I gave myself a B this quarter. I found a good, consistent rhythm and have been feeling generally good about work. I do still feel like velocity could be a bit higher, and I would have liked to see higher compliance on key habits.

Here’s the lowdown:

  • 🚀 Midana’s beta program is up to ~1500 users, has an NPS of ~44, and is generating ~$2/mo in revenue. People clearly love the product! Monetization continues to be a challenge, though I haven’t yet had a chance to really invest time into experimenting with new monetization channels.
  • 🐢 Midana growth has been stalling while I invest in scalable infrastructure and product management tooling. Most of this quarter has gone to upgrading the backend and mobile client to handle larger amounts of traffic and data.
  • 🍅 I’ve been hitting a pretty consistent ~16-18 pomodoros/day. I’m feeling pretty good about rhythm, routine, and cadence overall, but do want to start seeing if I can increase velocity a bit.
  • ✈️ I’m planning to travel with my girlfriend for ~3 months this summer. We’ll be headed to California, Mexico, Florida, The Bahamas, Washington DC, and New York for varying amounts of time. Planning for travel has taken a small toll on velocity.
  • 🤑 I had a brief, but ultimately unnecessary scare over my taxes, which has served as a good reminder not to get complacent, financially or otherwise, and which helped produce some interesting philosophical insights about uncertainty, stress, and faith.
  • 🚴‍♂️ I secured a bike! I ended up with something very $$$$, and probably tricked out than an amateur really needs, but I’m very happy with it. So far this year I’ve been on ~26 bike rides, though not all on my new bike.
  • 🏊‍♂️🏃🚴‍♂️ I’m training for triathlons again. I’m feeling strong and ready to start competing. I missed the April race deadline, but am registered for an event in Taiwan in September.
  • ⚖️ I’m down to ~163 lbs from 170 lbs at the start of the year. If I’m being honest, I expected to have made more progress here this quarter, but know I should celebrate the progress regardless.
  • 🀄 I completed 725 minutes of Chinese active immersion and learned 2060 new Chinese Anki flashcards. Language learning is slowing down, however, as exercise ramps up and concerns mount over language learning eating too much into other productive time.
  • 🇰🇷 I learned to read Hangul, which is rather random and is, hilariously, motivated by wanting to playing League of Legends on the Korean servers with a few friends.
  • 📚 I read 11 books this quarter, mostly from the Dune series.
  • 🙅‍♂️ I haven’t completed any rejection challenges yet, though I did compile a list from a number of friends. No good excuses here.
  • 🍻 I’m feeling like my social life is fairly fulfilling at the moment. I’ve made enough regular friends in Taipei to feel like my social calendar is full enough to keep me busy. I still have the intention to meet new people and make new friends, but not feeling like it’s as strong a need.

Next quarter:

  • 🚀 Aiming to (finally) launch Midana publicly in Q2 of 2022 after completing a hit list of prerequisites I’ve compiled.
  • 💸 Hoping to really push on the monetization problem for Midana once scaling infrastructure is in place to handle it.
  • 🚂 Will continue chugging along using many of the same techniques as Q1, including Sprints, DMAs, and Pomodoros. I like how this system is balancing outcome and process.
  • ⏩ Cautiously adding a stretch goal of an additional 5 pomodoros each week to increase velocity, though I am concerned that this won’t work well while traveling.
  • 🏃 Training for half marathons while abroad, culminating in two half marathon events in NYC in June/July.

Table of Contents

Quarterly Review 🔍

Qualitative Review 🎨

Reflection 🤔

Overall, I feel like Q1 2022 was a successful quarter. I found a good rhythm and I’ve been able to maintain it fairly consistently. In the past, I’ve struggled to stay focused and productive on my independent projects. I’m pleased to report that I didn’t have any major issues this quarter.

Here’s what happened this quarter:

  • 🚀 Midana’s beta program is up to ~1500 users, has an NPS of ~44, and is generating ~$2/mo in revenue. People clearly love the product! Monetization continues to be a challenge, though I haven’t yet had a chance to really invest time into experimenting with new monetization channels.
  • 🐢 Midana growth has been stalling while I invest in scalable infrastructure and product management tooling. Most of this quarter has gone to upgrading the backend and mobile client to handle larger amounts of traffic and data.
  • 🍅 I’ve been hitting a pretty consistent ~16-18 pomodoros/day. I’m feeling pretty good about rhythm, routine, and cadence overall, but do want to start seeing if I can increase velocity a bit.
  • ✈️ I’m planning to travel with my girlfriend for ~3 months this summer. We’ll be headed to California, Mexico, Florida, The Bahamas, Washington DC, and New York for varying amounts of time. Planning for travel has taken a small toll on velocity.
  • 🤑 I had a brief, but ultimately unnecessary scare over my taxes, which has served as a good reminder not to get complacent, financially or otherwise, and which helped produce some interesting philosophical insights about uncertainty, stress, and faith.
  • 🚴‍♂️ I secured a bike! I ended up with something very $$$$, and probably tricked out than an amateur really needs, but I’m very happy with it. So far this year I’ve been on ~26 bike rides, though not all on my new bike.
  • 🏊‍♂️🏃🚴‍♂️ I’m training for triathlons again. I’m feeling strong and ready to start competing. I missed the April race deadline, but am registered for an event in Taiwan in September.
  • ⚖️ I’m down to ~163 lbs from 170 lbs at the start of the year. If I’m being honest, I expected to have made more progress here this quarter, but know I should celebrate the progress regardless.
  • 🀄 I completed 725 minutes of Chinese active immersion and learned 2060 new Chinese Anki flashcards. Language learning is slowing down, however, as exercise ramps up and concerns mount over language learning eating too much into other productive time.
  • 🇰🇷 I learned to read Hangul, which is rather random and is, hilariously, motivated by wanting to playing League of Legends on the Korean servers with a few friends.
  • 📚 I read 11 books this quarter, mostly from the Dune series.
  • 🙅‍♂️ I haven’t completed any rejection challenges yet, though I did compile a list from a number of friends. No good excuses here.
  • 🍻 I’m feeling like my social life is fairly fulfilling at the moment. I’ve made enough regular friends in Taipei to feel like my social calendar is full enough to keep me busy. I still have the intention to meet new people and make new friends, but not feeling like it’s as strong a need.

Consistency 🚂

One of the major themes in my annual goals was consistency. I’m doing really well on this so far. I set out this quarter with the intent to explore a 16 pomodoros/day cadence, and found that that was pretty easily maintainable. By the end of this quarter, my records show that I completed 1057 pomodoros, which averages out to around 17.6 pomodoros/day.

