2025 review - a year of mixed feelings
🗓Yearly Reviews,⭐️Featured
It’s the end of January of 2026 so it’s time for my 12th yearly review of the previous year. To me 2025 was pretty stable business-wise but very rocky personally. Luckily nothing really bad happened to me, but to people very close to me, which was (and still is) hard to deal with. The bright spot last year were many quite exciting trips I did with my family. As always, I do these reviews mostly for myself, because to me writing them gives me closure and writing is thinking. Anyway, here goes:
- The year of death to people quite close to me
- Nozbe business is stable but promoting it is hard!
- Shortcuts - my new favorite hobby!
- New Home Office and new-ish gear
- Sports - much less cycling!
- Travels - lots of family trips
- Weekends with my wife
- 2026 here I come!
The year of death to people quite close to me
Let’s get the sad parts out of the way first. I’m still 46 years old and even though I’m in my midlife crisis age, I’m not used to people around me suddenly perishing.
That’s why 2025 was so awful as it started off with one of my closest friends losing his wife. Then in the summer two other people very close to me lost their life partners. All three people who died were in their forties or fifties. My age. All three were not supposed to die in 2025. Two of them had sudden health problems that proved fatal and one committed suicide.
All three left an enormous void. They left us too soon. And it hurt and still hurts like hell.
All deaths are awful, painful and sad. These three were particularly bad as none of them had the symptoms to die so soon. But let me tell you, the suicide is particularly dreadful. It’s like an atomic bomb. It comes out of nowhere and hits everyone in the vicinity of that person with a brick.
You can see when people have mild physical issues but usually you are completely oblivious to people’s mental health problems. Even the closest ones don’t share them.
In this particular case even the closest family had no idea this person was going through some extremely dark shit so when they ended their life it hit hard. And it keeps hitting. Nobody gets a proper closure. Everybody feels they are to blame for not seeing it. Fucking awful.
Mental health issues are health issues. They need to be treated by professionals and most probably with meds. This ain’t no joke.
Anyway, because of all that I spent lots of time trying to be supportive of my closest who lost their partners. In any way I could. Sometimes it meant just being there for them, traveling extra to see them for a few days to hang out with them, or just helping them with admin chores when they couldn’t focus on anything. Whatever it took. I had to call a mental health telephone line once myself to be able to make sense of it all. It was hard for me but I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to my closest friends who lost their partners. I suffered but I was still glad I wasn’t in their shoes.
Nozbe business is stable but promoting it is hard!
Let’s talk business. After last year’s downsizing this year was much better. One of our team members left us in the beginning of the year but now to cover her place we hired two more people. Both are very promising.
We didn’t hire a new programmer. Actually we did, but he didn’t work out. It’s something I’m planning on giving another shot later this year. The good thing that came out of that was that this mis-hire motivated us to embrace AI in the company. So much so that we’ll be shipping some cool Nozbe AI features already in the first quarter of this year. Join my webinar on February 10 if you want to know more.
We use much more AI at work now and it has improved our productivity immensely. I talked about it a lot on the episode #90 of the #NoOffice podcast. I feel like my CTO, Tomasz, got a new work partner and his name is Claude. Do I have to CTOs now?
The one remaining issue is our app’s positioning. It’s hard to fight against much bigger apps with enormous marketing budgets, but we’re doing our best to promote our message of simpler productivity in a team.
As a great bonus to me personally, I traveled to Boise, Idaho to meet my business guru - Nathan Berry and recorded a podcast with him. It was a mentoring podcast where he analyzed my business and gave me some great ideas how to make Nozbe stand out from competition and convince my target audience of SMART business owners to give us a try. The podcast will air in March of this year but I’m already implementing some of his ideas.
We didn’t hit our business goals, but we grew:
- Paid accounts in new Nozbe grew by 35%
- Paid seats slower, only by 22%
- MRR - Monthly Recurring Revenue grew by 30%
For this year I want to at least keep these growth numbers and grow paid seats by 40% - we need to improve the rate of teams starting to use Nozbe as their main project management and collaboration tool.
Overall we shipped 26 updates across all platforms, including 18 new features: Dropbox and OneDrive integrations, vacation mode, file and video previews in comments, and task sharing via link and many more… We improved task list performance along with 60+ other enhancements, and fixed 80+ bugs identified by our users.
Even though I’ve removed social media from my phone I’m being active on LinkedIn and I see much more engagement from people there. Let’s double down in 2026!
Shortcuts - my new favorite hobby!
Thanks to using AI and improving my skills with regular expressions, I’ve significantly improved many of my internal Shortcuts. These are like tiny apps to me for both my iPhone and iPad. I released version 4 of Journal and I’m already working on version 5… I re-wrote (twice!) my clipboard manager and I’m hoping to finally be publishing it this year. It’s glorious, I use it daily and wouldn’t be able to work without it.
