into a personal failure. I don’t always get it right, but I’m quicker to notice when I’m reacting rather than responding.

That difference matters. Reaction wants certainty and closure. Response allows for partial information, for waiting, for keeping options visible. I make fewer decisions in a rush to feel safe. I’m more deliberate about what I lock in, and what I leave adjustable.

I expect the ground to shift, so I design for movement.

Being multi-hyphenated is often framed as a lack of focus. For me, it’s closer to a coping mechanism in a world that refuses to sit still. I don’t treat optionality as indecision; I treat it as resilience. I commit, but only lightly. I choose depth over novelty, without betting everything on a single version of relevance.

What I notice now, more than anything, is range — the ability to move between depth and breadth without losing my footing.

I have work that still interests me — not because it’s new, but because it’s deep. I work with people I respect, on problems that are hard in ways that matter. I have space for thinking, for writing, for changing my mind in public and in private.

I have a working life that accommodates curiosity and contradiction. One that leaves room for travel, for friendships, for health, for creative detours that don’t need to justify themselves immediately — or maybe ever. None of this arrived quickly or neatly. Very little of it could have been predicted at the outset.

But it’s a life that fits — not perfectly, but well enough.

Titles still don’t quite capture what I do. They probably never will. I’ve stopped trying to compress a complex working life into a single, tidy label. Some ambiguity is simply the price of doing work that spans systems, disciplines, and contexts. And that’s ok.

What’s changed is that I’m no longer looking for a final definition.

Writing has helped with that. It’s given me a place to be authoritative on my own terms — not by pointing at outputs, but by articulating patterns, judgement, and expertise. Over time, I’ve come to trust that credibility doesn’t only come from what you reveal. It also comes from sharing how you think.

And I’m comfortable saying this plainly: I have a bloody great life.

Not because everything worked out. Not because there was a master plan. But because enough worked out. Because the work is meaningful, the people are interesting, and the days contain more choice than they once did, and I wake up every day (well, most days) feeling like I’m making a positive difference to people’s working lives.

There wasn’t a moment of arrival. There still isn’t.

What there is, is a steadier way of standing while things move. A clearer sense of what I’m willing to tolerate, and what I’m not. The confidence that I can adjust my stance as the ground shifts — because it always will.

I’m not finished. I’m not “there”.

But I’m facing in the right direction.

And, for now, that’s enough.

The Long Middle

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A surreal image of a woman standing with her back to the viewer on large stone slabs that are broken apart and floating above a reflective surface, with a wide blue sky and clouds stretching out ahead of her.

This is part two of a three-part series reflecting on ten years of self-employment — what led me to leave my last employed role, what came after, and how I now think about work, identity, and change.

(if you haven’t read Part One yet, read that first)

Leaving got me out of a toxic situation. It solved the urgent problem — but it didn’t hand me a new map.

What followed wasn’t clarity or momentum, but a long stretch of recalibration.

There wasn’t a clear trajectory. There still isn’t. What changed was my tolerance for that.

In the early years after I left, I spent a fair amount of time trying on different versions of myself. Some of this was curiosity. Some of it was necessity. And some of it was the lingering belief that “progress” ought to look like movement towards something newer, shinier, or more obviously impressive.

I flirted with adjacent worlds — product, innovation, startups — not because I was particularly drawn to them, but because they seemed to represent where the action was. In contrast, going back to intranets and the digital workplace initially felt like a step backwards. I’d internalised the office pyramid: bigger portfolios, bigger teams, broader remits. Returning to a domain I’d started in felt uncomfortably like reversing down the ladder.

At the time, I was still measuring myself by scope rather than substance. Portfolio size rather than domain authority.

That shifted once I stopped borrowing other people’s career templates.

Joining forces with my now-business partner was a turning point. Not because it suddenly clarified everything, but because working in partnership changed the texture of my working life. Ideas became conversational rather than solitary. Drafts were sharpened through debate. Momentum came not from self-discipline alone, but from shared accountability. If I promised something by the end of the day, it happened — not because of pressure, but because I’d said it out loud to someone whose judgement I trusted.

More importantly, partnership reflected my strengths back to me.

Returning fully to intranet and digital workplace work stopped feeling like retreat, and started to feel like reclaiming something I was genuinely expert in. What had once felt “unsexy” now felt deep, consequential, and hard-earned. I stopped apologising for caring about work that sits at the intersection of people, systems, governance, and power — because that’s where things actually succeed or fail in complex organisations.

One of the more disorienting parts of this period was realising that a skill I’d come to doubt was, in fact, central to my value.

In my last job, the authority to do this work — rolling the pitch, preparing the ground, building buy-in — was quietly withdrawn, and with it went my confidence. Politics was treated as something faintly embarrassing — a distraction from “real” work — rather than the environment in which real work actually happens.