I had some days here and there that were more challenging, and where the pomodoro counts were lower. In particular, I found myself often complaining in my journal that I didn’t rest up on Sunday and set myself up for a good week, so often Mondays were a bit of a struggle. Additionally, some Fridays had a lower than average pomodoro count, particularly earlier in the quarter when I had been experimenting with the idea of rewarding myself for higher productivity during the week by ending my day early on Friday.

I feel good that at 16 pomodoros/day, even when I felt potentially at risk of falling out of rhythm, it was generally easy to get back into it—the goal isn’t so high that it was impossible to meet on a bad day, and it also wasn’t so high that it was impossible to make-up pomodoros from a bad day on a better day.

Outside of work, consistency was OK. I could definitely have been better about maintaining some of my habits. Language learning, particularly, fell off towards the end of the quarter as I started to have concerns around velocity (which I’ll address next).

Velocity 🏎️

While consistency was good, velocity could probably have been better. After a quarter of work, I don’t feel like I got everything I wanted to get done, done. Progress on Midana still feels slow despite knowing that I am consistently putting the time in.

There were a few distractions this quarter that contributed to feeling like velocity was slow, including unexpectedly scoping planning for a ~3 month stint of travel this year (more on that later).

Overall, though, I’m struggling with the question of whether or not 16 pomodoros/day is enough. Generally I’ve been counting any time spent working towards my goals as valid pomodoro time. That includes time spent journaling in the morning to start my day and get my thoughts together. It also includes language studies, which some days took 3 or even 4 pomodoros to complete. It also doesn’t help that when I have students for Spike Lab, one student session will often consume 4 or 5 pomodoros of my day.

Losing nearly a quarter of my day to language learning often doesn’t feel great, and it’s surprising how weighty student sessions can feel when viewed in this light.

I certainly could work more than 16 pomodoros a day, and many days I do—there are a good number of 18s, 19s, and 20s in my log. At my current velocity, on a good day I’ll get a few hours of free time to use however I want. This extra time is also a good buffer to ensure that the day never feels too crunched, which I know can lead to an ever present sense of stress. Some days I feel more motivated to spend that extra time on work, other days less so. In the worst case, the extra buffer also allows me to make-up for mishaps from previous days by investing more time into work.

In coming into this review, I am toying with whether or not I should try to increase my daily pomodoro goal slightly or even increase my weekly pomodoro goal without explicitly changing my daily pomodoro goal. I’m also playing with the idea of “heavy” and “light” days. Perhaps a couple a days a week I expect myself to work a little harder and relax a little less. I am also finding that daily routines that allow me to start my day and finish my typical 16 pomodoro day *very early—*I’ve had a few days where I was done by 2:30pm—tend to leave me with enough extra time in the day that it isn’t hard to do a little extra credit.

Outcome Orientation 🎯

With regard to velocity, an important question is: what can I do to motivate myself to spend more of my extra time on work on average without necessarily obligating myself to do so?

I experimented with a couple of strategies this quarter that may hold the key. Specifically, those are Sprints and Difference Making Actions (DMAs). Sprints are two-week planned chunks of work, where I start the Sprint with a planning session and end it with a retrospective. During my planning session, I come up with a clear list of goals for the Sprint, which I do my best to align against my quarterly or annual goals. DMAs are something similar but on a daily scope. When planning the next day, I’ll write down the 5-10 most important things (fewer tends to be better) that would tangibly decrease my stress if they were to be completed.

Thematically, I’ve noticed both of these tools tend to force an outcome-oriented approach to work, which can serve as a good counterbalance to the more process-oriented time tracking tactics I employ.

The key word in that sentence was counterbalance. Being overly outcome-oriented has lead to situations where I finish everything on my list super quickly and feel good about myself, but still have plenty of time that I could or even should have devoted to a new set of tasks. By contrast, being overly process-oriented has lead to situations where I follow my process and feel good about myself for e.g. completing 16 pomodoros today, but don’t necessarily ever make progress on the things that were most important.

Thus far, I’ve found both Sprints and DMAs hugely helpful because the outcome orientation leaves me feeling motivated to spend my time efficiently in order to complete the goal set, and sometimes even motivates me to spend extra time to complete a particularly ambitious set of goals.

In both practices, however, I struggle with over scoping, which is when I consistently choose a set of goals that is, ultimately, unachievable. Sometimes when this happens, the motivation swings the other way: knowing that I’ll never finish everything, I now have even less motivation to try. Obviously I have this problem with my annual goals to some degree as well :).

Setting goals is always a bit of a dance: I need to give myself a set of things to do that is challenging, but accomplishable. When I fail to do this consistently, I naturally begin to lose faith in the practice, which negates its otherwise positive effects.

I’m still experimenting here. I’d like to keep both Sprints and DMAs in my regular workflows, but feel I need to take more steps to resolve scoping issues. I think this will solve itself with more time and practice, and potentially with a bit more padding around my estimates for myself—larger development tasks especially tend to take a bit longer than I wish they would in the ideal case. I also need to remember that when I commit to less, often I actually accomplish more and I maintain some adaptability around unplanned urgent and important needs that inevitably arise in life.

Retrospective Takeaways 🪞

Another consequence of the Sprint structure is that I’ve done a series of mini-reviews (formally called “retrospectives”) over the course of this quarter. Every two weeks, my retrospectives consisted of a free writing session where I reflected on how I did against my Sprint goals, what I did well, and what I could have done better. I then summarized any takeaways in bullet form.

I like that I now have a pool of takeaways that I can review for quarterly themes. Most of these insights have been pulled out and incorporated in narratives throughout this review, so I won’t repeat them here :). This feels like it has reduced the “load” of reflection needed to complete my review this quarter.

Though the review and planning processes have, at times, felt rather heavy—it often takes me more than half the day one every 2nd Monday—I do feel that the value outweighs the cost. Both of these processes help to concentrate strategic planning and constructive reflection time into a single, consistently visited space. Without these spaces, these processes may or may not occur ad hoc, which can lead to periods of not being sure whether or not I’m working on the most important thing until I’m inevitably forced to step back and think about it again.

It is worth noting, however, that the weight of the review and planning processes does affect both the velocity and over-scoping problems noted above—I’m often not taking the fact that I’m investing ~12 pomodoros into planning and review each Sprint into account when scoping the Sprint. The better part of a day every two weeks isn’t a trivial amount of time.

Midana 🚀

Overall, Midana is moving in a positive direction. I’m collecting NPS metrics graphed over time, and the product is now hovering in the low 40s with more than 100 survey responses. Though still in beta, the app now has ~1500 users, with many times that many downloads. There are, however, some indications that the active user counts are plateauing and there are some known obstacles to continued growth from here. Midana is generating ~$2/mo in revenue, which, though somewhat laughable, is still a big step from $0/mo.

