12 Useful Things For 2025
Want every useful tool, trick, exercise and advice from this year to help you work and live better? You've come to the right place.
What a year.
It’s been a very long one, full of soaring highs and crushing lows. But the end of the year is just within grasp.
In what has now become an annual Christmas challenge (see 12 Useful Things from 2024 and 2023), the final newsletter of the year is a shortcut to every single tool, trick, exercise and piece of advice that I’ve shared over the last year to help you work and live better.
If you’ve been following along for all twelve months, you know that a few months ago I launched my first mentorship and training group called This Year. I’m now working with 20 excellent humans for the next 12 months and it’s been such a thrill already. If you want to see what we’ve been up to, you can read the early experience from one of the participants here (and I’ve just opened up a waitlist for the next annual intake here).
Now, let’s return to all the useful things we discussed this year, starting all the way back in January with the first OUTLET for 2025. As an added bonus, at the end I’ve also include my 3 favourite ideas from my weekly column in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
So here are 12 Useful Things for 2025:
1. Annual Trends & Insights
We kicked the year off with another annual tradition: a kinda secret Google Drive containing hundreds of insights from some of the world’s smartest people. It doesn’t matter what industry you work in, these insights were a crystal ball predicting almost every topic imaginable, and it’s one of the most useful tools to help you process and make sense of what’s happening.
2. Learn, Earn and Burn
In February, I shared a simple tool that I use to help put all of the small distractions of life into perspective to better focus on the meaty things that matter. It detailed that there are three stages of life - Learn, Earn and Burn - and knowing where you are right now, and where you want to, can be very insightful.
3. Travel Better
Ok ok, it wasn’t just one useful thing this month. This newsletter was the second most viewed post of the year, and for very good reason. It took five years of constant travel to summarise almost 50 of my husband and my favourite travel hacks into one single post for anyone who wants to learn how to holiday like a professional. Tens of thousands of people read this one, which made me extremely satisfied this year.
4. Control Your Emails
Email is out of control, and rising. The numbers obviously vary, but data suggests that the average white-collar worker receives around 600 emails a week, or just over 100 every single day. It’s way too much, so this month I shared how I personally deal with it in the hope it might help you too. If it can help you claw back even a few minutes a day, then it’s a job well done.
5. New Audio Heaven
If you’ve got any long drives coming up over the Christmas break, then this is the post for you. Discover your next favourite listen so you’ll never have to sit through a long, boring car ride ever again. This was the most popular post of the entire year, with tens of thousands of people reading about 34 of the best podcasts that you can possibly have to amuse your for hours. I find myself returning to this post whenever I need something excellent to listen to, and you should too.
6. Behind The Scenes of Writing
Writing a book is a long, meticulous and insane process, which I why I wanted to pull the curtain back and explain exactly my method for doing it. I’m currently writing my fourth book, and this is the same process that I’m going through right now. There is no shortcut to it, so it’s nice to see behind-the-scenes of how I think about, research, write and edit all my non-fiction books.
7. Your Private Advisors
If you want to really get ahead in 2026, you need to build a diverse and trusted group of people around you to give you guidance and accountability when you need it the most. In this month I explained exactly who you need on your Personal Board of Directors, and why. I’m very lucky to have curated many people around me that help me be better, and you really should too.
8. How To Use AI Better
‘AI Slop’ was named the word of the year in 2025, and it is now everywhere you look. You’re likely to see versions of lazy AI slop appear everywhere, from vomiting buzzwords in lengthy reports at work, to crafting robotic-sounding prose on emails and social media. So when it comes to using AI for anything creative, this is a simple way to think about how to use it better to stop the slop.
9. Grow Your Profile
Minimum Viable Posting is the least amount of posting you can do on a platform that you can consistently maintain. Think of how often you’d like to post, and then halve it. If you’ve been meaning to start posting regularly to any social platform, chose a cadence that feels so easily achievable that you’ve got no option but to do it.
10. In Defence of Boring Jobs
In one of my favourite columns of the year, I wrote here about many of the underrated positives to having a typically “boring” job. These are the types of jobs that are predictable and stable, where you know exactly what you need to do, often repeat it until closing time, and do the same most days. They might be considered unsexy or uninteresting by some, and once you master exactly how to do it, there are few thrills left in learning new things. The opposite of a boring job is one where each day is unpredictable, requiring every ounce of your energy to dodge your way around new challenges.
11. Drop The ‘Busy’ Facade
One of my pet hates are people who always say they are just “sooooo busy”. It’s a common refrain in the workplace, with some people clutching so hard to the descriptor that it’s basically part of their personality. But – and here’s the harsh reality – everyone is busy. Every single one of us has too many items on our to-do list, we’ve all got places to go and there are dozens of open tabs in our brains that are clamouring for our attention. This story here was another enjoyable topic talking about the common trap of ‘busyness’.
12. Executive Wasteland
Lastly, there’s a strange place in your career you might find yourself in one day, whether you like it or not. It’s not a destination many would choose to visit, but you usually have no choice. The place I’m referring to is ‘executive wasteland’, the name that’s given when senior professionals, regardless of how much experience they have, can’t find their next role. It’s a sadly common phenomenon, multiplied by the simple maths that the higher you climb up the corporate ladder, complete with larger salaries and expectations, the fewer jobs there are. In this story I explain what it is, and how to get out of it.
And that’s it for the year!
Thank you so much for being an OUTLET subscriber. I genuinely love sharing useful things with you each month, and especially have loved every single email response I’ve got back in response throughout the year.
I’m now back in Australia, and really hanging for the Christmas break to spend time with my family and friends around the country, do some hiking, snorkelling, eating and reading. The perfect combo.
Hope you have a great break and will catch you in the new year.
Yours in usefulness,
Tim
Love this!