2025 Year in Review and How I Plan for 2026

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How I Plan

I last wrote about using Passion Planner as my go-to todo list 5 years ago. I keep an eye out for alternatives, but it’s still the same story. Since I’m extremely digital, it may seem odd that I keep a paper planner. It’s not my only way of tracking todos or goals, but it’s my way of consolidating my other methods. This helps in reflecting on todos and goals to distill the most important ones on a weekly, monthly, semi-annual, yearly, and longer basis.

Work Digital Planning and Reflection

  • Google Calendar (meetings and zooms)
  • Google Mail (marked to-responds)
  • Obsidian (daily entries, todos, notes)
  • Slack (read it laters and reminders)

Home Digital Planning and Reflection

  • Google Calendar (events and appointments)
  • Google Mail – mediated by Superhuman (inbox of todos I’ll handle today only; beyond that, scheduled reminders)
  • Digital diary – at least a photo per day along with some light reflections

Unified Digital Planning and Reflection

I swear by a paper yearly Passion Planner for unifying my personal and professional digital planning, and it’s brought me a lot of success over the years I’ve used them. It serves as the the distillation of work and home planning (my personal golden notebook) with the following great features:

  • because it’s paper and finite in space, it forces frequent review, prioritization, and incorporates goal changing and natural decay
  • yearly values setting/tune-up
  • semi-annual goal setting (3 month, 1 year, 3 year, lifetime horizon)
  • monthly goal setting broken out into personal and work, people to see, places to go, things to learn, and biggest priority of the month
  • monthly review broken out into reflections on memories, lessons, priorities, accomplishments, changes, gratefulness, areas of improvement
  • weekly breakout by day – here I put (redundantly) my most important appointments and meetings of the week along with approximately 3 todos a day that I must get done that particular day. Personal and work todo lists each have space for ~24 items for the week

The paper planner ensures I reflect, modify goals, pick the most important things, and have a log in a single place over time. It’s fantastic to have a record of these going back years.

2025 in Review

Large gap in content disclaimer: I work full-time as VP of Engineering at Horizon3.ai. This review leaves out my work projects and accomplishments entirely (beyond career development milestones).

Joint activities/help disclaimer: Podcasts I released and children I am raising are joint productions with my husband Casey Handmer. I employ a fulltime nanny who works 40 hours a week and helps with childcare during the day along with kid dropoffs and pickups that would otherwise occur during my work hours. I work remote (excepting work travel), and have a 1 minute commute.

2025 Meta Review

This felt like a less productive year on the personal front than I’ve had in most past years. Potential mitigating factors: I spent most of the year pregnant, and a lot of the year on the road (>25% away from home, most of it accompanied by my family). I work a full-time demanding executive job in tech and have 3 kids already.

Nevertheless, it was fantastic writing down this year reflection and seeing that indeed alongside my career progress at work, that I still had directional progress toward major personal goals.

I took a stab at a new technical hobby (biohacking) and made some serious advances in my chef ambitions. I got promoted multiple times and made my financial goals for the year. I got pregnant and gestated a baby. The second half of the year was more work-than-hobby focused, but at the end of the year I rallied with some ideas to get back in the hobby game and had good success.

Next year brings a new baby, some parental leave, and a meta intent to amp things up both personally and professionally alongside all of that. To help fuel my energy, I’m also strategizing how to find more of an online community of similar-minded folks after abstaining from interactive online discourse for quite some time. I’m starting with Substack as a potential pool. Ideas welcome.

Productivity consulting service

This is a good time to chime in with an ad break: if you’d like a productivity tune-up in the new year, book a productivity consult with me. There’s no better time than the present! I focus on folks with kids and diverse ambitions – if that’s you, get in touch.