There are clearly challenges to resolve, and it is by no means clear that, at least from a financial perspective, I haven’t completely wasted my time on this product. However, I am excited to see clear indications that I’ve built something that people love and that solves a real need!! Of course, there’s always the occasional sourpuss, but I’m learning to be more thick skinned about certain users who, frankly, would probably always have found a reason to be unhappy.

So far, monetization remains one of the larger challenges. At ~$2/mo in revenue, the product is still in the red, since it costs me in the range of $55/mo to run. Revenue currently comes from auto-redemption, which allows users to opt-in to split their winnings for qualifying receipts with Midana in exchange for help redeeming the receipts on a regular-basis. At this point, there are enough qualifying receipts from opt-in users that I can expect at least a few receipts to win and generate revenue, which is cool!

However, this monetization channel seems unlikely to drive the business long-term. Even if revenue doubles every 2 months (and, so far, it has), it will still take a very long time to even break even. I’m considering ways to restructure the auto-redeem business model to attract more users. I’m also considering several premium features which would likely get bundled into a subscription package. These premium features include:

  • Receipt translation service
    • Currently, receipt details arrive in Chinese and there is no easy way for users to navigate them in English. I do actually get some requests for this
  • Premium receipt scanning features
    • I get a lot of requests for OCR to handle receipts without QR codes on them.
  • Unlimited product search
    • I’d like to turn my aggregated receipt data into an anonymized search service that can help expats in Taiwan find otherwise hard-to-find items they are looking for here.
  • Free, no-commission, auto-redemption service
  • Removal of ads
    • I’m not actually running ads in the product, but am considering inserting ads somewhere in the receipt scanning flow, since this is by far the most visited part of the app.

Importantly, though, I discovered this quarter that I can’t actually generate real subscription revenue until Midana is out of beta and live on the app stores. Tactically, this means that I need to find a way to beta test some of these features and I need to ensure that I have infrastructure in place to handle subscription-based feature gating before the app goes live.

Though monetization remains a top priority, I didn’t get nearly as much time to spend on it this quarter as I had expected. I spent some time on a Notion-powered announcements and release notes system, which now allows me to easily push real-time bulletins to all app users, and allows my users to tell when a new update is available, and what changed in the app when they upgrade. These two capabilities have been crucial from a product management perspective, because they allow me to be proactive when new bugs are discovered, and it encourages users to upgrade to the latest app version (it’s frustrating to get bug reports from users who haven’t updated the app in literally months). In leading up to what I hoped was going to be a public launch, I figured these features would help me stay agile and responsive to users.

However, as the quarter continued on, I ended up needing to scope more and more work to resolve some unfortunate scalability issues. I’m at an exciting but painful part of the development process where the app is no longer just an MVP, and some of the things I had done in the interest of validating the product quickly now need to be swapped out for more sustainable solutions. To this end, I spent most of my time this quarter on upgrading the backend to scale-ably field API requests while also running important regular background processes and on upgrading the mobile app to handle large amounts of data (some of my users have 600-800+ receipts) without slowdowns or crashes.

All of this upgrading and swapping things out has me thinking a lot about software architecture lately. I’ve been reading Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin and really enjoying. I’m discovering that architecture is what describes a lot of what I’ve often felt was lacking in legacy projects I’ve worked on (particularly those created and then maintained by less experienced engineers). It also describes what I’ve often (imperfectly) driven towards in my own projects and in my client projects. Some of the pain I’m feeling now around restructuring parts of Midana could likely have been avoided with some amount of foresight around design, organization, and separation of concerns in the codebase from the start. These are good lessons for future projects, and it’s exciting to encounter real-world use cases for architectural concepts I’m learning about.

All-in-all, I remain optimistic about Midana, though I am now driving hard toward monetization and feel very motivated to start turning a profit from it somehow.

Financial Scares 😱

Some of the aforementioned motivation to monetize Midana comes from a set of financial scares I went through recently while preparing to file my 2021 taxes.

Everything’s settled down now, and it turns out there’s no issue, but there was a moment where, with incomplete information, I was terrified to discover that I may owe a huge sum of money to the IRS—enough to drain my cash reserves, require me to liquidate some investments, and potentially even start searching for some short-term supplemental income.

Going through that was hugely stressful for a few days. I kind of stopped sleeping. I felt stressed out about financial decisions I had made and guilty about recent large purchases. I felt like I needed to work more in order to deal with the stress.

Though everything turned out fine and nothing has actually changed in my finances, the need to cope with all of that extra stress and pressure drove me to a few insights that I would like to maintain even though I’m now out of the woods.

1. Uncertainty comes in influenceable and non-influenceable forms.

For example, I can be uncertain about whether or not WW3 is going to break out at any moment. For me, this is non-influenceable uncertainty—whether it happens or not, I don’t really have any control over the outcome. The actions that I can personally take here have minuscule, if any, effect. If I were, for example, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, or Joe Biden, this might be a different story.

By contrast, I can be uncertain about whether or not I’ll get a promotion this year, or crush an assignment my boss gave me, or pass an exam coming up. These are all things that involve some uncertainty, but where I can directly influence the outcome to a large degree. There may be a few other factors at play, but for the most part how hard I work or study will directly correlate to how likely it is that the desired outcome will come to pass.

2. Stress is a natural response to uncertainty of either form.

Uncertainty is stressful. Where there is no uncertainty, there’s generally also no stress.

When I was certain about my financial future, I was not stressed about it. When I suddenly became uncertain about my financial future, I was extremely stressed about it.

3. Stress from non-influenceable uncertainty is almost always negative.

If I can’t influence or control the outcome of something that is uncertain, then there is no value in my stressing about it. This stress can only affect me negatively, and experiencing it is generally a choice. In order to limit stress from non-influenceable uncertainty, I must adopt a different perspective or mindset, and I must acknowledge what is and isn’t within the limits of my power.

4. Stress from influenceable uncertainty is positive, but only in the right amounts.

Stress about things that I can directly influence is motivating. If whether or not I pass a test, or whether or not Midana succeeds, is largely tied to actions I take and consequences of those actions, then I am incentivized to take action and feel motivated to do so.

Quantity is important here, however. Too little stress motivates no change. Too much stress is anxiety-inducing and creates a counterproductive feedback loop. There is a goldilocks zone for stress that is positive and productive. This is eustress, or “good stress.”

Athletes understand this concept well: no stress on my body produces none of the desirable change; too much stress on my body causes injury, which is counterproductive long-term, as I will be forced to rest to recover. The perfect training program challenges the athlete, but does not break the athlete.

