The horse is characterised by high energy, moving forward, and freedom
I feel this is funnily aligned with where I am in my life right now. The last few years have been a rebuilding of myself and my business, and I now feel it is time to move forward.
My Daily Schedule
I don’t want to share too much here. I mean minute for minute or hour by hour, but generally I’ll have around 6 hours a day to spend on working for clients. Luckily, presently, this is taken up, plus some.
But luckily I am only slightly over so can get on with my other projects, including this writing. It's 6:07 am on the first Monday of February 2026, and I am thinking of where to now.
Writing is like meditation; it helps me centre myself on the day and process what I am doing, so it is important for me not to miss this. I don't think the work I do for my clients would be half of what I do for them without writing every morning.
A Look Back to Go Forward
It's been five years now that I have been writing almost every day in the morning. It has now become a habit, and I will not stop. I want to take a look back and pat myself on the back because five years is quite an achievement. My writing flow has become more fluid, and I feel my writing has become better because of that.
Another point I want to make is I don't use AI for writing, and I don't think I ever will; the benefits of putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard is shaping my work, and AI could never replace that. With that said let's look at the last few months to see the power of writing in action.
The End of 2025 and the Start of 2026: The never ending article
Last week I finished an article series on building components for Drupal, it took almost a year from the first words written to getting the conclusion done. The finished series is an audit of a Drupal website. The writing of it has allowed me to understand how to build Drupal sites using Layout Builder way more clearly than if I’d just built the site. I don’t see this article series generating a lot of traffic, but who knows.
As stated, it is an audit of my process, meaning it is a cornerstone piece of my knowledge. It has also become a cornerstone piece for my website, as it is the first true multipage article I’ve written. I have other multiple page guides, but this particular article has some connection between the pages; let’s call them chapters.
Dividing Up the Article and Making it Clearer
As I wrote it, I started to realise that leaving it as a 5000-word plus article was not the best idea. I noticed that I could better share it as multiple articles.
However, I still felt that the articles needed to keep the progression as it was about auditing a site I had built.
I wanted to make each chapter stand alone, but I also wanted to and needed to tie in the previously learnt ideas to make what I was writing make sense. This is the difference from other multipage guides on the site, where they don't have this flow on and can be used as is without reference to the other parts of the guide.
How did I Break up the Article?
To do this, I decided to write an outro, to introduce the next chapter and how it will relate to what you had just read.
I then wrote an intro in the next chapter to summarise what I was going to cover and introduce concepts from previous chapters to explain how I had got where I am. I feel this works well, as it makes every chapter stand alone to some degree, but also invites readers to go back to the other chapters if need be.
In a way, it mirrors one of the main points of the article, where starting in the middle of an unknown process is a valid approach when designing software.
Break down the chapters too
As a side note, I would like to point out the importance of having a page table of content, too. So as well as having the guide chapters clearly visible in the sidebar, having a table of content for the current page allows the reader to quickly scan the page to get an idea of what the page is about.
This idea is what makes this a cornerstone of my learning and therefore of my site; the recognition of the importance of both breaking up long articles into chapters and breaking up chapters to be scan-able. The implementation of this still needs perfecting, but it is working in theory.
So I feel this article brings me full circle again, like it is a beginning, like I’ve discovered something new, but in fact, I am at a drop-off point; I am somewhere in the middle and can go in any direction from here. Which asks the question I introduced in the opening, where to now?
Where to Now?
I cover this in the how to build components for Drupal article series conclusion. To summarise, I will continue to build on Drupal. However, the true direction of my work is in designing and building beautiful and usable UIs and websites.
To build beautiful UIs I will start to modernise my workflows. This is not a new concept to me; it is something I have done in the past, and now I need to do it again. Shed the old skin since the year of the snake has just passed, and use the energy of the energy and speed of the horse to catch up with this AI revolution.
I need to automate what I can using LLMs, but retaining the human touch is the goal.
Finally, I hope through using more modern tools with front-end development I will be able to move back to the design work, so expect that section of my site to expand also.
I also have a few personal projects I will work on to refine my processes and design work, so expect to see more about them in my work.
Well, that is about it, a year of front-end design and development fun. To follow along, be sure to sign up to the newsletter below.
Thanks for reading!
Simon