Away Day: A Year In Review
We like many lead lives that can feel quite busy, there is always something to be doing. Between work, family, friends, hobbies, and general life admin there never seems to be enough time in the day. Over the last 10-ish years we have tried a number of different techniques to try and help us get the most out of our time, and we thought it might be nice to share with you our latest attempt at sorting this out - our 2024 Away Day!
We can almost feel you shudder with visceral imaginings of the corporate nonsense that is an away day. However, this is the best name we could come up with at the time, so if you are intrigued then please feel free to stick around and find out how we plan our time. Hopefully someone may find some of this useful. As always, we hope that you can approach this with an open mind, take what works for you, and ditch the rest.
What we wanted from this adventure
Now this sounds simple, but the more we thought about it the more complex and existential it got. It can probably be distilled down into the following:
“A plan for 2025 that would align with what we want to get out of life, based on our continuous learnings from the last few years.”
We also wanted to get a rough plan together relatively quickly, as we have found in the past that we can all too easily just slip into whatever is easiest at the time. This can then result in us spending time doing stuff, which on reflection, did not align with what we wanted to be doing with our lives.
Having attempted to do this type of activity before, we found that we could easily get distracted at home be that by; the internet, mundane life admin, or so many other little things that we could “just do” instead of thinking about the task at hand. So we thought, “hang on a moment, let's go somewhere that we cannot get so distracted.” “Lets go camping” felt like it could be right for this, however finding somewhere that was open in December was a little tricky. With the changeable weather that we are experiencing we did not think it was wise to go wild camping. So we went to the next best option; we found a cabin in a field!
Where we stayed
We found an interesting cabin near Monmouth. With no internet connection, basic but comfortable amenities, this had all that we needed and more. It even had a little trick up its sleeve; a loft with a bed in it and windows to look at the stars! The Stargazer cabin had right on its doorstep a few nice walking options, and the small town of Monmouth an easy 15 min walk away.
Things we did before the adventure
To make the most of this time without distraction we thought about which topics we wanted to discuss and came up with “buckets” to put them in. Some examples (but by no means all of them), included; Health, Family, Work, and Adventure. We made sure we had an accessible 2024 calendar and offline access of pictures we’d taken throughout 2024 to remind us of what interesting events we’d experienced this year.
Our calendars for 2025 were ensured to be up to date making sure that anything that we had committed to were in there.
We also made sure we had enough food and drink for the trip, so if we didn’t want to go into a town then we didn’t need to. As it turns out we ended up going into Monmoth and picking up a few tasty treats from the supermarket, because why not? Making sure we had everything we needed was us trying to remove any other burdens or distractions, and just allow ourselves to focus on reflecting and planning.
What we actually did on the Adventure
We actually managed to make this a weekend activity and it was spread over three days. This felt like quite the extravagance to spend 3 days on just this, however having now done this once we think we could get it down to a day.
Day 1 - Travel to the Cabin
A relatively straightforward day. Pack up, drive to the cabin, settle in, eat dinner, confirm the bounds of what we were planning to do the next day, and chill out. We also went for a pleasant walk in the dark.
Day 2 - The Main Event!
After a wonderful breakfast we got to it. We roughly followed this structure but due to the fact that both of us while thinking about things can jump around a bit, sometimes we would jump back to a previous topic if another thought came up.
Talked through our list of topics and agreed on a list of the ones we wanted to cover. To give a flavor of the topics here are some but not all of the topics we used to trigger discussions:
Health
Family
Friends
Work
Fun & Adventure time
Finance
Nights during the week
As we were away from most technology we went back to pen and paper. We had taken with us a lined notebook where you can rip out the pages. For each of the topics we wrote the title and the following prompts:
Review - what we did regarding this topic in the last year.
What we want to repeat this year - Essentially what do we want to continue doing in the same way as this year.
Even better if - what would make next year even better if did whatever it was differently. We also made sure to identify the improvement, not just the problem.
We then worked through the year using a combination of our calendars and photographic record of what we had done regarding that topic. This is when we realised we had done so much more this year than we first thought!
We then stepped through each of the topics and answered the prompts. There was more than one occasion where we had to pop back to a previous topic as the subsequent ones had stirred thoughts, feelings and memories that we saw value in capturing. This was easy to do by simply picking up the sheet of paper of the relevant topic and noting the extra bit down.
Without any distractions, and all the sustenance we could want on hand, this turned out to be somewhat of a mammoth session. We talked about sooooo much stuff! It was great to see the world from each other’s perspective as we did so too.
Once we had captured all the prompts, we went through each of the topics and pulled out specific things that we wanted to do to make 2025 as good as it could be. All actions had to be reasonably possible (as much as Rob wants to go to the moon, it’s not hugely realistic within the next year) and have a date by which we wanted to get them done by, most of which were as rough as to which quarter of the year, rather than a specific day.
Then after such a mentally full-on day, we made sure we had an easy to cook dinner. Followed by some time for silliness and fun before climbing up to our bed with a view for the night.
Day 3 - Wrapping it all up
After a slow morning watching the sun come up from a rather snug bed, we packed up and made our way home. There were a couple of detours on the way to some interesting shops, One even had a tank outside!
The 1940’s Russian T34 tank outside the Army and Outdoor Store at Fromes Hill. A surplus shop that is chock full of interesting kit
As we did not have much gear to sort once we got home, all our stuff was packed away relatively quickly. We then sat down and planned out our year in our usual calendar using the actions from the day before. As always there were more things we wanted to do than time to do them in, so we had to do a bit of trading off, but with a bit of back and forth we were both happy with the plan. Even if only most of it goes to plan, there should be plenty more adventures finding their way to this website.
Katrina delving deep into the rabbit warren of fabric at Oh So Crafty in Kidderminster
Would we recommend doing this?
As with many ways of living a life there are many different ways to do things and this one seems to have worked for us. Would we say it is the best way of doing it, no, but it did help us this year figure out what we want to do next year. So if it sounds like it would work for you then give it a go. On reflection we could have done this at any time of the year. The two biggest factors that we have identified for this working for us were:
Being away from home and distractions
Blocking the time out and saying “WE ARE DOING THIS!” and making sure that was the thing we were doing.
So there we go, when we get asked “how do you fit in doing all that?” We now actually have an answer!