Work, Woodlands, and Geocaches

If the only honest answer you have to “What do you do for fun?” is “Work”, this is probably uncomfortably familiar.

There have been long stretches in my life where my job was not just something I did, it was who I was. On paper that looks impressive. In reality it is quietly expensive, and not just for you.

When work eats your life and calls it ambition

In the early years of Wirehive I did what a lot of founders do. I convinced myself that total commitment was the only acceptable setting. Long days, late nights, always “just finishing one more thing”.

From the outside I looked like a busy, driven founder. Inside my own head I was telling myself the usual story. I am doing this for the family. If I push hard now, we will all benefit later.

In practice it meant I was there for breakfast, then disappeared into work and often came home after the children were already in bed. Day after day. Week after week. Rachel was carrying most of the load at home while I carried most of the load at work, and somewhere in that split we pretended it was fair.

You look up one day and realise your eldest has gone from baby to small human and you have mostly seen it as a highlight reel. You know the growth curve of the company in exquisite detail, yet you have to think for a moment to remember the last weekday you did the school run, or an afternoon you took off simply to be around.

I am proud of what we built at Wirehive. I would not undo it. What I regret are the automatic trades I made along the way. Evenings that turned into yet another session on the laptop. Bedtimes I missed because “it is just tonight”. The mental load Rachel carried while I was off being “useful”.

That is the first trap. When work expands to fill every gap, you stop noticing how much you are giving up, because constant busyness feels like virtue.

When your “hobbies” are just more work in disguise

The second trap took me longer to see.

When Wirehive was more stable and no longer needed me glued to the controls in the same way, I did not relax. I went looking for more things that felt like work.

I spent time with Surrey Search and Rescue. It is a fantastic organisation and I still have huge respect for what they do. But if I am honest, I slotted into it in exactly the same way I slotted into everything else. Training, structure, clear responsibilities. Useful, serious, demanding. It lit up all the same parts of my brain as the job.

The same with rLab, the Reading makerspace. It is full of creative people and interesting projects, which suited me a little too well. I could take on more, commit to more, turn it into another place where I was responsible for moving things forward.

None of this was bad in itself. Community work matters. Makerspaces are brilliant. The uncomfortable realisation, looking back, is that I used them as additional places to be busy. Wirehive was running itself more, and instead of using that margin to be present at home, I filled it with more structured activity that felt familiar.

It was still “work”, just in a different uniform.

Covid and the forced experiment

Covid broke the pattern for me in a way that nothing else had managed.

For the first time in my career I was properly forced to work from home. No office to perform in. No long commutes that allowed me to pretend I was the only thing holding the world together. Just me, a laptop, and my family, all in the same space.

It was jarring. I saw, very quickly, how much of my usual working life was simply momentum. Meetings that happened because they had always happened. The reflex to say yes to travel, to face time, to being “seen”.

Being at home stripped that away. I ate lunch with the family. I heard the noise of the house during the day instead of catching a carefully edited version in the evenings. I saw, close up, the bits of the children’s lives I had been adjacent to, but not fully in.

It also made something painfully clear. Rachel had been doing the heavy lifting at home while I had been out earning money and collecting titles. I had told myself that was balance. Seeing it all in one place made that story much less convincing.

Once you have seen both versions of your life next to each other, the old one stops looking heroic and starts looking careless.

That is where the real shift began. It was not immediate and tidy. It started with a simple question: if I am not going to let work be the only thing that gets my best attention, what else is there?

Finding hobbies that actually pull you out of work

The answer that emerged over time is that I need hobbies that act as genuine distractions, not just more obligations. Things that demand my full focus and make it impossible to think about anything else, in the best possible way.

Owning two woodlands has helped. I now have an almost ridiculous supply of green wood to play with, and getting back into woodwork has been the most unexpectedly helpful thing I have done for my head in years. Carving spoons sounds whimsical until you are in the middle of it, managing grain, edge angles and stubborn knots. It is detailed, slightly risky, very physical. You cannot be mentally composing your next Slack post while you are trying not to slip with a sharp blade.

Leatherworking arrived shortly after. I am a beginner. My cuts are not always straight. My stitching wanders if I rush. But sitting at the table, punching rivets or trying to coax two bits of leather into a clean seam, pulls my attention firmly into my hands.

The woods themselves are a reset.

When I am out there, saw in hand, working out where a tree is going to fall, I am not thinking about the budget cycle or OKRs. I am thinking about the hinge, the wind, the escape route. When you are felling, the stakes are simple and immediate. That clarity is oddly restful.

Some of the best stuff is smaller and closer to home. Instruments left lying around the house that invite you to have a go, even if you only know a couple of chords. Video games that demand your full attention, because dodging rounds in a shooter is incompatible with worrying about Monday’s meeting. None of this is grand or impressive. It just works.

And then there is geocaching.