After the break knocked my confidence, I lost sight of the fact that understanding how organisations function is a skill in its own right. Knowing what a project sponsor is carrying. Recognising where resistance is coming from. Being close enough to the reality of organisational life to empathise — but far enough away to offer perspective and judgement.

The first time an old colleague hired me to support them at another organisation specifically for that capability, it was a genuine eureka moment. Not because I’d suddenly acquired a new skill, but because I could finally see clearly again what I’d been doing all along.

Consultants are often accused — sometimes fairly — of proposing ideas that sound elegant in theory but collapse in the cold light of day. What I’d been led to question wasn’t a weakness. It was the craft: working with context rather than around it, acknowledging politics instead of pretending they don’t exist, and offering help that is grounded, realistic, and usable.

That balance — empathy without over-identification, distance without detachment — turned out to be the thing that makes my work stick.

That realisation didn’t instantly restore confidence. Confidence lagged behind evidence. I had to stop apologising for how I work — and that happened slowly, unevenly, over years rather than months.

Identity, meanwhile, remained unresolved. Losing a job title I’d spent a decade chasing was harder than I expected. “Head of digital comms at a bank” collapsed overnight into “freelancer”, with all the ambiguity that entails. Titles are crude, but they’re socially useful shorthand, and I missed having one that did the explanatory work for me.

Go too narrow, and you limit the range of work you’re considered for. Go too broad, and you dissolve into a sea of digital hand-waving. I still feel that tension. But I’ve stopped treating it as a problem that needs solving.

This wasn’t simplification so much as a recognition of complexity.

Another quiet shift during this period was my relationship to impact and evidence. Working for large, complex organisations means you can rarely talk openly about what you’re doing. Commercial confidentiality applied in my last role, and it still does. For a while, I struggled with that invisibility — the inability to point to outputs, launches, or neat before-and-after stories.

What helped was returning to writing. Twitter (RIP), LinkedIn, and blogging gave me a way to be authoritative without breaching confidence. I didn’t need to show the workings to demonstrate the thinking. Over time, I became more comfortable with the idea that much of my value lies not in what I produce directly, but in the choices I help organisations make — including the mistakes they avoid.

Conditions during this period were far from perfect. I still wish I’d left my last job on better terms, with a clearer plan and some savings behind me. For a long time, I was angry — not just about how it ended, but about the injustice of it all. About being made to feel like a failure by an organisation that had benefited from my willingness to stretch, absorb, and endure.

That anger was oddly clarifying.

It stripped away some of the residual self-doubt and forced a reappraisal of what I’d normalised. I could see more clearly how readily I’d equated over-extension with professionalism, and how easily I’d absorbed responsibility for failures that weren’t mine to carry.

The anger didn’t vanish quickly. It lingered. It resurfaced, often out of nowhere. For a while, it was part of how I made sense of what had happened.

But over time, it loosened its grip.

It stopped being the engine of the story and became part of the context instead — something I could acknowledge without letting it define how I saw myself or what came next.

This phase of my career wasn’t about reinvention. It was about unlearning — letting go of borrowed hierarchies, inherited measures of success, and my habit of treating uncertainty as a personal failing.

The long middle taught me to live without a script. To value depth over novelty. To accept that some careers don’t resolve into clean arcs, and that progress is sometimes a matter of stance rather than speed.

The ground kept shifting. I learned to stand differently.

Now read Part 3, Orientation, not arrival.

The Break

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A surreal painting showing a woman in a dark business suit, seen from behind, stepping through an open door that leads into a blue sky filled with clouds. Behind her is a dim office interior with a desk and lamp fading into shadow.

This is part one of a three-part series reflecting on ten years of self-employment — what led me to leave my last employed role, what came after, and how I now think about work, identity, and change.

I didn’t leave my last employed role because I was brave, burned out on corporate life, or driven by some entrepreneurial calling.

I left because staying had become untenable.

By the time I quit, I was exhausted, unwell, and out of road. Not in a dramatic way — but in the slow, grinding way that comes from trying to make an impossible situation workable for too long.

For over a year, I’d been doing the work of two, arguably three people. I spent a year living in a hotel on the other side of the world to deliver a project against an unrealistic deadline, with neither enough resources nor senior support. Alongside that, I was managing two teams across eight time zones — a logistical and emotional load that never let up.

I did all of this willingly. Partly out of professional pride. Partly out of ambition. And partly because I believed (and was quietly encouraged to believe) that if I proved myself hard enough, everything would eventually resolve.

I was chasing a promotion I thought I needed, and a bonus that had been dangled just far enough ahead to keep me running. Early in that financial year, I discovered that someone in my team, with significantly less responsibility and a lighter workload, was being paid more than I was. When I raised it, I was told it couldn’t be fixed — but that it would be rectified at bonus time.

In retrospect, I was a mug.

Then came the reorganisation.

It was badly handled, driven more by internal politics than how teams actually function. My team was disbanded — a fact I didn’t learn in a meeting, or even on a phone call, but via a text message from a junior team member, because my manager had forgotten to invite me to the meeting.

