I took part in the Australian launch of the Accounting Streams project last night. The event went well, and I am grateful to all those who took part.

The ebook that Susan Smith, Jenni Rose, and I have been working on has been deliberately designed to be appropriate for international use. It's not quite true that all accounting concepts are universal, but there are plenty that are enough so for the potential international audience for this project to be pretty big.

The downside of such an event is that I did not get to bed until midnight. Given that I usually start working at soon after six in the morning, that is much later than usual for me. Being so late does, most definitely, disrupt the early morning blogging routine which has been an essential part of my life for some time now. I am feeling more than averagely bleary-eyed as I write this.

This does, however, provide an opportune moment to record one of my decisions about how I wish to work once all my current projects are complete (and it turned out that my hope that they were all completed a week or so ago was misplaced but that has to happen soon).

Some readers here will recall that late last summer, Steve Keen suggested that he, I, and maybe Danny Blanchflower might hold some public events on our economic thinking, potentially visiting a number of UK locations. For many reasons, I did not have the time to pursue this during the autumn. Since Danny is based in the USA, he was only going to be an occasional participant in this process.

However, having now reflected on this idea again and having taken into account the fact that by far the two biggest audiences for my work are on YouTube and this blog, both of which demand early morning attention if they are to succeed, then accepting regular commitments to be away from home for the sake of smaller audiences than I can achieve here seems to make little sense. There is also some financial risk in setting up any such arrangement, and whilst I am quite happy to have taken that risk with regard to the creation of the YouTube channel, which now seems to be paying off, the scale of risk in running events appears to be much higher. There is also much more associated admin hassle. As a consequence, I have pretty much decided that such events will not form a regular part of my work in the future.

Nor am I accepting any invitations to one-off events at present, although that is for an entirely different reason. As my workload does wind down a little I am realising just how hard I have worked for the last 15 to 18 months. This is especially true as this period of work began just after I recovered from long-covid. I have every intention of keeping routine blogging and a daily video going without interruption at present, but I really do need some time off, not least to plan what I might do next. I am sorry to have already turned down a number of invitations as a result. I don't like doing so, but I really do need time out, and after 45 years of work, I think I can justify that.

It is very unlikely, however, that this will be a period of total inactivity. Both Thomas and I have skills that we want to learn at present because despite having been through a crash course in managing a YouTube channel in real time over the last six months or so, we realise that there is still a great deal to learn on this issue. In particular, Thomas is working on editing ideas, and I am working on how to give the YouTubes a greater focus. I might come back with some more on those ideas soon.