2025 Detailed Review: Month by month travel, hobbies, and content released

Ongoing activities

  • Serving on our city’s planning commission (biweekly)
  • Buying the snack and cooking curriculum food for my kid’s preschool; serving on the preschool board of directors as second VP (first half of year)
  • Reading – read 32 books, including 12 for my monthly book club and 7 middle grade novels as research for writing for this age group
  • Studying chess – long form games the first half of the year; focused on puzzles the second half
  • Raising/educating 3 kids + breastfeeding and/or being pregnant

January 2025

Evacuated due to LA fires to a resort in Palm Springs. Thankfully arrived home to a house (my neighbor was not so lucky). Did some fun math calculations regarding the economics of refilling the Salton Sea and did a deep dive on desalination. Decided not to dedicate my hobby bandwidth to the problem at present. Started searching for another technical side project by meeting folks on Y Combinator cofounder matching – met someone interested in creating alternative proteins and we started a great collaboration researching and sharing ideas in parallel. Released two podcasts, booked a Spanish immersion program for my family for the summer, and got back into a routine after the fire.

January Media released

February 2025

Went to Texas for my all-company annual onsite and again to San Francisco on PTO for a precision fermentation conference. Met my biohacking collaborator there in person! Set up my home biolab for biohacking in my garage. Released three podcasts.

February Media released

March 2025

Went to Florida for Amazon’s elite MARS conference. Went to Vegas for a family wedding – saw the Atomic Museum. Was promoted from senior engineering manager to director at work. Finished our family taxes. Started working with a mentor from Caltech, a biology Ph.D. student, who came over 1-2 nights a week. Did several experiments detecting DNA variations at home. Released three podcasts and a blog.

March Media released

April 2025

Visited San Francisco to do quarterly planning for work. My Australian in-laws visited us in LA for a few weeks. Finished up the polishing on a Chopin piece I worked on – which I had played nearly every day for 3-4 months prior. Continued to lean into biology lab work, with the thought that it wasn’t company-forming but might inspire me to find something that was one day. Released three podcasts and a blog.

April Media released

May 2025

I volunteered to run a drink booth at my kid’s preschool’s annual fundraiser (which ended up being more of a production than I planned for with my husband out of town that weekend). We went camping as a family with families from our preschool. I moved one level up in the management hierarchy at work, to lead our Engineering organization as a whole. I initiated a 6-week plan to travel to our corporate headquarters once a week to onboard with executive leadership (CEO, VP Product, and more) – taking two San Francisco day trips this month. I 3D printed, wired up, and programmed an orbital shaker for my home biohacking lab, only to discover my husband had a larger, more effective one sitting around in his home chemistry lab (packed away after moving to a facility). I did my first experiment transforming E. coli to accept a plasmid – successfully. Released two podcasts.

May Media Released

June 2025

This month I focused on work, and biology experiments at home took a back seat. I took three San Francisco trips, including an extended one for my first corporate board meeting for work. The family took a week trip to Healdsburg, CA for Edge Esmeralda 2025, and went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I worked for the week, except for taking PTO to volunteer at the childcare (indoors for half a day, on a farm for half a day). At the end of the month we took off to Oaxaca, Mexico for the next 30 days. I did my mid-year Passion Planner reflection. We went on a podcast hiatus in June after two (thankfully not consecutive) audio mishaps that involved hours of lost audio – the first was deemed accidental, but after the second I determined both to be the result of a gnarly iOS voice memo lock screen bug. My goal is to get back to this in 2026! Big news as well was a positive pregnancy test, meaning we were on the journey to four kids as a family – a huge dream of mine.

July 2025

I spent most of the month in Oaxaca City solo parenting with our 3 kids (not solo in truth: we brought a live-in nanny who worked 8 hours on weekdays). The older two attended Spanish immersion school. I took cooking lessons in Spanish for a few hours after work each day (Monday through Thursday), and went to three Michelin star restaurants during that slot on Fridays. We traveled to the beach at Puerto Escondido for the weekend. I focused on recruiting at work as we strove to double our engineering org. Several friends visited us, along with a former colleague who stayed near us for the month and shared our nanny during daytimes. My son made friends with a family from the Spanish immersion school that happened to be from our neighborhood back in California, and we started keeping in touch, having similar kid-raising philosophies. I had a few migraines, probably a vortex of job stress, “single motherhood,” and travel stress. I had my year anniversary at work. We returned home, and I had a midwife appointment where everything looked normal baby-wise. I started Invisalign to straighten a niggling snaggle tooth.

August 2025

I attended Defcon in Las Vegas with my hacking team from work. My husband had a trip at the same time (taking our big kids) and my mother-in-law was kind enough to visit from Australia to care for our youngest. I visited my brother and family over a weekend in Portland, bringing my family. I started planning an Oaxacan cooking dinner party and sent out invites. I hired a lot of folks at work. This month was light on the outside-of-work productivity front, and I considered it a victory that I read a lot, relaxed, traveled, and made it through the month.