Shortly afterwards, I was moved under a new manager who neither understood nor valued digital, and who had little appetite for making a success of a platform I’d spent the previous year delivering. Because it wasn’t their idea, it was quietly undermined — along with the person responsible for it.

By then, my body had already started to register what I was still trying to rationalise. I barely slept. I was constantly tense. I was ill with stress in a way I’d never experienced before. I took a few days off sick — the only sick leave I took in the whole time I worked there — and received an email from HR informing me that if I remained off, my pay would be withdrawn.

It wasn’t framed as concern. It was framed as process.

That was the moment the spell broke.

Up until then, I’d still been operating under the illusion that if I just worked harder, explained myself better, or endured a bit longer, the situation would right itself. That email made it clear this wasn’t a misunderstanding or a temporary rough patch. The system had made its position known.

I didn’t quit because I was brave. I quit because I had reached the limit of what I could reasonably absorb.

At the time, it didn’t feel like a career decision so much as a physical and emotional necessity. I didn’t leave on good terms. I didn’t have a plan or a financial cushion. I left carrying a messy mix of anger, relief, fear, and a deep sense that I’d somehow failed.

Looking back, I wish I’d been kinder to myself.

I wish I’d trusted my own signals sooner, rather than forcing my body to escalate the message. I wish I’d recognised that enduring harm isn’t professionalism, and that loyalty to a system that isn’t reciprocated is rarely rewarded.

Ten years on, I don’t romanticise that moment — but I respect it. Walking away wasn’t a career move. It was an act of self-preservation.

And everything that followed began there.

Part two, The Long Middle, is here.

Weeknote 2025/50

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A collection of vinyl records displayed on a shelf, featuring album covers from various artists including Sepultura and Suicide Silence.
Amsterdam Vinyl Club this week Photo by me.

This week had a strong clearing space energy to it.

Not in the sense of bold new beginnings or fresh starts, but in the quieter, less Instagrammable way: finishing things, tidying edges, and letting go of what no longer needs to be carried forward. Less about acceleration, more about reduction.

French writer and fellow airport departure lounge regular Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote that perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. That line kept resurfacing for me this week, not as an abstract ideal, but as a practical reality. Editing rather than drafting. Removing rather than accumulating. Accepting that some things have done their job.

Some of that showed up as work. Some of it looked suspiciously like procrastination. Some of it was simply recovery after intensity. All of it, in one way or another, was about making space.  Mentally, professionally, and occasionally quite literally.

This week at work

We submitted the final three chapters of Digital Communications at Work. After months of living with these ideas — in offices, airports, trains, hotel rooms, borrowed desks, co-working spaces, OneNote thought-dumps, half-finished Notes apps, a thousand Teams chats, Slack messages, voice notes, screenshots of whiteboards, comments in Word, comments on comments, and the occasional “I’ll remember this later” (I did not) — the moment of pressing send on the email to the publisher was an odd mix of momentous and underwhelming.

The chapters focus on the unglamorous but decisive end of the digital workplace lifecycle:

  • Launching channels — not as a moment, but as a process. How organisations communicate value, build habits, and avoid the familiar post-launch fade where “new” quietly becomes “ignored”.
  • Measurement and management — moving beyond vanity metrics and zombie stats towards evidence that actually helps teams make better decisions, course-correct, and earn trust over time.
  • What’s next — less about shiny tools, more about the slow forces reshaping work: demographic change, automation, trust erosion, and what all of that means for internal communication as a profession.

The book is no longer hypothetical. It exists now as something that has to survive editing, disagreement, and the uncomfortable process of being read by people who weren’t in my head when I wrote it.

Also this week

With a book deadline looming, I indulged in a familiar form of productive procrastination and cleared out my wardrobe.

It’s a decade since I left my last corporate job. The pandemic killed off the corporate suit for me and, it appears, consulting more generally. And yet some things had been hanging in there for years — not because I wore them, but because of what they might one day be for.

Maybe I’d go back into corporate. Maybe future-me would finally be that person.

On the floor lay the ghosts of a life past… and a few imagined futures that never quite happened.

There was also something telling about how easy it was to part with things that are now too big — a decisiveness I notably did not show in the opposite direction.

Undeniably work avoidance, yes.  But also an oddly appropriate companion to a week spent finishing a book about legacy, change, and what we choose to carry forward.

A close-up image of a colorful assortment of fabrics and clothing items, featuring various patterns and textures, folded and layered together.
A colorful assortment of clothes hanging on a closet rack, showcasing various patterns and textures.

Consuming

📺 Watching

After a week of intense writing, thinking, and deadline-brain, I deliberately switched my higher functions off and let television do its thing.

I watched the entire second series of Welcome to Wrexham and became genuinely, embarrassingly invested in the fortunes of a football team in a town I’ve never visited and, realistically, probably never will. It’s an object lesson in narrative engineering: take stakes, characters, time, and a sense of shared jeopardy, and you can make anyone care about anything. Football is almost incidental.