If you have never taken your children out to look for little hidden boxes in hedgerows and under benches, I recommend it. It is an instant adventure that starts at your front door. There is map reading, puzzle solving, a small sense of victory when you finally find the cache that has defeated you twice before. It drags you all outside and, for a little while, nobody is holding a phone for anything other than navigation.

These are the things that finally started to shift the balance. Not because they are “productive” or worthy, but precisely because they are not.

Hobbies at home, and shared, are different

One of the big objections people have, especially in high pressure jobs, is the feeling that hobbies are selfish. That time you spend on yourself is time you are not giving to work or family.

The thing I have learned is that you can design hobbies that sit right in the middle of that triangle instead of on the edge.

Most of mine happen in and around home. Woodwork in the shed. Leatherwork at the kitchen table. Games in the living room. Geocaching from the front door. They pull me out of work without pulling me out of the house.

More importantly, they can be shared. A child can “help” sand a spoon. They can come and choose which tree is today’s project. They can be the one in charge of the GPS when you are closing in on a geocache. Even if I also do some of these things alone, they are easy to fold into family life.

That makes a huge difference. Instead of hobbies competing with home, they can become part of what home looks like. I am not disappearing to a golf course for an entire day and leaving everyone else to get on with it. I am there, in the mess, making memories that are not just “Dad on a laptop in the corner”.

Why this actually makes work better, not worse

All of this would still matter even if it made me worse at work and better at life. But the interesting thing is that it does the opposite. It makes me better at work too.

Leadership work is mostly thinking work. You are paid for judgement, pattern recognition, handling complexity, making calls that are rarely clear cut. That part of your brain does not recover by doomscrolling or half watching television while you keep an eye on Slack.

It recovers when it is allowed to be somewhere else entirely.

When I am carving, or sewing, or trying to extract the children from a hedge without losing the geocache, a different part of my mind is in charge. The problems are physical and specific. The feedback is immediate. If you cut the wrong line, the spoon looks wrong. If you choose the wrong route through the brambles, you know about it.

That context switch is not a waste of time. It is the mental equivalent of putting a tired laptop to sleep so it stops thrashing the fans. While you are occupied with something small and absorbing, the parts of your mind that normally deal with strategy decks and organisational politics are quietly untangling themselves in the background.

There is another important layer. I am one of those people who always feels I should be doing something useful. If I do not give that instinct a healthy outlet, it will chew on work continuously. Hobbies soak up that restlessness. A half finished spoon, a leather project waiting for the next step, a cache we have not found yet, all give that “must do something” part of me a safe target.

And then there is guilt.

When I spend my weekends actually doing things with my family, I do not sit in Monday meetings thinking about what I should have done. I am not replaying a weekend I wasted checking email. I know I took the kids out. I know I spent time with Rachel. I know I saw friends. That box is ticked on purpose.

Which means work can be guilt free. When I am at work, I am at work. I am not trying to be at home in my head at the same time. People get a present version of me, not someone half here and half somewhere else.

Work on its own stretches to fill every gap and eventually frays. Work plus hobbies that live close to home, that can be shared and that properly absorb you, gives you a rhythm. Focus hard. Step away. Do something with your hands or your kids or both. Come back sharper, calmer, less defensive.

Charity, with a little more honesty

Charitable and community work still matters to me. My involvement with the school is one of the ways I try to contribute something beyond my own career and bank account. Sitting in budget meetings and policy discussions about children who will never know who I am is a useful reality check.

The difference now is that I am more honest about the role it plays in my life. It is part service, part perspective, and I am careful not to let it quietly expand into yet another identity that swallows everything else. I have already seen what happens when I pour all my spare attention into “being useful” outside the home, and I do not want to run that pattern again.

Charity can be a brilliant form of hobby, as long as you are clear about what you are using it for. If it becomes yet another way to avoid being present with the people closest to you, you are back where you started, just wearing a different badge.

What I wish I had understood earlier

I am not writing any of this as someone who has always had it nailed. Quite the opposite. I learned most of these lessons the long way round, with a fair amount of regret baked in.

If I could send a message backwards to the earlier version of me, the one who felt permanently important and permanently behind, it would probably sound something like this:

Your job will always be hungry. It will happily eat every evening, every weekend, every spare thought you let it have, and it will still not be satisfied. Your family will not always be small. Your children will only be this exact age once. Your parents will not always be this well. Your own body will not always be this forgiving.

You do not need to quit, or retreat to a cabin, or dismantle the ambition that got you where you are. You do, though, need to give that ambition neighbours. Hobbies that absorb you. Work at home that looks like play. Small adventures that start at your own front door. Acts of service that widen your world instead of narrowing it.

Do that, and something quite ordinary but important happens. Work stops being the whole story. It becomes one part of a bigger, more interesting life. And when you are working, you can actually relax into it, because you know you have done the other parts on purpose.

That is what I am trying to do now. Some days it goes well. Some days I slip back into old habits and have to pull myself out again. The difference is that I can see the pattern clearly.

And that, in itself, feels like a hobby worth keeping.