Game designers also understand this concept well: no stress in a game makes things easy and leaves players bored with no desire to play; too much stress in a game makes things impossibly difficult and leaves (most) players with no hope to eventually win after repeated attempts and practice. The perfect game challenges the player, but does not overwhelm the player.

Stress from all sources, whether influenceable or non-influenceable combine to create my mental reality. Not dealing with stress from non-influenceable uncertainty can lead to a lower threshold for taking on stress from influenceable uncertainty.

5. Eliminating stress is not the goal.

This is a corollary from the previous point.

Because stress is uncomfortable and because most of us have experienced stress in excessive quantities, eliminating stress is commonly conflated as the goal.

Where there is no stress, there is comfort, but there is also complacency. In a world or a life without stress, nothing ever changes, let alone changes for the better. Without stress we do not grow or change.

The goal is not to eliminate stress, but rather to control and limit it within productive bounds.

In returning to a place where my financial situation does not generate excessive stress, I am careful to remember that the goal isn’t to return to a place of no stress, but rather to find the sweet spot.

6. Faith is fundamentally a strategy for coping with uncertainty and stress, and not solely a religious concept.

In the face of an otherwise non-influenceable source of uncertainty, faith may enable me to believe that things will work out for the best, thus eliminating stress from sources I can’t otherwise control.

This faith doesn’t have to be religious. Yes, it could manifest as the idea that a higher-power is taking care of me, so if I trust and surrender to that then I can know things will be OK. Alternatively, this faith could manifest itself simply as a form of optimism; an emotional belief rather than a rational one that things will work out for the better.

Faith, even in a religious sense, is fundamentally about coping with uncertainty, and is therefore a tool to limit stress. Whether backed by religion or not, faith allows me to experience a degree of certainty where otherwise I had none.

7. Self-confidence is a form of faith applied to influenceable uncertainty.

Self-confidence is a sense of personal power and optimism that allows me to believe, on an emotional level, that I am capable of producing a desired but potentially uncertain outcome.

Ultimately, this is just faith applied to inwardly rather than faith applied outwardly—a sense of faith in one’s self.

While all of this is philosophically interesting to me, the main practical takeaways are to not take my financial situation for granted and not to get complacent. In the dark moments when I was really scared, I lost faith a little bit, both in the sense of wider optimism, and in the sense of self-confidence.

The whole experience has scared me out of what might have been a relatively complacent place. Though I’ve found a rhythm for myself that seems to keep me consistently productive at a reasonable velocity I’m now asking myself whether or not there is enough stress in my life. It’s possible that I’ve minimized stress, and so I don’t move quite as quickly as I could, and I certainly don’t have the same sense of urgency that I would if there were more stress.

When I was worried that I might need to find some additional outside work to supplement my income, suddenly the time and energy I’ve spent on projects like Midana seemed kind of trivial. Now that my faith has been restored to some degree, I’m thinking less catastrophically. Still, I want to see Midana generate profit, and I feel a little more pressure to do so, in a good way. I don’t want to go back to a place where I don’t have the freedom to choose what I do with my time. Ultimately, that’s only guaranteed if I’m entirely able to support myself through my own projects. Better get moving.

Travel ✈️

Somewhat unexpectedly, my girlfriend and I are going to be traveling ~3 months this year. I leave at the beginning of May, and I’ll return at the end of July. I’ll be headed to California, Mexico, Florida, The Bahamas, and New York in that time frame. Primarily, the reason for travel is to celebrate my Dad’s 60th birthday and to attend my girlfriend’s cousin’s wedding.

I will still be trying to work while I’m gone, though I do expect (and worry) that travel will affect velocity a bit. The effort to plan and prepare for travel did already have an effect on velocity this quarter.

Regardless, I am excited about this, even if it is adding some stress to my life (a good thing?). I’m unsure what traveling while COVID cases are still so high will look like, but looking forward to being back on the road for a bit, particularly with my girlfriend. She’s traveled less than I have, so there’s a wealth of experiences to share with her! This is also an awesome opportunity to share parts of my nomadic past that previously I’ve only ever been able to describe.

Fitness 🏋️

It’s been a good quarter for fitness! I started the quarter recovering from an injury that had kept me away from running. At the time, I had been focused mostly on cycling in order to maintain and improve fitness, and had been becoming increasingly frustrated by how inconsistently I was able to find public bikes when I wanted to go for a ride.

Early in the quarter, though, I was able to lockdown a road bike! It took many months of searching, but I’m very excited about the bike I ended up with. It’s a 2019 Trek Madone Project One Icon—custom made and custom painted for the previous owner. The purchase ended up being $$$$, and several times my initial expected budget, but I think I got everything I wanted out of a bike and more with this one. For the perfect bike, and this one is damn near perfect, I think the money was worth it.

Since purchasing my bike, I’ve been very motivated to get back into the triathlon scene, and have been training pretty consistently. I’m feeling pretty strong these days across all 3 triathlon disciplines. Unfortunately, I missed the cut-off to register for a race before I leave Taiwan, but I am registered for a race in September after I return.

I will say, I haven’t been cycling quite as much as I set out to at the beginning of the year, as I discovered pretty quickly that riding in the rain is miserable. I’m willing to do it if push comes to shove maybe ~once a week, but I had a few weeks where I had to go on multiple consecutive days of rainy bike rides and just couldn’t. (It didn’t help that it rained for all but ~6 days in January / February here in Taipei.)

Since starting triathlon training, my training plans have required less cycling overall—only once or twice a week—which has actually been perfect because it allows me to flexibly work around the couple of days a week where it either doesn’t rain or doesn’t rain as hard. Now that I’m recovered from my injury, it also feels good to add running back into the mix.

I haven’t lost as much weight or body fat as I had hoped by now—I’m still hovering around ~160-165lbs. I likely need to pay more attention to diet. As my training has ramped up, I’ve found little excuses here and there to cheat and “reward” myself. There’s a place for that, but if I’m not meeting my goals it likely needs to be re-examined.

Still, given that I started the quarter weighing closer to 170lbs, I’ve lost a non-trivial amount of weight over the course of the quarter.

Social Life 🤗

In reviewing this year’s goals, I notice a lot of things about meeting new people and making new friends. I’d still like to meet new people, but as I review myself this quarter I find that I’m actually decently happy with my social life in Taipei right now. In fact, I’d say there are enough people in my life that I want to see and catch-up with regularly or semi-regularly, that this quarter I’ve sometimes felt a little like my weekends are constantly too busy. Sometimes I worry that I’m actually not getting enough time to myself to just rest and do what I want to relax.