And like any good Swiftie, I watched the first two episodes of the The End of an Era docuseries released on Disney+ on Friday. I was caught off guard by how emotional it made me, reliving a tour that already feels oddly historic. There’s something about watching collective experience back through a screen — tens of thousands of people moving in sync, night after night — that hits harder in retrospect than it does in the moment.

I also started knitting again — largely while watching all of the above. I’m still objectively terrible at it, but it turns out keeping my hands occupied is an effective way to stop myself doom-scrolling through the credits. Parallel processing, but make it wool.

🎧 Listening

In a similar spirit, my listening was entirely functional rather than aspirational. A heady mix of cheerful pop and various flavours of ADHD Focus Music on Spotify — deployed less for deep work than for emotional regulation. Not taste so much as task support.

Connections

Earlier in the week, I met up with my old mate Peter Morley, now Head of Communications at AI infrastructure darling Nebius. He filled me in on life inside a company in genuine hypergrowth; I filled him in on the correct way to eat bitterballen.

Peter also introduced me to a former Nebius colleague, Anna Fedosova, who’s now building an HR startup tackling an achingly familiar problem: keeping policies and compliance current across multiple geographies and fast-changing legislation.

I took a selfie afterwards but, in my haste, failed to check whether my eyes were actually open in it. In retrospect, a fairly accurate metaphor for the week ahead.

Three friends smiling for a selfie in a warmly lit urban setting with holiday decorations.
Peter, Anna and me (with my closed eyes fixed by Google Gemini with a surprising degree of competence)

Coverage

I appeared in two industry publications this week, both circling a familiar theme: cutting through noise.

In InComms, I shared practical advice on making LinkedIn work for you without becoming beholden to the algorithm — focusing on voice, format, and visibility that serves real professional goals rather than platform theatrics.

And in HR Grapevine, I contributed to a piece looking beyond the usual AI-heavy trend forecasts for 2026, arguing instead for closer collaboration between HR and internal communications, and for designing change that people can actually understand and act on.

Travel

I was home all week, which felt not just pleasant but extremely necessary. No trains, no airports, no tactical packing.

This coming week I’m heading to London for a couple of meetings — my final trip of the year. I’ve got a little slack in the diary, so shout if you’re around and fancy a cuppa.

This week in photos

Sharon O'Dea standing in front of a mirror, wearing a blue button-up shirt over a black top and black wide-leg pants, holding a phone for a selfie in a dimly lit hallway.
A pair of black boxing gloves positioned next to a black water bottle on a windowsill with a cityscape view in the background.
A picturesque street scene at night, illuminated by string lights and decorated storefronts. A cyclist is riding down the cobbled street, with people dining outside and an inviting atmosphere created by warm lighting.
Close-up of manicured hands with festive nail designs featuring deep red, gold glitter, and candy cane stripes.
A group of people browsing vinyl records in a shop, with a wall of album covers in vibrant colors behind them.
A DJ spinning records at a bar, surrounded by bottles and glasses on the shelves behind.
A scenic view of Amsterdam's historic buildings at sunrise, reflecting in the calm waters of a canal, with a few bicycles parked along the street.
A person standing in a reflective surface with a yellow and black design, possibly in a contemporary interior space.
Indoor cycling class led by an instructor with a microphone, surrounded by participants engaged in the workout. The setting features dramatic red lighting and candle-like decorations creating an energetic atmosphere.

Weeknote 2025/49

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A modern building with large glass windows and a surrounding plaza, featuring a prominent evergreen tree. People are walking around the area under a partly cloudy sky.
London trying its best to look festive this week. Photo by me.

I keep coming back to the same realisation this week: the future of comms isn’t just more digital. It’s more structurally complex.

Not more tools in a tidy stack. Not smarter systems in a neat ecosystem. But messier audiences, overlapping loyalties, porous identities, and workplaces that no longer contain people in the way they once pretended to. Add AI, video overload and algorithmic confidence into the mix and you don’t get clarity. You get chaos but with single sign-on.

Consider the past few days a field experiment no one asked for but everyone participated in.

This week at work

I’m currently locked in a low-grade standoff with the final chapter of the book — the one about the future of digital internal comms — which is refusing to behave like a normal chapter and instead insisting on being part travelogue, part systems theory, part group therapy session for a profession in the middle of a long, quiet identity crisis. It keeps pretending to be a chapter while actually being an accumulation of travel, interviews, unease and an unreasonable number of open browser tabs. It is, frankly, a menace.

Midweek I was back in London for the Communicate Conference, hosted by vendor Interact. It was at an Interact event, over 15 years ago, that I met my now business partner, Jonathan. So it felt oddly cyclical to be there discussing whether intranets even exist in the future.

