Festive greetings to one and all! 🎄❄️
As this beautiful year of 2023 comes to a close, I’m delighted to share one last 5 Bullet Friday to help propel you into the new year! As ever, please enjoy this fortnightly selection of social ideas, tips, tricks and intriguing finds that I’ve come across or re-discovered over the past weeks. Let’s jump in.
1. The Warn’s Christmas Song: Gaudete! – I just have to begin this week’s edition with our annual family Christmas video. It is, incredibly, our 7th annual foray onto the Yuletide stages of YouTube. Above and beyond being a lovely little creative project each December, I take stock each year as I put it together of just lucky I am to have such an incredible family.
2. A personal tool I’m sharing: Jacob’s New Year’s Audit and Planning template – I take the end of each year pretty seriously and spend a good half day taking stock. It has two phases. PART 1: I audit my Google Calendar for the previous year, making two separate lists of the things that gave me energy, and of those which felt like a drag. I then commit for the next year to maximise time spent on those activities which I enjoyed, and to find strategies to minimise time spent on energy-depleting activities. Of course, you don’t need to have used Google Calendar for this – you can also simply sit and reflect for a while on what you did each month. PART 2: This is where I make a cheat sheet of all the things I want to do and how I want to do them in the following year. It includes thinking about some new guiding values, priorities, skills I want to nurture, daily habits I want to build in and updating my ‘bucket list’ – a random assortment of things that I might do in the coming year (but don’t have to do). Importantly, after doing this, I print out this sheet and keep it in my notebook. I take 30 minutes at the end of each month to take a look and see what I’ve managed to uphold and where I might have veered off track. It’s a great little grounding exercise that carries me through the year.
3. An article that gets it right: Reducing the migration panic rhetoric – This Guardian article makes a great point over the difference between the UK and Spain when it comes to handling irregular migration. As I’ve long suspected, one of the best actions we take (although I’m guilty for failing at this) about migration is just to shut up about it. Migration is a natural phenomena – we need to stop making it so political and just deal with it in a compassionate way.
4. A scandal no one seems to care about: Supermarket member’s card – Though I’m not one of them, over 23 million of us have a Tesco ClubCard. But from selling personal data, to influencing consumer trends on a national scale, from helping supermarkets rake in profits to monopolising the market, they are (in my opinion) one of the most conniving yet ubiquitous consumer schemes. This Channel 4 Dispatches documentary that came out a couple of weeks ago powerfully reveals some of their nefarious practices – just watch the last 10 minutes from 37’40.
5. A campaign I’m launching: Phone Free February – Together with my friend Charlotte, we’re piloting Phone Free February very soon! Want to join us and take the challenge? Check it out and choose between Level 1: PhoneFlex or Level 2: PhoneFree. You can focus on sleep, work or socialising and together we’ll be changing our phone habits over February’s 29 days to radically renegotiate our relationship with our smartphones! We also just recently updated our presentation deck in case you want to have a sneak peak!
📣 Callouts from me and my network
👨💻 Need an awesome website? – check out GSF Creations, my new sustainable web design agency
🧡 Fundraising Trustee at Refugee Biriyani & Bananas (where I’m also a Trustee)
📱 Honest Mobile – use referral code jacobwarn1994 to join the UK’s most sustainable network
That’s it for this fortnight – and this year! Thank you for being a part of the 5 Bullet Friday: the social edition – and I look forward to sharing more ideas and inspiration in 2024!
Finally, as ever, please let me know your thoughts and feedback – and send anything you’d like me to include in upcoming editions this way.