While I do want to maintain the intention to meet more cool people, I feel like a lot of it is happening naturally right now without the need for me to press too much. All of this is to say that even though I expect to have missed a few things I said I wanted to do this quarter, I’m actually feeling quite fulfilled on this front right now :).

Quantitative 🔢

Summary 💯

I’m giving myself a B this quarter. Effort this quarter was solid, though in some cases outcomes were lacking. Feeling pretty good about routine, rhythm, and balance right now.

In order to earn an A, I’d like to have seen myself be a little more consistent on some of the key habits like waking up early and meditating, and I’d like to have seen a little more real progress on monetizing Midana.

Break Down 🧨

Habits 📅

  • Daily
    • Morning
      • Wake up by 6:30am
        • Failed on this. To be fair, I shifted my schedule to a 7:30am wake-up in the middle of the quarter, but in spirit I think wake-up discipline has been lacking this quarter.
        • ~22% success rate
      • Meditate for 20 minutes a day
        • ~61% success rate
      • Write in my journal
        • ~71% success rate
      • Leave my phone silenced until my morning routine is complete
        • I’ve slowly and accidentally gotten back into the habit of checking notifications on my phone when I wake up. I should recommit to avoiding this.
    • Evening
      • Get to bed by 10:30pm
        • ~47% success rate. Considering I purposefully didn’t follow this on weekends, that’s actually not too bad, but probably not ideal.
      • Leave my phone and all other electronics (Kindle excepted) charging far away from bed
        • My phone has never returned to the bedside, though I have occasionally taken to playing Switch in bed before going to sleep. Not exactly the best habit.
        • ~57% success rate.
    • Work Days:
      • Take no longer than 1 hour for my lunch break.
        • I’ve found that this actually isn’t that important to a successful day. On a good day, I can still get lots done even if I do take a longer lunch break. Many days, I’ve been finding that working through lunch is also quite effective. This particular rule hasn’t contributed or detracted much from cadence on the whole.
        • ~16% success rate
      • Do a pomodoro of reading from a book that helps me sharpen and advance my professional skills
        • It’s usually not a full pomodoro these days, and I do forget or skip this fairly often, but my records show I did this ~41% of the time.
        • I’ve finished Design Patterns by the Gang of Four,
      • Leave my phone in Do Not Disturb during work sessions
      • Clear my inboxes
      • Plan tomorrow today
    • Do a pomodoro of Chinese active immersion
      • Did pitifully on this this quarter, though I need to re-evaluate how I’m going to sustainably fit language studies in without detracting from ordinary productivity.
    • Stick to my diet plan
    • Complete my Anki reviews
      • Complete 25 backlogged reviews for Chinese
      • Complete 25 backlogged reviews for French
        • Decided to abandon these for now in favor of Spanish since I’m headed to Mexico again this year.
      • Complete 25 backlogged reviews for Spanish
  • Weekly
    • Complete an average of 16 pomodoros each day for a total of 80 pomodoros each week
    • Exercise 5-6 times each week
      • Looks like I worked on, on average, just under 4 times a week. Overall, I feel OK about where my exercise routine is, and I do think I’m hitting 5-6 times a week many weeks recently.
    • Find something adventurous to do every weekend
      • I’ve been OK about this.
      • My log shows that I did something I felt was noteworthy 7 out of 12 weekends this quarter.
    • On weekends where I fail to find something adventurous to do, complete a rejection challenge
      • I haven’t done a single rejection challenge yet, and don’t have a strong excuse.
    • Call my parents and sister
  • Bi-weekly
    • Complete a sprint planning session
    • Complete a sprint retrospective, and implement actionable takeaways for the next sprint
    • Participate in a family therapy session
      • Been doing therapy sessions with my Dad. I think we missed one Sprint in here somewhere, but we’ve had a few good sessions and a few tougher ones.
  • Quarterly
    • Host an event that will allow me to meet friends of friends
    • Attend at least one new meet-up and aim to meet at least one person to grab coffee or drinks with
    • Attend a networking-style event and aim to meet at least one person to grab coffee or drinks with
    • Participate in a race event of some kind
    • Increase weekly pomodoro target, if feasible
      • Going to attempt this this quarter, but on a stretch basis
    • Pick a dieting method each quarter and stick to it at least 80-90% of the time

OKRs 🎯

  • Launch Midana to the general public
    • On track to happen this year
  • Achieve a 4.5/5-star average rating for Midana
  • Make at least $1/month of passive profit with Midana
  • Reach at least 50 active users for a new project
    • At current pace on Midana, not sure if I’m on track to start a new project and start attracting users.
  • Get my weight back down to the ~145-150 lbs range
    • Currently still in the 160-165lbs range, so still a ways to go, but potentially do-able. Losing weight while traveling is going to be tough, however.
  • Reach 10% body fat
    • Likely closer to 15-18% right now.
  • Go on 100+ bike rides
    • I’ve hit 26 so far this year, which is actually on track.
  • Clear out my backlog of old Anki cards
  • Register for a TOCFL Level 4 test in early November
    • Registration opens later this year!
  • Pass the TOCFL Level 4 test this year
    • With recent cut backs in language learning to reserve time for other work, I’m lately feeling like I’m not learning quickly enough to expect to pass.
  • Reach out to friends to build a bank of 40 rejection challenges
    • Rejection challenge bank built!
  • Complete at least 20 rejection challenges
    • I haven’t done a single challenge yet, though 😅…
  • Read 40 books
    • Q1: 11 books read! Mostly been re-reading the Dune series after being inspired by the movie released last year.

Metrics 📊

  • % compliance for daily, weekly, and bi-weekly habits
    • See above
  • Body weight
    • Q1: 163.7lbs at last weigh-in
  • Body fat percentage
    • Q1: 15.4% at last weigh-in, but scale is questionably accurate
  • Pomodoros completed each day
    • Q1: ~17.6 pomodoros/day
  • Average number of pomodoros completed per week
    • Q1: ~88.1 pomodoros/week or ~176.2 pomodoros/sprint
  • Midana average star ratings from Apple App Store and Google Play Store
    • Q1: N/A since have not launched yet
  • Midana profit per month
    • Q1: Negative ~$53/mo at the moment. Still not profitable.
  • Weekly active users across all products
    • Q1:
      • Midana: ~300 weekly active users, though probably better to ask how many users were active since the last lottery draw
  • Number of bike rides completed
    • Q1: 26
  • Number of rejection challenges completed
    • Q1: 0
  • Minutes of Chinese active immersion
    • Q1: 725
  • Number of new Chinese Anki flashcards learned
    • Q1: 2060 new cards for an average of 23 new cards/day
  • Number of backlogged Anki cards remaining
    • Q1:
      • Chinese: 5277
      • French: 900
      • Math: 128
      • Spanish: 3771

Quarterly Planning 🗓️

Goal Modifications ✏️

No huge changes so far this year! Travel is likely the biggest source of small modifications.

