I spent a lot of time alone during the holiday period, except at work, and on New Year's Eve. It’s been a long time since I’ve been completely alone for more than a day, and I almost forgot how much I enjoy being cut off from the outside world. I was feeling pretty tired and uninspired for the last couple of months, and I think this definitely helped me to recharge my batteries.

Work was pretty fun during that period as well. Since most people are not in the office, that means there are also a lot fewer deadlines to stick to. This allowed me to let go of some of the more boring, standardized work I’ve been doing and just let my creative juices flow and rethink some of my existing reports. Because of time constraints, a lot of my reports are unstructured and inefficient, and I always feel that they are not great, just ok. I wished I had a couple of weeks more to work on my own projects without worrying about deadlines, but I still managed to have a good feeling about it.