2025 year in review
jenxi.com Vision alchemist crafting strategic innovation & AI adoption. Bridging startups to China's ecosystem advantage. Building a cyberbrain. Registered pharmacist × Brand strategist × Storyteller
Everyone warned me that becoming a father would kill my side projects. Friends who’d crossed this threshold spoke of it in hushed tones, like veterans recounting a particularly brutal campaign.
“Say goodbye to free time,” they’d murmur, shaking their heads with the weary wisdom of the sleep-deprived.
They were spectacularly wrong.
2025 turned out to be my most productive year for passion projects: not despite becoming a father, but because of it. The arithmetic seems impossible until you live it. Fewer hours, more output. Less time, greater clarity. It’s the kind of paradox that would make a philosopher stroke their beard thoughtfully, except I no longer have time for beard-stroking.
The ruthless arithmetic of nap time
Before the baby, I had entire days stretching ahead of me like an open highway. Naturally, I spent most of them idling in the road shoulder, fiddling with the nav app. Parkinson’s law: work expands to fill the time available. Give me eight hours and I’ll produce four hours of output, having spent the rest “researching” (reading articles tangentially related to the task) and “preparing” (rearranging my desk).
Now my productive day looks like this: drop Wifey off at work, take any necessary meetings in the car on the way home, walk the dog, bring the baby to the park for morning playtime. Pick Wifey up for lunch. Then, the main event: nap time. Those precious two hours when the baby sleeps and I transform into a remarkably focused worker. Some evenings, after bedtime, I squeeze in a bit more.
That’s it. Two to three hours of “real” work time, plus stolen moments.
The secret weapon? Three tasks. Every day. No exceptions, no excuses, no ambitious to-do lists stretching into next week. Just three things that matter, identified the night before, executed during nap time.
Parkinson’s law, it turns out, works beautifully in reverse. Compress the time and work becomes remarkably efficient. When you know the baby could wake at any moment, you don’t spend twenty minutes choosing the perfect Spotify playlist before you start.
The surprising bonus? I now have more time to read and reflect than I did when I theoretically had “all the time in the world.” When you protect your time fiercely, you spend it on what matters. When time feels abundant, it evaporates.
Learning to say no
The real transformation wasn’t in how I worked: it was in what I refused to do.
Past-me would have said yes to that interesting project, that networking meeting, that “quick chat” that inevitably balloons into an hour. Present-me has become ruthlessly protective of my time, because every yes to something peripheral is a no to being present with my daughter.
Saying no used to feel uncomfortable, like declining a dinner invitation from someone you quite like. Now it feels like self-preservation. The baby doesn’t care about my professional obligations or networking opportunities. She cares about whether Papa is there, fully there, not half-present while mentally drafting replies.
This protectiveness extended beyond work. I said no to meetings that could have been emails, projects that would have fragmented my attention, and commitments that looked appealing but would have stolen hours from what actually mattered. I limit work and meetings to very specific time slots: even more aggressively than before, and my previous schedule was already considered extreme by people who knew how I operated.
There are trade-offs. I reply to messages even more slowly now, and I’m already notorious for glacial response times. To some, this probably comes across as disrespectful. But that’s the price of protecting my time, and I’ve made peace with it. The people who matter understand. The ones who don’t: well, that’s useful information too.
Finally learning to be present
I’ve written about presence before. I’ve read the books, understood the philosophy, nodded along with the wisdom about not dwelling on the past or anxiously predicting the future. I knew, intellectually, that ruminating on yesterday or worrying about tomorrow steals from experiencing today.
Knowing and doing are different things.
Having a daughter changed this. Not through some mystical transformation, but through simple, brutal motivation: I don’t want to miss the special moments. When she laughs at something for the first time, when she figures out how to do something new, when she reaches for me: these moments don’t wait for me to finish checking my notifications.
The present used to feel slippery. I’d try to grasp it and find myself somewhere else, replaying a conversation, planning tomorrow’s tasks, anywhere but here. Now the present has a face, and she’s looking right at me.
This is perhaps the most unexpected gift of parenthood: not the joy or the love, which I anticipated, but the anchor. She pulls me into now, whether I planned to be there or not.
AI as a force multiplier
I couldn’t have maintained this output without AI tools. But the breakthrough wasn’t using AI more: it was learning to use it like a proper director runs a film set.
Here’s what I mean. Last month I was debugging a layout issue on this very blog. Pre-AI me would have spent an evening squinting at CSS, opening seventeen Stack Overflow tabs, and muttering increasingly creative profanity at the screen. Instead, I described the problem, the AI identified a conflicting z-index in about four seconds, and I spent the remaining hour and fifty-six minutes actually writing.
That’s the model now. I’m the director setting the vision; the AI is the crew handling execution—the same cyberbrain approach I’ve been refining. I developed workflows where the AI doesn’t just complete tasks but checks its own homework: each step includes a checklist and a scoring system. If the output falls below the threshold, it reworks until it meets the standard. Only then does it slide the result across my desk.
Think of it as hiring a diligent assistant and a quality control manager in one. The result is that I can accomplish in two hours what previously took a full day, because I’m no longer doing the tedious parts. I’m focused on where the ship is heading, not swabbing the deck.
Progress on passion projects
Against all expectations, every personal project moved forward this year.