Travel ✈️

Travel will affect my goals a bit, though i’m trying to limit the impact. Under normal circumstances, I’d look to increase my weekly pomodoro goal by 5 pomodoros. With travel in the mix, I suspect that this will be difficult to accomplish, so for now I’m going to commit to this as a stretch goal. If it turns out to feel OK on the road, then I’ll do my best to keep it up.

While I’m abroad, I’ll be switching to a running-focused training program culminating in a half marathon race while I’m in New York City. Part of the motivation for this is also to give myself a calorie sink so I can eat more delicious food :P.

I’m also likely unlikely to be executing rejection challenges while I’m abroad. We’ll see, I’ll try to keep these in my back pocket, but the whole point of rejection challenges this time around was to create a tenable fallback for weekends where I wasn’t otherwise getting adventure, challenge, or uncertainty from other sources. Adding traveling back into the mix should satisfy most of that need. I’m not going to throw rejection challenges out, but I am going to lower the goal number this year.

Goal modifications:

  • Stretch: Complete at least 85 pomodoros each week.
  • Complete at least 20 rejection challenges.
  • Complete at least 10 rejection challenges.

Midana 🚀

No major changes here, but want to crystalize my thoughts on what I’d like to accomplish for Midana this quarter.

There isn’t that much time before I leave Taiwan in May, but I’d like to get as close as possible to launching publicly before I leave. Prerequisites for launching are:

  • Scaling issues solved for at least the mid-term if not the long-term for both the mobile client and the backend.
  • Backend infrastructure in place to track receipts for in-app purchases and subscriptions.
    • Ideally I build this in such a way that I can re-use the architecture and/or code for future projects.
  • Backend infrastructure in place to allow or deny access to features based on purchase status.
  • At least one premium feature to ship with the app on launch.
    • Personally, I think receipt translation is the most interesting, but premium receipt scanning features are probably the lowest hanging fruit.
  • Smoother onboarding experience.
    • Right now I’m probably losing 50% or more users in my onboarding process, and half of those are probably falling out of the funnel because they’re encountering errors they can’t get past on their own.
    • I either need to stabilize the onboarding experience (there may not be a huge amount I can do here) or re-imagine it to eliminate the technical blockers making it tough for users to get in.

I don’t know that it’s realistic to finish all of this in less than a month, but I would like to see all of this done by the end of Q2. I’d like to see the app launch publicly this quarter, even though I’ll be abroad.

I’ll add these things as “sub”-OKRs to the OKR to launch Midana publicly:

  • Launch Midana to the general public
    • Resolve long-term scaling issues for the Midana mobile client
    • Resolve long-term scaling issues for the Midana backend
    • Resolve stability issues in registration and onboarding flows
    • Implement backend infrastructure to track receipts for in-app purchases and subscriptions
    • Implement backend infrastructure to gate access to features based on purchase status
    • Implement at least one premium feature to ship with the app on launch

Risk Mitigation 🛠️

Habit Maintenance on Weekends

I need to do a better job, on average, of maintaining key habits on weekends and days off. Even though I expect to relax and want to give myself space to decompress, a few important things like meditation, journaling, exercise, and, perhaps, language learning should all still be happening over the weekend. For the most part, I should also be trying to maintain good sleep discipline on the weekends to help avoid feeling like I switched timezones on Monday morning.

As a “risk mitigation” this isn’t exactly satisfying, as it isn’t terribly actionable. Still, I think the intent here is important, and I do know what success feels like. Even though I can stay up late on Friday nights, I still do love the feeling of being awake at 6 or 7am on a Saturday morning and having the whole day ahead of me.

Calorie Tracking

This one is really tough for me, but I do need to get back into the habit of tracking calories more closely. Not only because this is going to help me lose weight more consistently, but also because while I travel it’s going to be really important that I have a sense for, at least generally, how much I’m eating. Tracking calories sucks, but it does force a certain sense of mindfulness around how much I’m eating and whether or not I need to self-regulate.

Even if I do pig out for a day, and perhaps especially if I pig out for a day, I’d like to have a full log of how much I ate.

Summarized Habits and OKRs 🎯

Habits 📅

  • Daily
    • Morning
      • Wake up by 6:30am
      • Meditate for 20 minutes a day
      • Write in my journal
      • Leave my phone silenced until my morning routine is complete
    • Evening
      • Get to bed by 10:30pm
      • Leave my phone and all other electronics (Kindle excepted) charging far away from bed
    • Work Days:
      • Take no longer than 1 hour for my lunch break.
      • Do a pomodoro of reading from a book that helps me sharpen and advance my professional skills
      • Leave my phone in Do Not Disturb during work sessions
      • Clear my inboxes
      • Plan tomorrow today
    • Do a pomodoro of Chinese active immersion
    • Stick to my diet plan
    • Complete my Anki reviews
      • Complete 25 backlogged reviews for Chinese
      • Complete 25 backlogged reviews for French
      • Complete 25 backlogged reviews for Spanish
  • Weekly
    • Complete an average of 16 pomodoros each day for a total of 80 pomodoros each week
    • Stretch: Complete at least 85 pomodoros each week.
    • Exercise 5-6 times each week
    • Find something adventurous to do every weekend
    • On weekends where I fail to find something adventurous to do, complete a rejection challenge
    • Call my parents and sister
  • Bi-weekly
    • Complete a sprint planning session
    • Complete a sprint retrospective, and implement actionable takeaways for the next sprint
    • Participate in a family therapy session
  • Quarterly
    • Host an event that will allow me to meet friends of friends
    • Attend at least one new meet-up and aim to meet at least one person to grab coffee or drinks with
    • Attend a networking-style event and aim to meet at least one person to grab coffee or drinks with
    • Participate in a race event of some kind
    • Increase weekly pomodoro target, if feasible
    • Pick a dieting method each quarter and stick to it at least 80-90% of the time

