This is my “now” page inspired by Derek Sivers. It answers “what I’m doing now?“. My life, projects and priorities. I post an update here every 1-3 months.
What’s up as of August 2026?
This summer took us back to Poland for a few weeks, something we’ve now done several years running and long enough that it’s stopped feeling like a trip and started feeling like a second rhythm to the year. Somewhere over Europe on the way out, a podcast rerouted my thinking for the rest of the holiday: a throwaway mention of an essay called “The Tail End” that I couldn’t quite put down afterwards. In between, we carved out a few days in Vienna: cafés, a cathedral, kids gone quiet in front of a pipe organ. The thread running under all of it is how little of some things we actually have left, and how easy it is not to notice.
🎧 A Podcast I Wasn’t Ready For
On the flight to Kraków I put on an old episode of The Random Show: Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose, no agenda, just two people talking. Somewhere in the middle they mentioned an essay, Tim Urban's "The Tail End", from Wait But Why.
The premise is simple and a bit brutal. Urban charts out his time with his parents in days, not years, and works out that by the time he left home, he'd already used up something like 93% of all the time he'll ever spend with them in person. Ferriss said the same chart changed how he planned family trips afterwards.
I'd recommend both: the episode for the conversation, the essay for the fifteen minutes it takes to read and the thinking it won't let go of afterwards. It's not a guilt trip. It's closer to a maths problem you didn't know you needed solved.
☕ Vienna, Slowly
We broke up the Poland stretch with a few days in Vienna, staying in Favoriten and mostly walking everywhere. I leaned on my AI assistant to plan most of it: museum picks, walking routes, the legwork I'd normally lose an evening to. Demel became our anchor point, an old Viennese coffee house with cakes under glass and staff who seem to have been there since the empire. We went back twice, the second time to sit upstairs among the chandeliers.
The assistant flagged the best find almost as an aside: Sunday mass in St. Stephen's Cathedral, pipe organ and choir filling the whole building. Because it's a mass, not a concert, it's free to walk in, and we stayed for all of it. The service was in German, but the priest paused to summarise it in English for visitors, a small, generous gesture. The kids sat completely still for the first time all week.
Vienna isn't cheap, and a few days there add up fast next to the rest of the trip. But as a short family detour (cafés, a cathedral, gelato in between), it earned its place on the itinerary. We'd go back.
⏳ Show Up and Hang Out
My father still lives alone in Poland; we live in the UK. That fact usually sits quietly in the background, but Urban's essay dragged it into the foreground for the whole flight home.
One of his three takeaways is the one I can't argue my way out of: geography isn't neutral. Living somewhere else from someone you love doesn't just cost you convenience, it quietly cuts the total time you'll ever have with them, whether you notice the bill or not. The other two, priorities and quality time, matter too, but this is the one where I made the choice, and I'm the one paying for it.
Later in the same episode, Kevin Rose talked about caring for his mother, who has dementia but still knows him. His conclusion was the simplest version of all this: the only thing you can do is show up and hang out. I'm trying to take that literally, not as a nice sentiment.
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#blog
This page is inspired by Derek Sivers “now page” movement.
Updated: 23 Aug 2026
