This will be the theme for 2010 - Sharpening the Saw, best explained here: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2004/11/sharpen-the-saw/ This blog in fact will form part of it for me as writing seems to be a key aspect of this. I attended a course on the 7 habits course just before xmas and while much of it was very useful, this final habit struck home very powerfully. As Mr Pavlina says - "Downtime is needed too, but it isn’t the same as sharpening the saw." Often the mistake you make is that relaxing is investing in yourself. But it isn't. Relaxing is just putting the saw down, not making it sharper. So one of the things I will be doing this year is much more bushwalking. I've always been keen, but instead of seeing it as just something I enjoy, I now recognise that its an important task...an investment of time in its own right. As such during the xmas break I took myself off to both the Ku-ring-Gai and Royal National Parks and reminded myself just why I live in Sydney. They are both quite remarkable pieces of land - huge untouched swathes of pristine bush right on the northern and southern edges (respectively) of this enormous sprawling, 4.5 million-strong city. Despite their proximity to one of the world's great metropolae, they both have the feeling of being remote and distant. But both are between 45 mins to an hour from the centre of the city! It seemed incredible to me when I first arrived that such untouched, unblemished beauty could be so accessible. Then I remembered that discovery of this fact is one of the factors that led me to settle in Sydney in the first place. Comparing it to the efforts one might make to escape London, Sydney's potential get-away spots make it the Serengeti to London's Sing Sing! This is not to mention the many other spectacular parks in and around Sydney - including the Lane Cove National Park only a stone's throw from my North Ryde office. With Saw sharpening potential in such abundance (lets never forget the beaches) Sydney is paradise found!