OKRs 🎯

  • Launch Midana to the general public
    • Resolve long-term scaling issues for the Midana mobile client
    • Resolve long-term scaling issues for the Midana backend
    • Resolve stability issues in registration and onboarding flows
    • Implement backend infrastructure to track receipts for in-app purchases and subscriptions
    • Implement backend infrastructure to gate access to features based on purchase status
    • Implement at least one premium feature to ship with the app on launch
  • Achieve a 4.5/5-star average rating for Midana
  • Make at least $1/month of passive profit with Midana
  • Reach at least 50 active users for a new project
  • Get my weight back down to the ~145-150 lbs range
  • Reach 10% body fat
  • Go on 100+ bike rides
  • Clear out my backlog of old Anki cards
  • Register for a TOCFL Level 4 test in early November
  • Pass the TOCFL Level 4 test this year
  • Reach out to friends to build a bank of 40 rejection challenges
  • Complete at least 10 rejection challenges
  • Read 40 books

Metrics 📊

  • % compliance for daily, weekly, and bi-weekly habits
  • Body weight
  • Body fat percentage
  • Pomodoros completed each day
  • Average number of pomodoros completed per week
  • Midana average star ratings from Apple App Store and Google Play Store
  • Midana profit per month
  • Weekly active users across all products
  • Number of bike rides completed
  • Number of rejection challenges completed
  • Minutes of Chinese active immersion
  • Number of new Chinese Anki flashcards learned
  • Number of backlogged Anki cards remaining

2022 New Year's Resolutions

Priorities for 2022 haven’t changed much from 2021 despite this being the last year of my 20s! I will, however, be working to improve execution by focusing on consistency and velocity.

I want 2022 to be a breakthrough year. I’d love for it to be the year that I start generating semi-passive income from one of my own projects. I’d also love for this to be the year that I start having the confidence and bandwidth to work on projects that move closer to some of my passions and personal missions.

Some highlights from this year’s resolutions:

  • 👊 I’m aiming to start working on a second product this year once Midana is stabilized and, hopefully, profitable. I’d like my second product to be something closer to my personal mission and passions.
  • I’ll be breaking my quarters into 2-week sprints complete with a planning session and a retrospective. I’m hoping to translate the strategic intentionality from these larger documents into something more tactical and consistent.
  • 🍅 I’m continuing to lean heavily on the Pomodoro technique this year, and am aiming for a starting baseline of 16 pomodoros a day, 5 days a week, for 80 pomodoros a week. I’ll raise this bar slightly every quarter, when feasible.
  • 👾 I’m making a commitment to reduce the impact of games like League of Legends on my independent work by introducing new rules and restrictions that will hopefully start to transform this into a motivating reward rather than a derailing distraction.
  • 🍻 I’d like to meet more cool people in Taipei this year, and plan to host at least a few events this year with this purpose specifically in mind.
  • 📝 I’m going to register for an official Chinese exam this year, likely registering for the TOCFL Level 4 test sometime in November.
  • 🚴🏻 I’m aiming for 100+ bike rides this year just as soon as I hopefully secure a bike in early January.
  • 🏁 I’m looking to participate in one race event each quarter this year, likely a mix of running, cycling, swimming, and triathlon events.
  • 🙅🏻 I’m bringing back rejection challenges as a means to ensure that I have a way to get out of my comfort zone every week.

Table of Contents

Since I just turned 29, 2022 is going to be the last year of my 20s. In coming into my final year as a 20-something, I’m a bit daunted by asking myself what I want to accomplish in the final year of the 3rd decade of my life.

The truth is, though, I don’t think this framing changes much for me. I feel like I’m on the right path. I feel like I’ve made a lot of interesting choices in my life so far, and I don’t regret them. I don’t feel trapped where I am the way I personally might have if I had stayed at Palantir or in Silicon Valley. I feel like I’ve learned and explored a lot, even though I don’t always give myself credit where credit is due. I’m not thinking seriously about marriage or kids yet, so there also isn’t a lot of change there—for better or for worse, I’m still focused on myself.

My priorities for this year are mostly unchanged from 2021. Last year I wrote:

  1. Maintaining a healthy mind and body.
  2. Overcoming my fear of failure.
  3. Working towards financial freedom.
  4. Overcoming my fear of rejection.
  5. Living a balanced life full of friends, family, and non-professional interests.

And additionally, because I knew I was going to live in Taipei for all of 2021:

  1. Reaching native-level fluency in Chinese.
  2. Establishing deeper friendships and expanding my network.
  3. Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for an extended period of time!

I’m not planning to leave Taiwan in 2022, so I’m happy with these priorities. I do still want to travel again at some point, and I’m not sure I see myself living in Taiwan full-time forever, but especially with the added uncertainty of the pandemic, this isn’t the year I’m going to uproot myself. It also helps that my Taiwan gold visa converts to permanent residency after 3 years, and I’m pretty close to qualifying. For now, I’m pretty content to stay here and focus on my work and my goals.

I do, however, want 2022 to be a breakthrough year. I’d love for this to be the year that I started generating semi-passive income from one of my own projects. I’d also love for this to be the year that I start having the confidence and bandwidth to work on projects that move closer to some of my passions and personal missions.

While my priorities haven’t shifted a whole lot, reflections from 2021 made clear that I need to improve execution. To that end, I’m going to focus on consistency and velocity this year. In order to support improved consistency and increased velocity, I’ll continue to look for ways to maintain stillness, cultivate courage, and promote discipline. Since I had a much longer period of reflection before Q3 2021, this year’s resolutions are something of a continuation of the intentions I set then.

Breakdown 🧨

Consistency 🪨

It’s not unexpected, but over the last couple of years I’ve noticed that my annual reviews show a downward trend over the course of a year. Each of my quarterly reviews also tend to show a downward trend over the course of a quarter.

Motivation falls of naturally—hence why discipline is so much more important—but I have found that breaking my year into quarters has helped a lot. Each quarter I get to reset, reflect, and start anew. Reviewing my goals and my progress allows me to set intentions and course correct on a strategic level.

This year I’d like to really lean into this idea. I want to see if I can pull that intentionality down to a more tactical level. Borrowing from tech industry project management techniques, I’m going to organize my quarters into 2-week sprints. Two weeks because one week feels too short with too much overhead to be worth the added structure, and anything longer is too large a chunk of a single quarter (which is ~13 weeks) to be regular enough.

I’m going to skip the boring overview of the Agile Methodology and exactly how sprints work, and zoom in on just two practices that I’d like to pull out more formally:

  1. Sprint planning
    1. At the beginning of each 2-week sprint review high-level goals for the year and quarter and any ongoing projects. (5 minutes)
    2. Scope a set of things to do that feels like it will reasonably fit into the allotted time. (10 minutes)
    3. Ensure that that the upcoming sprint is aligned against stated goals for year and quarter and current priorities. (5 minutes)
  2. Retrospective
    1. At the end of each 2-week sprint review what was and wasn’t completed.
    2. Reflect on what went well and what didn’t.
      1. I’ll structure this as a ~15-minute free-write session in my journal.
    3. Come up with actionable takeaways to improve the upcoming sprint.

