This week involved a disconcerting amount of physical reality.

People materialised in actual rooms. Ideas escaped their Google Docs and did things to other humans in real time. Work happened in ways that required shoes—sometimes even presentable ones. Collaboration, usually a distributed affair mediated by timestamps and emoji reactions, briefly acquired mass and occupied three-dimensional space. It was all very analogue, in that faintly unnerving way analogue things are when you’ve forgotten they exist.

I hadn’t quite realised how thoroughly my working life now exists as a theoretical proposition rather than a physical practice until this week gently but firmly dragged me back into corporeal form.

This week at work

We delivered an ‘infobesity’ workshop with Swoop at ING—their term for information overload, and a very good one, which resonated immediately with me, a middle aged woman who has tried and failed at every diet known to (wo) man.

The morning brought together a collection of comms people from pleasingly complex organisations. And I’ll admit it: I love running workshops. The architecture of ideas, the careful choreography, that electric moment when something actually lands in a room full of people who’ve heard everything before. It went well. People were open, honest, collaborative, generous with their ideas and tolerant of our extended metaphors. And that’s the best I can hope for.

It was also my first public outing of the “Infozempic” concept, which I’d been nursing like a potentially embarrassing joke at a wedding. The collective intake of breath when I said it—that visceral ohhh—was gratifying in a way that probably says something unflattering about me. The metaphor hit a nerve. Possibly because everyone’s drowning and I just named the water.

The feedback was effusive enough that I immediately carved out time to write an extensive blog post on the same theme. Yes, responding to a workshop about information restraint by producing more information is ironic in a way that would make Alanis Morissette weep. But when an idea has heat, you chase it. Better a considered piece written in the moment than another half-arsed thread abandoned at 11pm.

With Jon in town for the workshop, we seized the opportunity to tick off two remarkably adult tasks. First: professional photographs. Despite speaking daily across international borders, we’ve somehow amassed approximately zero visual evidence of existing in the same postcode. Given the book’s imminent arrival, it seemed prudent to acquire proof that we’re not an elaborate catfishing scheme before journalists start asking reasonable questions about whether we’ve ever actually met.

Second: actual strategic planning for book promotion. We discussed what we want to say, who might conceivably care, and how to avoid becoming just another desperate voice howling into the digital void come launch day. The bar is low, but we’re hoping to clear it.

Mid-week brought a pitch to a potential new client. Early omens were promising, which means we’re now in that delightful purgatory between “I think that went well?” and “now we wait while they ghost us or don’t.”

Simultaneously, we’re spinning up two new projects, doing the unglamorous but essential work of actually understanding the organisations before swanning in with hot takes. It’s the bit that doesn’t make for good anecdotes, but it’s where most projects are quietly sentenced to success or failure.

And the book continues its stately procession through the publisher’s approval machinery, advancing without us like a child you’ve sent off to university. It’s oddly pleasant and faintly unsettling to watch something you’ve made take on independent life, trundling along tracks you’re no longer steering.

Also this week

I also went to hear Timothy Snyder talk about tyranny and freedom, which is exactly the sort of thing a normal person voluntarily does on a weeknight. I left genuinely uncertain whether I felt enlightened or simply more anxious about everything—probably both, which I suspect was rather the point. He positioned Ukraine not as just another crisis to scroll past between doom updates, but as the philosophical hinge point for Europe. No pressure.

What lingered was his insistence that resistance requires an actual vision of what you’re for, not just what you’re against. Freedom, properly understood, isn’t just the absence of interference—that thin, negative American definition—but the conditions that let people become what they want to be. Europe, he noted, practices this reasonably well while barely mentioning it, which leaves us ideologically underprepared when someone shows up to actively dismantle it.

The framing stuff was grimly compelling: Trump understanding sovereignty purely as property rights, immigration as pretext for building an unaccountable federal force, oligarchy and surveillance capitalism aligning beautifully with authoritarianism. None of it felt theoretical. All of it had the unfortunate coherence of something that’s already happening, which—Snyder argued—is exactly what makes it resistable if you can see the pattern.

He was bracingly blunt about media deference letting US presidents set Europe’s agenda days in advance. And he positioned history not as a warning label we slap on things, but as a reservoir of actual meaning alongside art and culture. Protest needs art, he said, especially now that AI can churn out infinite aesthetic slop. Human unpredictability still counts for something.

Oddly, the hopeful bit came last: talk to people in real life, including the racist uncle. Don’t try to win—plant seeds. Build coalitions with people you agree with 85% of the time, not 100%. Fascism is never defeated intellectually; you have to actually win things. Elections, institutions, minds, power.

I didn’t leave reassured. But I did leave thinking the catastrophe is at least comprehensible, which means it’s not inevitable. Small mercies.

Connections

Ahead of the workshop, with Jon and the Swoop team already in Amsterdam, I did something dangerously close to networking: I organised drinks for comms and digital workplace people. Actual, three-dimensional humans gathered in a bar—a concept that still feels faintly experimental post-pandemic.

It was genuinely lovely meeting people I’ve known online for years but never actually stood near, plus a few I’d met once years ago, and had since reverted to being profile pictures who occasionally like my posts. Always a relief when your LinkedIn feed materialises as actual thoughtful, funny folks rather than the corporate avatars you’d half-convinced yourself they were. We complained about vendors, and I demonstrated the ancient Dutch art of eating bitterballen without incinerating your entire mouth (secret: patience bordering on the superhuman, waiting until the molten core drops below lava temperature).

Coverage

I appeared on the WB-40 Podcast this week, talking nomad working with Lisa Riemers—podcast host and regular Lithos co-conspirator. The conversation emerged after she’d read my Yearnote, specifically the bit cataloguing the increasingly ridiculous places I’d worked from last year, and decided this warranted interrogation.

Her challenge was entirely fair: just because you can work from a capsule hotel in Fukuoka doesn’t mean you should, or that anyone else wants to. What about people who need routine, a proper desk, the psychological comfort of consistency? I didn’t argue. In fact, I have a half-finished blog post festering in my drafts that’s essentially a litany of everything that doesn’t work about nomad working—the friction, the exhaustion, the endless low-level admin of simply existing somewhere new.

But that doesn’t make it pointless. Working from Japan isn’t viable for most people—it’s barely viable for me much of the time. People like me are early adopters operating at the extreme edges of what current work systems can tolerate. And that’s precisely the point. If you can make work function for nomads, you make it work better for a vastly larger group: parents, carers, people nowhere near major cities, people whose lives categorically refuse to conform to a 9-to-5 tethered to a single postcode.

We already have most of the tools. What we haven’t managed is loosening our death grip on time the way we’ve started—barely—to loosen it on place. Until we do, we’ll keep extracting a fraction of the potential value while excluding far more people than necessary. But at least we’ll all be in the office on Tuesdays.

This week in photos

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.

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 Göring — 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.

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