Andrew Doran
Andrew Doran
I write here in order to work things out and understand myself better. I write here in order to put things down that I have been carrying around in my head, so I don’t need to carry them around anymore. I write here in order to capture a moment and have something that I can look back on, remembering what I thought and felt at the time.
August 2026
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Top Words
- weeknotes
- year
- born
- work
- life
- song
- london
All posts (101)
My first five-day work week for a while, and it was a tough one. Despite twenty years of following GTD and working on simplifying my workflow, in busy periods I end up falling back to a simple list. A mental sweep of all of the things I really need to get done as quickly as possible resulted in a very long list. I’d...
Flying into Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The start of the week was spent travelling back from Kingsville, Texas. Saying that it is 5,000 miles away from Berkhamsted isn’t doing justice to quite how long it takes to travel between them. I was up at 6am and on the road less than an hour later in order to get the car...
Having watched this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix, I have to say that I am loving this version of Formula 1. There is a narrative that the racing is ‘fake’ due to the 50/50 internal combustion engine/battery split and the existence of an electricity boost button. But I will take watching all of the close following,...
Kleberg Avenue, Kingsville, Texas A hectic week of travel. On Monday I came back from Austria where I’d spent a long weekend in the skiing town of Kitzbühel with colleagues. On Tuesday I worked from home, with my day packed full of meetings and messages to catch up with. That evening my wife and I checked in on her...
Finished reading Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. A good collection of positive reflections on human nature, debunking many negative apocryphal stories about how people tend to behave in specific situations.
The town of Kitzbühel, Austria, from high up in the mountains. A four-day working week with a long weekend away at the end. I needed it. At the start of the week I noted that I felt as though I was going through a tough period, but one week on I’m doing much better. The highlight of the week was a trip with fifteen...
Stopped to photograph this phone box on my walk to work, as the construction work means that you can’t open the door. Then I noticed that it’s due to be removed. Last week was tough for no reason. This week was hard, but in a different way. There are so many balls in the air and I’m struggling to juggle them all....
A big chunk of my final year at university, studying for my Computer Science degree, was spent working on a project. That last year counted for 60% of my overall grade, and the project contributed half of that. So the mark that I obtained could make a significant difference to my overall result for my degree. Every...
Spotted a cheeky jackdaw sitting on the sign, looking at the passersby. It flew off as I pulled out my phone to take its picture. Note the blue sky in the background — a rare moment of spring amongst days of near-endless rain. A tough week. Last weekend, for no reason whatsoever, the cloudy, grey feelings descended...
Having a proud dad moment. On Friday, our eldest son broke his college’s mile record, and later that day ran the 10th best time in school history in the 800m.
This week, multiple people sent me a link to Matt Shumer’s post that Something Big Is Happening. In the post, he sounds the alarm that AI is coming for most white-collar jobs. It’s definitely worth reading: If you extend the trend (and it’s held for years with no sign of flattening) we’re looking at AI that can work...
Adding email links to the bottom of each blog post is paying off. Someone emailed me with information about a problem with my indoor cycling trainer. With permission, I’ve updated the post so that anyone searching for the same issue can benefit.
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