2025 - what a year

Coming from an IT and agile background, retrospectives were already a familiar concept to me at work. Thanks to the wonderful Johannes Thoenes, I realized how powerful they can be outside of a professional context as well. So many years back, I started with doing personal retros as well.

For anyone not familiar with the concept: A retrospective is a structured reflection session where a team looks back at a given period of time to understand what went well, what didn’t go as planned, and what could be improved going forward. It’s a simple but effective tool for learning and continuous growth.

While retrospectives are widely used in agile work environments, surprisingly few people apply them to their personal lives. But they work just as well there, maybe even better. So before diving into my 2025, let’s take a quick step back and look at how I approach personal retros.

Why personal retros matter (and how I do them)

At work, retrospectives help teams identify what’s working well, acknowledge successes, and openly discuss challenges and improvement areas. Over time, I realized that the same structure can be incredibly helpful on a personal level - not only, but especially when life feels busy, overwhelming, or just a bit out of balance.

Since quite some years, I’ve been doing personal retros on three different levels:

Monthly retros I usually do a simple Mad / Sad / Glad brainstorming, followed by a quick check on action items from the previous month and ending with gathering action items for the upcoming month.

Quarterly retros These are more about zooming out - and tbh maybe not a typical retro themselves. I review the past few months, note highlights and lowlights, and look for recurring themes or patterns. Based on that, I define a small set of focus points for the upcoming quarter.

Yearly retro Not surprisingly, my yearly retro goes a bit deeper. It starts with a broad brainstorming session, followed by a review of the monthly and quarterly notes. I look for patterns, tendencies, and lessons learned over the year - and then derive action points for the next one. This usually takes around an hour. After that, I let things sink in for a bit before breaking those action points down into more concrete goals and habits for the coming months.

Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches might now point out note that my setup isn’t a 1:1 match with retrospectives at work - and that’s absolutely true. I don’t experiment with lots of different methods either, but stick to the ones that have worked well for me over the years. So bear with me - this is just my personal adaptation of the agile retrospective for my own life 😇

With that context out of the way, let’s talk about 2025.

My 2025 - Metalevel

2025 turned out to be quite a year.

I spent 85 days on the road across 18 trips, taking me to places like Hamburg, Munich, Nürnberg, Winterthur, Zurich, or the Bodensee region. I attended 11 conferences and meetups, contributing to 8 of them through talks, workshops, or moderation - and was even organizing one. On top of that, I managed to catch 5 concerts (one of them with my son performing ❤️) and 4 festivals. And along the way, I met a lot of amazing people.

But 2025 wasn’t all sunshine, festivals, and exciting travel. It also brought challenges I wasn’t prepared for. There was a family loss that I’m still not done processing. And physically? My body decided to remind me that I’m not getting any younger. I’ve dealt with lumbago attacks for years, usually about one per year - but of course, this time it hit right before conference moderation and a festival 🤪. Bruised ribs a few months later weren’t any fun either - especially with more travel and conferences coming up. There were a few more unpleasant surprises along the way, which I’ll spare you the details of. On top of that, I spent large parts of the year struggling with recurring depressive phases and what I fear were early signs of burnout.

So while things may have looked exciting and successful from the outside, 2025 was a year where I struggled quite a bit internally. My yearly retro hence this time focused less on “doing more” - and much more on how to make the upcoming year not just exciting, but also healthier and more sustainable.

Retro Brainstorming

After gathering impressions and reviewing the year, a few recurring themes became very clear:

Despite trying to be more active - strengthening my back, moving more, and ideally losing some weight along the way - these phases rarely lasted. Busy periods often became an excuse to stop listening to my body and neglect self-care, even though I knew better.
Thanks to all the busy phases (not just in 2025 but also the years before), quite a few tasks had been piling up for a long time. They kept losing the priority game against other things. While I sometimes managed to reduce that backlog, it never felt sustainable.
I wanted to be more consistent with blogging, improving my website, and being active on social media. Some of that worked - in phases. But those productive bursts were usually followed by long phases of inactivity.
Carrying so many different responsibilities meant I often found myself sitting at my laptop late into the night - instead of spending time with my loved ones or taking time for myself. Getting up, working, squeezing in family logistics, and going straight back to work & volunteering tasks until bedtime might be OKish occasionally - but not as a long-term default.

So yes - there are still quite a few construction sites to take care of 😉 That said, the year also had many great moments, too:

Having loads of fun at conferences, meeting or reconnecting with many awesome people
Playing around with my Raspberry Pis, blogging and speaking about it
Many wonderful moments with my family
Visiting festivals (one with my son, too) and different concerts
Still not regretting for a second that I bought a Bulli for camping in 2024
And despite all the travel, I was on the road less than in 2024

What’s up for 2026, then?

Let’s face it: 2026 will still be a wild and busy year. There will be travel, conferences, festivals, work, volunteering work on different initiatives — and of course kid, family & household. And that’s okay - I need things to happen, projects to drive, ideas to explore.

I still set a few concrete goals to help create a better balance:

Do my back exercises every day, no matter what. (Goodbye, lumbago)
Use my lunch break for a 20 – 30 minute walk, rain or shine.
Close the laptop no later than 21:00 and take one full hour of me-time before heading to bed.
Block the time between 18:00 – 20:00 for family time only.
Distribute workloads more evenly across the year.
Finally accept that no one can be perfect - including me. 😇

From a professional perspective, I’m especially excited about one thing: rocking my talk at KubeCon in March 😇 Beyond that, I have a number of technical topics I want to dive deeper into this year - and write about along the way. I’m also planning to apply for the CNCF Ambassador Program. Let’s see how that goes.

And last but not least: Now that my website is finally updated - I want to keep it alive. You’ll definitely find out how that turns out 😉