A group of five professionals posing for a photo at an event, smiling and wearing lanyards, with a background featuring a stylish interior.
Intranerds assemble! L-R: Lisa Riemers, Suzie Robinson, me (Sharon O’Dea) looking like I’ve been Photoshopped in at the wrong scale, Chris Tubb, Steve Bynghall. Photo by Lisa Riemers.

What I hadn’t fully anticipated was how many familiar faces I’d run into who’ve been in the intranet and comms world for as long as — and in some cases longer than — I have. Which led to a steady stream of conversations that start light and get surprisingly philosophical. The shared laugh was always the same one: everything old is new again. The same overblown vendor claims we heard fifteen years ago, now wearing an ill-fitting suit called AI.

Different nouns. Same promises waiting to be broken.

But running underneath the cynicism was something much more serious. The conversations quickly turned to how the organisations we’re working with now are structurally more complex than anything we dealt with a decade ago — layered supply chains, outsourcing, platforms, regulators, global delivery, blended workforces, algorithmic management. And at the same time, the pace of change has accelerated to the point where even seasoned teams feel permanently slightly behind their own reality.

It’s a strange duality: the tech rhetoric looping, while the organisational conditions it’s being dropped into are genuinely unprecedented. Which may explain why so many “this will finally fix it” moments keep… not fixing it.

A few highlights from the conference:

Allan Tanner opened with a session on AI and the digital workplace. A quick poll showed about two-thirds of the room using generative AI weekly, but early findings from the Gallagher State of the Sector report suggest one in three are using it without any oversight, and only 40% feel confident in their skills.

What surprised me wasn’t the numbers so much as the familiarity of them. You could lift this whole section almost intact from a conference two years ago and nobody would blink. In a field that insists it’s moving at hyperspeed, that’s… odd. Is the survey already ageing in dog years? Or are comms teams simply adopting more slowly than the hype suggests?

The idea of an AI agent-first future replacing intranets floated through the room — but the awkward ownership question still hung there, unresolved. Comms? IT? HR? When everyone owns it, no one really does.

Also: we have absolutely been here before with chatbots.

The exact example used was booking leave. The endlessly cited use case where, in theory, a bot should smoothly handle what currently requires checking a team calendar, emailing your boss, verifying your entitlement, and then logging it all in some separate HR system. That was the canonical chatbot demo when I was doing a whole series of talks on this… in 2017. That’s getting on for a decade ago. If this really is an easily solved problem, we’d be living in it by now. The fact that we aren’t tells you something important.

When the tech keeps changing but the outcome doesn’t, you’re not looking at a technology failure — you’re looking at a human systems failure.

Sam Bleazard followed with employer brand as the connective tissue between HR and marketing, using Fortnum & Mason as a case study in visual storytelling and employee voice.

Then came Tom Vollmer from Cofenster with the stat that properly landed: around 23 hours of internal video uploaded every week, versus about 10 minutes actually watched. The issue isn’t underinvestment — it’s saturation. We are not video-poor. We are video-exhausted.

I fear I have crossed a generational Rubicon because I now actively resent being asked to watch a video for an entire minute. A minute of looking. Nope. I want text I can skim while emotionally elsewhere. I want bullet points, headings, and plausible deniability. Video is no longer a medium; it’s an attention hostage situation.

AI can now generate highlights, scripts and even videos from PDFs, which is undeniably impressive. But it also raises a more troubling possibility: that we’re no longer just producing noise at scale — we’re now automating it at industrial volume.

And when people can’t even keep up with the volume of information being thrown at them, it’s hardly surprising they stop engaging with it. Cognitive overload is the silent assassin of communication.

Helen Bissett shared disengagement data from Gallup that was hard to ignore: 90% of UK employees feel disengaged at work, while over 80% practise mindfulness outside of work. People are repairing themselves in their own time because work no longer does.

But this is also where I felt a quiet friction forming with some of our default assumptions. Engagement is treated as the unquestioned North Star — yet I’ve just spent weeks in Japan, a country consistently cited as having low employee engagement, alongside high levels of personal life satisfaction.

It left me, once again, with a nagging sense that we may not always be chasing the right thing.

The closing case study from AMS took an 11-page PDF innovation brief and turned it into an intranet takeover with storytelling, countdowns and discussion. Strong results. But what stuck with me was structural: AMS staff often hold dual loyalty, to the company that employs them and the client organisation they sit inside. It’s a pattern on the rise: the audience for “internal” comms is often not internal at all.

Across the day, the pattern repeated: AI, video, employer brand, purpose — all accelerating. But the deeper shift isn’t technological. It’s structural. Our audiences are fragmenting, our channels are multiplying, and the idea of a single, coherent “employee experience” is becoming more theoretical than real.

Oh, and we unexpectedly landed a juicy new client. Entirely unplanned. Entirely welcome <stares at impending HMRC bill>. All systems go.

Also this week

I went to the WB-40 Christmas dinner in London. WB-40 is a podcast about how tech reshapes work, with an associated Signal group that might genuinely be the friendliest place on the internet. It was lovely to see people properly, in three dimensions, after years of being avatars in each other’s phones.

