Happy 2025, Dispatcheers!
We’ve now been writing our wee newsletter for nearly two years, and we’re delighted that so many of you have joined us on this wild ride. Whether you’re new to the Dispatch or you’ve been with us since the beginning, it’s great to have you here.
As tradition dictates, I’m dedicating our first newsletter of 2025 to my goals for the year ahead. But before I get to that, here’s a recap of my goals from 2024, along with a self-assigned grade for each one:
🙅♂️ Establish boundaries between work and life (B)
My work-life balance is perhaps best measured by whether or not the Teams app is installed on my phone. And, after making it most of the year Teams-free, the little rascal snuck its way back into my ‘Productivity’ folder (nerd alert!) in the last few months of 2024. It’s still there as I’m writing this, but I’m deleting it… … now!
🧠 Protect ‘deep work’ time in my calendar (F)
I deserve nothing more than an ‘F’ for this one. As it’s done many times in the past, that ‘Deep Work Thursday’ very quickly started to look like a blank space in my calendar. Before long, it filled up with meetings and administratia. ‘Ross D tries hard but could do better.’
🤖 Automate or streamline repetitive administrative tasks (C)
I’m maybe being a bit generous to myself here, in so far as I haven’t managed to automate a single administrative task in the last twelve months (grrrrr!). But I like to think that my Asana cards and project folders have never been more up-to-date. Ross G might tell you otherwise.
🏆 Submit a project for an award – and win it! (A)
Perhaps ironically, my most successful goal of 2024 was the one I had the least control over. But, hey, I’ll take the win! Back in November, Mindtools and Southwestern Railway claimed Gold in the ‘Best use of blended learning — commerical sector’ category at the Learning Technologies Awards in London. I’m over the moon for our team, and still can’t quite believe it.
Now, as report cards go, that’s obviously a bit of a mixed bag. So, I should point out that the personal goals above don’t quite map on to the SMART goals I set with Ross G at the start of the year. I got a lot done in 2024, just not exactly in the way that I wanted to.
With that disclaimer out of the way, on to my goals for 2025!

💾 Build a digital learning experience outside of an authoring tool
Before I started working as an instructional designer, my uninformed opinion was that conventional authoring tools limited the types of experiences that organizations could offer their employees.
Now that I’ve been in the role for several years, I think I’d argue that the constraints of authoring tools actually encourage designers to think creatively, finding ways to develop novel experiences within familiar parameters.
But I don’t think pre-ID Ross D was entirely wide of the mark.
If ‘the medium is the message’, authoring tools (and LMSs) affect the way that information is framed and received in organizations, and their logic shapes the types of experiences that instructional designers can create.
While I’m still figuring out precisely what this will look like, one of my goals for 2025 is to explore opportunities to build and deliver digital learning experiences outside of an authoring tool. (And, yes, the unSMARTness of this goal probably means I’m setting myself up for another ‘F’.)
🏆 Submit ANOTHER project for an award - and win it!
When Ross G asked me what my ‘great ambition’ for 2025 was during the madness that is our annual Christmas podcast, I recycled one of my 2024 goals: ‘Submit another project for an award, and win it'.
Why was this my answer, given what we achieved with South Western Railway last November? Was it hubris? Ego? Vanity? All of the above?
Well, maybe a little… But mostly, it’s a mindset I try to apply to all of my projects.
As I’ve written previously, awards are useful, even if you choose not to enter them.
By the end of next year, I want to be able to look back at all of the projects I’ve worked on, and think that any of them could be potential candidates for an award. If I can say that, I’ll know I’ve done my job well.
🤪 Stop writing this newsletter at weekends
Last but by no means least, one of my main goals for this year is to stop writing this newsletter over the weekend. Put differently, I want to be less toxically productive in 2025.