September 2025

I restarted baking sourdough 1-2 times per week. I traveled to work’s quarterly board meeting in San Francisco. I reserved our month-long family trip (coworking + kids camp + travel + events) for next summer and sent out invites to friends to join (interested? get in touch). I held my Oaxacan dinner party, cooking for 20 at home with the help of a friend acting as sous chef. I cleaned out my biolab, which had been lying dormant since May. I had my 20-week scan, which went well. The last day of the month I got a promotion from Head of Engineering to VP of Engineering, which was fantastic news – same org structure, bigger expectations.

October 2025

Besides cooking, reading, and working out, this month was fairly light on hobbies outside of work. I drove out to Malibu with my husband to board a floating sauna engineered by a friend. We ended up hitchhiking on a small Amazon-purchased raft, and enjoying the vibes when we arrived. I checked out the Hollywood Farmer’s Market for the first time, which was a lot of fun. I had a good run working out more than 50% of days, churning through Peloton prenatal content. I cooked a lot, trying out new recipes and cookbooks – usually 4-5 hours a week.

My sister-in-law stopped by from Portland. I wanted to write more (blogs, nonfiction, fiction) but wasn’t really making time for it. This month I had the idea to buy a new iPad (the existing one I had was 10 years old) as that used to be where I felt most inspired to write, but it would be another month before I followed through.

November 2025

I voted. I wrote a lot of blogs (four), most notably a tome about how we educate our kids. I felt like my hobbies were finally on the upswing again. I went to a cool invite-only AI event in LA hosted by Grimes. I had Friendsgiving with friends and Thanksgiving with family, trying out a few new recipes. I traveled to SF to meet up with one of my cornerstone engineering teams. I bought the iPad I had been eyeing (the top-of-the-line 11 inch) and set it up, and immediately saw success in writing more.

I started reading middle grade fiction in preparation for potentially writing some myself. I started brainstorming reasons why I might be doing fewer hobbies (lack of community to share with?) and tried rejoining Instagram briefly, only to find its feed especially jarring after so long away from news and algorithmic feeds. I cleared out my kitchen of a bunch of old bulk food stockpiled during COVID, clearing up a lot of space.

I vibe-coded an app to alert me when my husband starts his commute home (with his consent!). I used GitHub Copilot, the Tesla API, and Pushover notification service, and started running the service locally on my computer to great results. I now get a push notification to my watch with an ETA home when he leaves work.

November Blogs published

December 2025

I traveled to San Francisco for a week for another board meeting at work. My older kids had a holiday piano recital. My friend and fellow astrophysicist Chiara Mingarelli stopped by. I spent the month digitizing my biohacking lab notebook in Benchling as a way to review my spring and summer experiments, and to brainstorm ways to get back in the lab at home. I took PTO to travel to Australia with the family, spending time on the beach in Newcastle, sleeping on a small yacht and visiting islands, and seeing the New Year’s Eve fireworks from Sydney.

I started visiting Substack more, finding some like-minded content and the pull of the algorithm or 24-hour news cycle absent. A 2026 goal is to find my online community somewhere – I think Substack might be it, and to restart the podcast, which seems to have been motivating to continue with hobbies (and share with our one fan!). I published a blog.

December Blogs published

2025 Travel Review

  • Palm Springs (3 days)
  • SF (9 times, 23 days) – without family
  • Camping in CA (3 days)
  • Austin, Texas (5 days) – without family
  • Healdsburg, CA (7 days)
  • Orlando, Florida (4 days) – without family
  • Oaxaca City, Mexico (27 days)
  • Puerto Escondido (3 days)
  • Las Vegas (2 times, 7 days) – second trip without family
  • Portland, Oregon (3 days)
  • Australia (Newcastle, Sydney) (13 days in 2025)

Total days traveled: 95
Percentage of the year away from home: 26%
Total number of trips: 19
Flights taken: 31

2026 and beyond

I’m looking forward to what’s next in 2026, including finding more inspirational folks to interact with online. If I should be following your work and cheering you on, get in touch!