And it left me with a question I can’t quite shake: what if low engagement at work isn’t always a failure? What if, in some cases, it’s a boundary?

It certainly maps, subjectively at least, to my own experience of the last decade. I haven’t had a “proper job” in years, and I don’t look to work for belonging, identity or community in the way I once did. Those needs are met elsewhere now — through friendships, networks, odd little internet corners, shared projects.

So if people can have rich lives, strong identities and real community without work being the emotional centre of gravity, is “more engagement at work” always the right thing to chase? Or are we sometimes trying to re-inflate a social and psychological role that work can no longer credibly carry?

That Japan contrast keeps needling at me. Maybe the problem isn’t that people are disengaged from life. Maybe they’re disengaging from work — deliberately.

Some of the most important people in my life mostly exist as glowing rectangles in my pocket. Which feels odd to admit, and yet it’s completely true.

Which made the next thing I went to this week land even harder: a talk on psychological safety with Ania Hadjdrowska — and instead of feeling theoretical, it felt uncomfortably operational.

Because in a world of hybrid teams, async work, platform hopscotch and digital performativity, psychological safety now shows up (or doesn’t) first in online behaviour:

  • Who speaks in the channel
  • Who stays silent
  • Who only reacts with emojis
  • Who disappears entirely

In remote and hybrid work, participation is visibility. Silence is no longer just silence. It’s interpreted as disengagement, resistance, risk, apathy. Often unfairly. Often reductively.

The classic barriers still apply:

  • Fear of judgement
  • Fear of exclusion
  • Fear of conflict

But digital work amplifies all three. You don’t get tone-of-voice buffers. You don’t get corridor repairs. You don’t get the quiet reassurance of eye contact after a risky comment lands badly. Everything is logged, screenshot, searchable. Mistakes feel permanent. So people calculate. And then they don’t speak.

Before the rational brain catches up, the amygdala scans for threat — hierarchy, tone, uncertainty. If it detects danger, it triggers fight, flight, freeze or fawn. No one innovates when they’re being emotionally chased by a tiger. And no one meaningfully collaborates when every contribution feels reputationally risky.

Psychological safety, as defined by Amy Edmondson, is the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. Not agreement, but constructive disagreement.

That matters even more when:

  • Teams are distributed
  • Trust is assumed rather than built
  • People meet as avatars before they meet as humans
  • Employment relationships are shorter, looser, more conditional

We are asking people to be brave in systems that increasingly give them no margin for error.

The line I can’t shake is still this: silence is expensive. In digital workplaces especially, it quietly drains collaboration, learning, innovation and belonging — while looking, misleadingly, like “everything’s fine.”

And that “booking leave” example kept needling at me again. Such a small task, yet it still demands procedural obedience, reputation management, tool-hopping and emotional calibration. Multiply that across a working life and you start to see why people are tired — and why AI keeps stalling on exactly the same rocks.

Layer on the social media disinhibition effect (performance, oversharing, dunking, provocation) and it doesn’t always switch off at work. When trust thins, people retreat into safer containers: private chats, external networks, side communities. Belonging migrates. Collaboration fragments. Comms gets harder.

Consuming

(Keeping this bit short this week cos I’ve wittered on above)

Like the rest of the planet, my listening week was dominated by the release of Spotify Wrapped — the global ritual in which an algorithm holds up a mirror and everyone pretends to be surprised by what’s staring back.

Once again, mine was a window into my not-so-secret pop shame. I had solemnly vowed that Taylor Swift would not dominate my Top 10 this year. And then she went and released a banger. And Lily Allen casually dropped the confessional of the decade. What’s a woman supposed to do?

Once again, I will not be sharing my list with the wider world.

Spotify also informed me that my “listening age” is 46. I am 45 and a half, thank you very much. I refuse to be aged up by an algorithm.

Connections

Staying with the theme of where community actually lives these days, I also met up with Jenny Watts — a mainstay of another of my favourite online communities, the old FitFam crowd.

Two women smiling and posing together in a casual setting, wearing colorful clothing. In the background, a sushi restaurant sign is visible.
Jenny Watts and me

FitFam started life years ago on Twitter: a loose group of people talking about health and fitness, cheering each other on with our running times, gym attempts and “I went for a walk instead of lying face down on the sofa” victories. It was low-key, kind, and weirdly effective.

Given the descent of Twitter into a hate-filled sewer, the group’s now migrated to WhatsApp. Same people, different platform. The conversations are smaller, more honest, less performative. It’s a nice reminder that while platforms come and go, the communities that matter tend to quietly pack their bags and move together.

Another small data point in the same direction: belonging is increasingly something people build around themselves, not something work hands out with a lanyard.

Coverage

I ended up in the Financial Times this week. Which, in comms-world terms, is basically being knighted.