I’ve long had the ambition to start a separate, personal Substack, and there’s no way I’ll have the time and energy for that if I’m thinking about L&D every other Sunday. You’ll know I’m succeeding in this goal if there’s an occasional gap in your inbox over the next twelve months. ;)
If one of your goals for 2025 is to work with our award-winning Custom team, then get in touch by emailing custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter from your inbox.
🙏 Favour time
On the topic of awards, our client Heathrow Airport (specifically their Equality, Diversity and Inclusion team) are up for the ‘Learning Giveback Award’ at the 2025 LPI Learning Awards.
Their experiential programme, Right Where I Belong, encouraged employees to reflect on the impact they have and commit to taking action.
This project, led by our own Learning Experience Manager Claire Gibson, is subject to a public vote from Januar 14 to 17! So, if you have a minute, please do vote for us and the Heathrow team. Thanks!
🎧 On the podcast
Do remote and hybrid managers need different skills to those who work in-person? If so, what are those skills and how do we develop them?
In this first episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast for 2025, Ross G and I were joined by return guest Gary Cookson, author of Making Hybrid Working Work. We discuss:
The ‘sensory loss’ that takes place when managers move to a hybrid environment
The digital signals that help managers understand their teams
Strategies for building hybrid management capability.
Check out the episode below. 👇
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website. Want to share your thoughts? Get in touch @RossDickieMT, @RossGarnerMT or #MindToolsPodcast
📖 Deep dive
This week’s ‘Deep dive’ is an oldie but a goodie!
In a 1973 study, researchers from Princeton University set out to understand the situational and personality factors that influence an individual’s willingness to help a person in need.
The subjects of the study were seminary students, who were tasked with delivering a talk on either: i) the parable of the Good Samaritan; ii) a topic unrelated to helping others.
The students were subjected to different time pressures, with some told they were running late, others told they were on time, and others told they were early for their appointment.
Before participating in this exercise, the students completed a test assessing their religious orientation, and the extent to which they prioritized personal spirituality over helping others.
To deliver their talk, the students were asked to walk from one building to another. En route, they encountered a disheveled stranger in an alleyway, showing clear signs of distress.
The results of the study showed that perceived time pressure — not task relevance (the topic of the talk) or personality traits (the results of the assessment) — was the strongest predictor of helping behavior amongst the participants.
Darley, J. M., & Batson, C. D. (1973). ‘"From Jerusalem to Jericho": A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27(1), 100–108.
👹 Missing links
🧠 Are young people’s attention spans really shrinking?
In my last Dispatch, one of the ‘missing links’ I shared was an article from The Atlantic, exploring elite college students’ diminishing ability to read long-form prose. In response to that article, Professor Marion Thain acknowledges that, while we shouldn’t be complacent about shifts in our focus, it is possible that young people are developing new modes of attention that confer their own benefits: ‘What of the rapid, quick-fire, written exchanges of instant messaging? The art of the pithy, witty expression condensed into 140 or 280 characters?’.
🤳 The desperation of the Instagram photo dump
If you spent any time on Instagram in the days leading up to the New Year, you will likely have come across several ‘2024 Highlights’ carousels — ‘carousel’ being the sophisticated word for ‘dump’. As Kyle Chayka points out, these posts reflect an evolution in social-media aesthetics. Gone are the days of the single, perfectly curated image. Instagram users now, and particularly younger users, instead choose to share ‘faux-messy but actually carefully selected compendia showcasing the detritus of their lives.’ What a time to be alive.
Last year, Platformer’s Casey Newton predicted that 2024 would see Google catch up to OpenAI in the LLM race, that Threads would overtake X in daily users, and that social media would fill up with synthetic content in the run-up to the US election. This year, he’s betting that the TikTok ban will go into effect in the US, that AI companies will continue to make incremental improvements rather than exponential leaps, and that all the tech giants will copy the Meta Ray-Bans approach to mixed reality. What’s your take?
👋 And finally…
As you take your first steps into 2025, just remember that Phil Dunphy was here waiting for you.
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