I have several Shortcuts that I use for my social media posting (like Toot for Mastodon) and blogging. I might get around to publishing them here as well so that you can get inspired for your workflows.
New Home Office and new-ish gear
2025 was a year I significantly upgraded my Home Office with Mac Mini and new Prompter making it a semi-professional recording studio which I then automated with NFC tags and additional lights. I even upgraded the Mini with 2TB SSD storage module!
I’m still rocking my M4 iPad Pro 13” but I upgraded my phone to iPhone Air which I still love. My watch is still the 2.5 year old Apple Watch Ultra 2 and it’s still amazing. Holds 2 days on battery no problem.
I upgraded most of my gadgets to be using USB-C and I love the simplicity of one cable. Even for shavers!
Sports - much less cycling!
In 2024 I spent 243 hours doing sports and last year not much less - a total of 239 hours… so great, right? Well, kind of, but I’m not happy with how I planned my sporting activities.
🎾 Tennis - 42 hours - stable
I play tennis roughly an hour a week, which is fun, but I’d like to play more matches in 2026. I’m not progressing much, but I’m having fun and I feel good doing it. Less practice, more matches. That’s my goal for 2026.
💪 Strength training - 10 hours - OK
Less than 1 hour a month. Not ideal. I need to change things a little. Do more pilates and change up my TRX routine to make it more appealing for me to do strength training.
🏊♂️ Swimming - only 4 km!
I didn’t swim at all. Even in the summer I wasn’t really training much. I’ll try to sign up for a local swimming pool with my daughter and I’m hoping to swim much more this year.
🏃♂️ Running - 378 km - stable
My goal each year is to run around 400km and in 2024 I went above it and last year a little below it but still stable. However, I’m slower now and I’d love to pick up that speed. This year I want to do another 400km but have some faster 5km and 10km runs done. I want to break the 25min and 50min mark.
My highlights include regularly attending Park Runs in Gdynia and doing a 10k on the Strip at Las Vegas. (10k8, P2p2, Pr6)
🚴♂️ Cycling - 754 km - a new low…
To me, 100km a month used to be a minimum and in the previous years I managed to do it quite consistently. However, in 2024 I slipped below 1000km in a year and last year it was even less than that. I’d like to cycle more. Being on the bike helps me think, vent and also gain perspective. And it’s not very hard on my joints which is also important at my age, right? (R1, RV4, SV7, M1)
🚶♂️ Walking - 314 km - a new high!
Because of what happened last year, I was walking even more than in previous years. I was having meetings walking, I was doing power walks, I was trying to walk as much as I could instead of taking some sort of transport. When I couldn’t run or cycle, I was walking. I’m hoping to do another 300km this year.
I managed to also go out twice again with my group of buddies for a hike in the mountains and this year we’re planning to go again. In October we even did 29km in one day!
⛷️ Skiing - 85 km - not bad!
My biggest milestone was doing a skiing holidays with my family last year and it was a success. All family members enjoy the sport now and I can enjoy it with them. This year’s skiing trip is already booked so I’m hoping to ski much more with my daughters and my wife and maybe even do more than 100km for the first time in years…
Weight… not so good - at 78 kg
Since I lost weight in 2014 it kept creeping up. The breaking point was the year of covid, 2020 when I got back to the weight of 74 kg. Now every year it’s a little more and I hate it. I cannot find a way to lose it.
I’m beginning to feel chubby now and I don’t like it. Now a feat would be to go below 75 kg. Let’s see if this year I can make it happen?…
Total score - 3679
My total fitness score was way below last year’s 4149 so I really need to re-focus and plan my fitness activities this year much better. So far January hasn’t been easy, but I’ll try to improve. I failed to compete at a triathlon last year but I’m aiming to do one in May of this year.
Goals for this year: fitness score of way above 4K (1000/400/20 bike/run/swim), my weight below 75kg and one triathlon done.
Travels - lots of family trips
Last year in April was me and my wife’s 20th wedding anniversary and we decided to celebrate it with the family on the west coast of the USA. We visited California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah. We visited Disneyland in LA, saw Grand Canyon, Antelope, Bryce and even Zion… but the highlight was Death Valley:
Apart from this trip, we managed to do a family ski trip and again rented RV Camper to visit Norway (with beautiful weather!) and Sweden. We also managed to squeeze a family longer weekend in the UK (London and Oxford).
We had other trips scheduled but because of the deaths I mentioned above, we needed to cancel some of them to be able to support our people who were suffering.
Weekends with my wife
In 2025 we managed to schedule only 2 get-away weekends together without kids. Our date weekends. First in February for our friend’s wedding and then in October. I’m hoping to go back to having one weekend per quarter like we used to. As busy parents of 3 kids, we need it!
This year we already have our planning weekend scheduled, so that’s a good start!
2026 here I come!
Now that January is behind me, I’m looking forward to the rest of 2026. Fewer deaths, more fun, more travels and much more Nozbe customers. Let’s go! 💪