They shared a slice of my time in Nagasaki. Including my slightly surreal exploration of the future of work alongside a remote-controlled robot tour guide, piloted by a disabled operator elsewhere in Japan. A sentence I still can’t quite believe I get to write.

Screenshot of an article from the Financial Times featuring Sharon O'Dea discussing her experiences in Nagasaki, Japan, and insights on the future of work.
Screenshot

And yes, I am rightly smug about this. A positive mention in the FT is the biggest win you can get in this industry. It’s the comms equivalent of a Michelin star, an Olympic medal, and being retweeted by someone with an opinion column — all at once.

I will now be quietly unbearable about this for a while.

Travel

I’m going absolutely nowhere this week. An entire week without visiting an airport or getting up at the crack of dawn to catch a train. Bliss.

Next week, though, I’m back in London for the final time this year. I’m organising some drinks —  if you’re around and would like to come*, give me a bell.

*and I actually know you

This week in photos

A person standing in a fitness studio, wearing athletic clothing and taking a selfie in the mirror.
The exterior of St. Pancras Railway Station in London, showcasing its ornate brick architecture and tall spires under a clear blue sky.
A lit Christmas tree stands beside a statue at night, with buildings and bicycles in the background.
A stylish platter of fresh oysters served with lime and garnishes, accompanied by a side of butter and slices of bread on a table.
A large group of people gathered around a long wooden table at a restaurant, smiling and enjoying a festive dinner together, with glasses and plates scattered on the table.

Weeknote 2025/48

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A illuminated sign on a building in Amsterdam that reads 'THE LIGHT YOU SEE IS PAST.' with bicycles parked nearby.
Amsterdam Light Festival.

After six weeks in Japan, this week was all about timing — or more accurately, being completely out of sync with it. My body is convinced 4am is an excellent time to start the day. My inbox seems startled that I’m replying during daylight hours. And all the ideas I’d parked while sweating my way around Nagasaki chose this week to sit up in bed like startled toddlers.

Between jetlag, a chapter that staged a full rebellion, and Andreas Wagner’s talk on dormant innovations (apparently even grass needed 100 million years to get going), I’ve been reminded how much of this job is just… timing. When a client’s ready. When a chapter clicks. When the organisation finally notices the thing you’ve been politely suggesting since 2019.

Timing might not be everything, but this week it certainly felt like the main character.

This week at work

A lovely vote of confidence: We won a new piece of work with an existing client — always gratifying, always reassuring, and always a reminder that just doing good work is always the best marketing.

In my first week in Japan I ended up doing a pitch. It was 9pm where I was, but still 32 degrees. I had to duck out of a group dinner to join the call. I was sitting on the floor with a fan blowing behind me to partially avoid collapsing into a puddle of sweat. Somehow, we won the gig and we start work next week. So this week we’ve been getting ready to do just that.

The chapter that fought back: Got one of the earlier chapters back from our editor at Kogan Page. On reread, it just… didn’t sing. Too many lists, not enough soul, and absolutely none of the “why should anyone care?” that Jon and I bang on about. It was also far too long.
So I did what any reasonable author would do: took a deep breath and decided to brutally rewrite the whole thing.

What I thought would be a quick tidy-up became two solid days of editing, trimming, rearranging, despairing, and eventually emerging triumphant. By Thursday it felt like a completely different chapter — tighter, clearer, and something I’m actually happy to put my name on. But it was a slog.

With that behind me, I finally pulled together the outline for the twelfth and final chapter of the book. Can’t quite believe we’re almost there — after months of interviews, diagrams, Japan detours, and existential questions about the future of workplace comms, the end is in sight. So I spent a chunk of the week writing up insights from Japan — drones, shrinking workforces, robot tour guides — and threading the best bits into the horizon-scanning sections.

Also this week

Went to this month’s Science and Cocktails talk by evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner, on the mystery of dormant innovations — ideas or traits that emerge long before they have any impact, sitting quietly until the environment shifts and suddenly they’re transformative.

Think grasses: they appeared, did nothing much for 100 million years, and then boom, global dominance — and the basis of most human food systems. Or bacterial genes capable of antibiotic resistance long before antibiotics existed. Or early cultural ideas and technologies that only take off when society is finally ready for them.

The tl;dr is: nature – and culture – generate far more potential than they currently need, and environments act as the “prince” that wakes these sleeping beauties when the moment is right.

It made me think about internal comms and digital workplace work: how often the “innovation” isn’t the new tool, but the dormant capability already in the organisation — the half-built governance model, the underused feature, the employee insight nobody acted on — just waiting for the right conditions, leadership, or crisis to wake it.

And, frankly, how much of my job is quietly planting seeds for things that won’t catch until the organisation shifts in the right way. A slightly humbling, slightly comforting reminder that timing is half the craft.

Aside from that, I had a quiet week back in Amsterdam. Woke up at 4am several times, which is perfect if you’re a monk; less so if you’re merely someone who made poor timezone choices.

