A Year In Time 2025 - End of my 20s Edition

Keeping track of where my hours end up being flushed away has been a habit that has defined my 20s. It's helped keep track of my self-romanticizing when I've imagined myself as some kind of productivity Ubermensch, but it's also shown me when I've been pushing too hard, and has provided insanely useful insight into what is a "good" use of my time, whatever that means. It's never about trying to work to a specific end-goal in terms of hours spent on something, it's just to live a good life and then take a look in the mirror. As I'm writing this, I've just turned 30, so it's certainly a good environment to be looking into that mirror. In the total 1230 hours tracked this year, let's see how they break down.

Work - 435 hours (2024 - 563 Hours).

Another year, another rather drastic drop in hours spent doing my day job. The previous drop, 2023 - 2024, was by 300 hours, and this is for a similar reason, with much of my work life having a slightly different emphasis. And that is...

Playing Live - 141 Hours (2024 - 212 Hours)

Despite the discrepancy in actual hours spent onstage, I'd say that 2025 has been filled with as much good time spent performing. I've done some shows I'm very proud of, and am going to be doing this full-time well into the start of 2026, so expect this number to be much higher next year.

Recording - 9 Hours (2024 - 13 Hours)

Recording is just not a large part of my life, it seems. As much as I'd like to move the needle on this, it's clearly not where my value as a musician is sought out, and travelling to studios is clearly not confluent with the kind of work life I'm cultivating at the moment. As always, I'd love to do more of it, but it's clearly not my time to enter that area.

Practice - 152 Hours (2024 - 121 Hours)

As much as I talk about not trying to game-ify these numbers, I am actually happy to see this number go up. For the last few years, time spent just on the instrument has been on a steady decline, and that's been a mild concern. Not just because I was worrying about where that would leave me skill-wise, but also because I had less and less to actively practice for, and there's only so many picking exercises I can personally stomach. However, this increase isn't due to a deliberate effort on my part, it was much more to do with having more things to practice for. I've had more shows to learn this year, and much more impetus for keeping on top of my form than previously. Hopefully this number will continue to go up, but given the amount of live playing I'm going to be doing, I can't expect them both to go up at the same rate.

Writing - 92 Hours (2024 - 18 Hours)

I have been really hitting this hard this year. My project this year was to write a symphony, and while I haven't quite gotten to the finish line on that project (yet), the act of deliberately sitting down every day and writing for ten minutes or so has had a huge effect not just on my active output but also my passive level of creativity. It's been a long time since I've been able to just have something constantly on the mental back burner, turning over little ideas and motifs to later implement in the piece. There have been other projects that have also contributed to this, like library music projects, but this was certainly the main contributor. I'm enjoying really actively writing again, and plan on making much more of a habit of it, both with music and this blog.

xercise - 68 HoursE (2024 - 70 Hours)

No marathons for me this year, but I did race a couple of half marathons, and also made much more of an effort to do things like strength training, cycling and other things aside from running. I was thinking about a potential marathon in 2026, but it's looking unlikely. Given the amount of travel on the books (and a wedding), it's much more likely that most of my exercise in 2026 will be health-first, with any bigger goals being a nice by-product, instead of the other way round like I'm used to.

Travel - 204 Hours (2024 - 281 Hours)

Despite the fact that I am writing this blog post on tour in the middle east, I somehow spent less raw hours in the year overall travelling. This seems consistent with my decline in hours spent playing. To be honest, a decrease in travelling hours but an increase in new places travelled to isn't a bad thing at all.

Driving - 43 Hours (2024 - 8 Hours)

I shouldn't imagine this needs clarifying, I drove quite a bit. I went on holiday for a week, played a festival, did a few functions in hard to reach places, all the standard fare. It was nice to do a bit more driving for leisure, it's always something I've tried to avoid. Doing it a bit more and normalising it is a good thing, I have no intention of owning a car anytime soon, but it's always good to have the option.

Dog Walking - 115 Hours (2024 - 117 hours)

This is an estimate, I struggled to get good data on dog walking this year, as it was a category that I just wasn't very good at keeping on top of. My suspicion is that I spent more time than this walking the dog, but I'll settle with imperfect data for now.

It's been very interesting to see the data slowly morph as I move further into adulthood. More driving, more playing live, less of the kind of work I've been doing in my 20s. At some point I should probably process this all into some kind of line graph, maybe an idea for next year, especially when I've done a few more months of touring to really get some different data. For now, though, it's time to enjoy the first year of my 30s, get outside and play some music.

Fun Bonus Stats:

Books Read - 20

Films Watched - 12

Miles Run - 406