WuxiaSociety saw steady progress. MechaBay evolved. This blog: my digital home for over two decades, got more attention than it had in years. Translation work continued. The constraint of limited time forced me to prioritise ruthlessly, which meant the projects that mattered actually got done instead of languishing in the “someday” pile.
The lone exception was AI art, but not for lack of trying. The technology is evolving so fast that keeping up feels like reviewing cars when a new model launches every Tuesday. By the time you’ve mastered one approach, three better ones have emerged. I’ve made peace with running behind on this particular frontier: I stay current enough to know the latest trends and workflows, but I focus on getting the results I want rather than chasing every shiny new release. It’s not unlike being content with my camera gear instead of upgrading every time Leica clears its throat and announces something.
Unlearning the Western lens
I’ve spent a decade in China and apparently learnt nothing. Or so it felt this year, when a quiet revelation crept up on me while reading the Analects.
On a whim, I compared Confucian ideas against Greek and Roman philosophers and found striking parallels. Concepts about virtue, governance, and the good life echoed across millennia and continents, except the Chinese versions often predated their Western counterparts by a thousand years.
Growing up with a Western education, absorbing Western media, I’d unconsciously absorbed a dismissive attitude toward Chinese philosophy. It was something ancient and quaint, not a living tradition with practical wisdom. Discovering that Confucius was exploring ideas about ethical leadership and self-cultivation centuries before Aristotle put quill to papyrus was, to put it mildly, a recalibration.
I’ve been reading Michael Puett’s The Path, which reframes Chinese philosophical traditions as practical guides for living. His treatment of rituals particularly struck me. I’d always thought of rituals as empty traditions: things we do because we’ve always done them, like wearing ties and belts.
But rituals serve a deeper purpose. They’re emotional guardrails, preventing our feelings from pushing us toward reckless actions we’d regret. When you’re angry at someone you love, ritual: the expected response, the appropriate behaviour, stops you from saying something irreparable. It’s not about suppressing emotion; it’s about creating space between impulse and action.
This isn’t mysticism. It’s practical psychology dressed in ancient robes. And it’s something I’ll be delving much deeper into in the year ahead.
What I actually want
Turning 40 has a way of clarifying things, like putting on glasses you didn’t know you needed.
I used to think I wanted to create content. What I actually want is to shape conversations: to share what I’ve learnt in the hope that it helps someone, however minor the contribution. Not someone producing material for algorithms to sort, but someone whose ideas occasionally make a reader pause and think.
I used to dream of building a big business. What I actually want is a self-sustaining operation, what Paul Jarvis calls a “company of one”—work that stays meaningful without demanding I sacrifice the life it’s meant to support. Something that supports the life I want rather than demanding I sacrifice that life to feed its growth. Rejecting the busyness of business, if you will.
These aren’t failures of ambition. They’re refinements of it. The younger version of me chased scale because scale seemed like success. The current version understands that true success means something different: autonomy, impact, presence.
Finding myself at 40 isn’t about dramatic reinvention. It’s about clearing away the assumptions I’d accumulated about what success looks like, about what I should want, about who I’m supposed to be, and discovering what was underneath all along.
A wish for more courage
If I could gift myself one thing for 2026, it would be courage. Not the dramatic kind. I’m not planning to wrestle tigers or start a revolution. The quieter kind.
The courage to publish the half-formed essay that might make me look foolish. The courage to admit, publicly, when I’ve been wrong about something I argued passionately. The courage to create, even when the work might be mediocre. The courage to fail at things worth attempting. The courage to learn new things badly before learning them well. The courage to keep saying no, even when it disappoints people I respect.
Saying no got easier this year, but it still costs something. Every declined invitation carries a small weight. I’d like to set that weight down: to say no without the lingering guilt, trusting that protecting my time is stewardship rather than selfishness.
Courage, I’m learning, isn’t the absence of fear. It’s shipping the blog post anyway, while uncertain—being bold in the small ways that add up. Creating anyway, while imperfect. Pressing publish, then closing the laptop before you can change your mind.
Looking ahead
2026 arrives with unusual clarity. The systems work. The priorities are set. The path is clearer than it’s been in years.
I’m grateful for Wifey, who makes all of this possible and tolerates my obsessive systems and stubborn refusal of most invitations. For my daughter, who taught me more about priorities and presence in her first year than I managed in the previous thirty-nine. For friends, old and new, who showed up in ways that mattered. For the tools that multiply my efforts and the knowledge freely shared by others that helped me build my systems.
2025 wasn’t a year of conquering challenges. It was a year of receiving gifts I didn’t know I needed.
What stays: the three-task system, the fierce protection of time, the AI collaboration that makes it all possible, the commitment to being present. What evolves: deeper engagement with Chinese philosophy, more intentional thought leadership, continued refinement of the small-but-sustainable approach to work. And hopefully, a bit more courage.
Some questions I’m still sitting with: How do I balance spending more time creating with being present? How do I scale impact without scaling busyness? How do I keep discovering blind spots I don’t yet know I have?
Good questions to carry into a new year. The kind that don’t demand immediate answers, just continued attention.
The great irony of 2025 is that becoming a father: the thing everyone warned would end my creative life, actually gave it back to me. Constraints clarified. Limits liberated. Less became more.
It turns out the secret to getting more done isn’t finding more time. It’s finding what actually matters, and protecting the time you have for exactly that.