Cultural re-entry has hit me at odd times, mostly when tired. I nearly bowed at multiple Dutch people, but have avoided saying arigato gozaimasu at anyone (so far).

I’m playing catch-up on socials, sorting through thousands of photos and ten times as many memories. Realised I now possess 400 photos of fruit-shaped bus stops. No plan for them. Yet.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

Two very different takes on the future of internal comms collided in my feed on Tuesday, and the contrast was so stark it felt almost choreographed.

On one hand: Unily’s “Future of the Workplace”

On the other: Mike Klein’s “Big Shift”

Unily’s view is the one most people in big, complicated organisations will recognise: grounded, sensible, measured.

The world of incremental improvements: a bit less friction, a bit more governance, modest, polite steps toward AI, progress paced by budget cycles and risk committees. And honestly, that’s where most digital workplaces genuinely are. The average intranet of 2026 won’t look wildly different from its 2016 ancestor — and that’s fine. Evolution has value.

Klein, meanwhile, is squinting at an entirely different horizon. His lens: AI compressing decision cycles, dissolving management layers, accelerating knowledge loss, reshaping coordination itself. Less “optimise the comms plan”, more “your operating model may not survive contact with the next five years”.

The key thing, of course, is that both are true — just on different timescales.

But the bit we can’t wish away: AI isn’t a shiny add-on. Used badly, it could be a workplace bloodbath.  Many people are understandably nervous about automating themselves out of relevance. And demographic change is already gnawing at the edges.

Japan hammered that home. Fewer workers, more automation, and a very immediate need to rethink how work gets done at all.

Small DEEx improvements still matter. They make the day-to-day tolerable. But they’re not the thing that will get us through the real shifts barrelling towards us.

If anything, the moment calls for more boldness — in how we use AI, how we explain it, and how we help people navigate what’s coming.

📺 Watching

Finger on the cultural pulse as always, I finally started Celebrity Traitors. I intended to watch one episode as a palate cleanser after a day of editing… and then resurfaced four episodes later, blinking at the clock like someone who has accidentally time-travelled.

It really is as good as everyone says: the camp, the scheming, the sheer operatic commitment to drama over absolutely nothing. It’s the kind of show that gives you whiplash from switching between “oh come on” and “I would absolutely betray every one of these people for £120k”.

No spoilers, obviously — but I am now fully invested, irrationally suspicious of everyone, and contemplating whether a roundtable on “psychological safety and betrayal in hybrid teams” might be a useful conference talk.

📚 Reading

My copy of Lisa Riemers and Matisse Hemel-Nelis’s Accessible Communications was waiting for me when I got home — a comforting sight after weeks with only my Kindle for reading company. I’d already had the pleasure of reading an advance copy earlier this year, but there’s something about holding a hard copy (a proper dead-tree edition) that makes the material land differently. Maybe it’s the weight; maybe it’s the guilt of knowing this will outlive all of us.

Re-reading it, I’m reminded what a genuinely important book this is for our industry. Too much accessibility advice for comms people is either painfully high-level (“write clearly!”) or so technical it requires a support animal. Lisa and Matisse manage to bridge that gap beautifully. They give you the principles and the practicalities, without ever making you feel lectured or incompetent.

What I love most is that they treat accessibility not as a compliance box to tick, but as core craft — part of what it means to be good at communication, full stop. They weave in examples, checklists, real-world scenarios, and the kinds of small, humane decisions comms people make a hundred times a day but rarely interrogate.

For anyone working in internal comms, content design, digital workplace, HR, UX, or frankly anywhere words meet humans: it’s one of those books you’ll keep within arm’s reach and quietly force on colleagues. Highly recommend.

🎧 Listening

Lily Allen’s new album has been on repeat in my ears since it dropped last month. I keep intending to listen to something else — a podcast, a serious audiobook, literally anything that would make me seem more intellectual — and then five seconds later I’m back in Lily-land, tapping away like a woman possessed. 10/10, no notes.

Travel

 I’m heading to London this week for the Communicate conference. Looking forward to seeing some of my favourite intranerds in 3D. If you’re coming, say hello — or buy me a coffee if you’d like to hear about robot tour guides.

This week in photos

A glowing neon radiator sculpture illuminated against a dark urban backdrop, showcasing the architectural features of nearby buildings.
A speaker presenting on stage at an event, discussing the topic of dormant innovations. A presentation slide is visible in the background with the title 'Sleeping Beauties'. The audience is seated in front of the stage, engaging with the talk.
A woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a polka-dotted shirt is sitting at a desk, gesturing with her hands in a questioning manner, while looking at the camera. A computer screen displaying text is visible in the background.
A pair of black boxing gloves resting on a dark surface, with a blurred view of Amsterdam's cityscape in the background.
A hand holding a bright orange coffee cup with white text that says 'all yellow coffee cup', with a view of Dutch architecture and bicycles in the background.