This week I am officially "on retreat". I haven't actually left my house because budget, but what I have done is cancel all meetings, turn off all notifications, and I'm not doing any small admin tasks or replying to messages unless they're urgent.

It started because I was getting frustrated about how much time each week was devoted to "business as usual", and how hard it was to find large chunks of focused time for the following activities:

1. Reading in depth articles, watching videos etc
2. Researching audiences for potential passive income projects
3. Writing code
4. Writing blog posts
5. Developing my upcoming workshop​
   ​

So I set up an out-of-office auto-reply, and planned a meeting-free distraction-free retreat week.
​
As I had five things I wanted to deep-dive on, the programme for the week was easy: Each day, Mon to Fri, is devoted to the activities listed above.
​
At the end of every day I've inevitably wanted to do more, and been tempted to carry through to the following day. But I knew that would happen. Luckily each activity is open-ended and doesn't have a finish point, which makes it a lot easier to say "OK, yes, of course I'd like to do more, but I've done enough"... and then move on to a new project the following day.
​
My favourites so far were reading day and coding day. Today is writing day! Hence this post. And I'm also planning to write and schedule a raft of new LLM-related posts, a lot of which will be reporting back on what I learnt from my reading and coding days. I'll probably schedule one of those for tomorrow and the rest for coming weeks. And of course I won't write as many of them as I'd like, but I'll write enough.

I really enjoy having this focused time to build momentum on each scheduled set of tasks. In an ideal world I'd do it once per month, or have more than one day for each activity. That's sadly unrealistic given my current work cadence, but I'll definitely be doing this again.

Come on my journey with me

All of the reading, researching, coding, writing and development I've done this week has been in relationship to LLM-augmented coding and test driven development. If you want to know more about what I'm up to in this space, you can do the following:

• Read some advice on getting started with LLM-augmented coding​
• ​Subscribe to this newsletter​
• Sign up for a workshop in building robust maintainable software using genAI:
  • 18th to 19th Nov 2025: A two-day workshop for Trifork Academy in Amsterdam
  • 25th Nov 2025: A one-day workshop at Software Architecture Gathering in Berlin
• Keep an eye on my socials (LinkedIn, BlueSky, Mastodon)
  • …and my events page…
  • …for new workshops and training sessions
• ​Read the testimonials​
  • …about the above workshops and others