I’m going to try scheduling both retrospective and planning on Monday mornings, first thing. I’ll complete my retrospective first, then go immediately into planning every two weeks. I may need to play with the exact timings—I’m just hesitant to put either exercise at the end of the day on a Friday.

Habits and OKRs:

  • Bi-weekly
    • Complete a sprint planning session
    • Complete a sprint retrospective, and implement actionable takeaways for the next sprint

Stillness 🙏

As noted in my 2021 End of Year Review, it feels like stillness is a key ingredient to maintaining consistency. When stillness falls off, so, it seems, does everything else.

Maintaining stillness is going to be about:

  1. Meditation.
    1. I’d like to meditate 20 minutes every morning.
  2. Managing good habits and routines around sleep.
    1. I’m aiming to wake up by 6:30am every morning.
    2. I’m aiming to be asleep by 10:30pm every night.
  3. Getting into a good rhythm that enables both work and play.
    1. I’m going to try to structure my days around 16 pomodoros each day, usually starting around 8:30am and ending by 6:00pm.
    2. I’ll take a ~45-60-minute break for lunch after my morning session of 8 pomodoros. This break will likely include a 20-minute nap where needed.
  4. Preserving a sense of time and space abundance throughout the day.
    1. This is mostly about removing mid-day distractions that take away time and space, thereby reducing stillness.

In Q4 2021, I identified the need to cut back on League of Legends during my afternoons, since playing too much or too often in the middle of the work day tends to lead to me losing stillness for the rest of the day, and possibly into the next day.

I’d like to find a way to transform things like League of Legends and playing games with friends into motivating rewards instead of debilitating distractions.

Assuming that the goal (for now) is to consistently hit 16 pomodoros a day, 5 days a week, here’s what I’m going to try:

  • In order to create and preserve momentum throughout the week, I will commit to not playing at all during the work day early in the week (i.e. Monday through Wednesday).
  • In order to incentivize myself to snowball momentum earlier in the week, I will allow myself to bank extra pomodoros (i.e. any daily pomodoros above 16) from earlier in the week in order to create pockets of time later in the week in the form of extended breaks on Thursday or Friday or just finishing the week early on Friday.
  • In order to de-risk the possibility that an afternoon will run away from me, I am only ever allowed a maximum redemption of 2 pomodoros (~1 hour) for an extended break.
    • There is, however, no limit to how early I can finish work for a week if I choose to truly front load my productivity.
      • E.g. I could work 20 pomodoros a day Monday through Thursday, and effectively take Friday off or, more realistically, I could work 18 pomodoros a day Monday through Thursday and effectively earn a half-day on Friday.

Habits and OKRs:

  • Meditate for 20 minutes every day.
  • Wake up at 6:30am on weekdays.
  • Sleep by 10:30pm on weekdays.
  • Take no longer than 1 hour for my lunch break.
  • No games with friends during the work day Monday through Wednesday.
  • No games with friends during the work day Thursday or Friday unless redeeming banked pomodoros.

Velocity ⚡

I’m at a stage in my independent work where money isn’t the limiting factor as much as my time and how well I utilize it is. In 2021, I was able to start making slow progress in the right directions. In 2022, I’d like to find and maintain a good velocity that promotes consistent progress.

From experiments at the end of 2021, I think that consistently averaging 16 pomodoros a day is a good starting baseline. I’ve found that this is enough focused working time that, barring anything unexpected, I can usually get through almost everything on my hit list for a day and feel pretty good about myself. While I am typically pretty tired by the end of my 16th pomodoro in a day, I’m not usually drained enough to affect future productivity. Doing more is possible, and I have had 18-pomodoro days before, but I’m not yet sure if it’s sustainable.

I’m going to start with a goal of 16 pomodoros a day, 5 days a week, for 80 pomodoros each week. I’d love to see myself hit that consistently every week in Q1 of 2022. If I can hit that in Q1, I think that I should evaluate whether or not I can sustainably increase the weekly goal in Q2, even if the increase is only by a single pomodoro each week.

It would be cool to see my velocity increase slowly but surely by the end of Q4 2022. If 2021 was learning to walk, I’d love to start sustainably jogging in 2022. Whether or not running or even sprinting will be the ultimate goal remains to be seen.

Habits and OKRs

  • Increase my weekly pomodoro average each quarter, if feasible

Courage and Discipline 💪

As I outlined in my Q3 2021 review, courage and discipline are important skills that require constant maintenance. Since settling down in Taipei during the pandemic, I haven’t been as intentional about keeping these skills sharp. I’d like that to change this year.

Courage is the tougher of the two to isolate. Training courage requires that I put myself in situations where I feel enough fear that my decision-making becomes clouded. Courage comes not from banishing that fear, but learning to act with integrity despite it. In Q4 2021, I used adventure as a proxy for courage, relying on adventures to create unexpected and uncertain circumstances where courage might be necessary.

I think using adventure to train courage was a step in the right direction—there were definitely at least a couple of adventures in Q4 2021 where uncertainty and self-doubt crept in and courage needed to take hold to move forward. Besides that, I had a lot of fun on said adventures :).

While I plan to continue to go on regular adventures in 2022, I’d like to go a step further to ensure I will always have something I can do to push my comfort zone each week. To this end, in 2022 I’m going to be re-introducing rejection challenges, except that I am, for the most part, going to be doing them here in Taiwan and in Chinese. I’ll elaborate more on this below in the section about overcoming my fear of rejection.

Discipline is more straightforward. To train discipline, I have to choose to do what I need to even when I don’t want to. Work is an obvious area where I can train this, and I’ll continue to use the pomodoro technique to create rhythm and flow this year. Beyond that, exercise is often a good proxy for this, and I’ll be leaning into exercise more this year. See the below section on Maintaining a Healthy Mind and Body for details on that.

Habits and OKRs:

  • Find something adventurous to do every weekend.
  • On weekends where I fail to find something adventurous to do, complete a rejection challenge.

Maintaining a Healthy Mind and Body 🏥

This priority is usually about health, exercise, and mindfulness.

Exercise 🚴🏻‍♂️

I’d really like to get my health and fitness back on track this year. Since ~Q3 of last year my weight has been up quite a bit, and though I am still on a downward trend, I am at risk of ~160-175 lbs becoming my new normal. For my height and build, this is a little overweight. I know weight and body image are touchy subjects in this day and age, but I’m personally worried about the risk of long-term health complications that I know can come from carrying excess weight for too long, especially as I get older (and I’m turning 30 next year 😱). I’m particularly worried because I’ve watched my father struggle with long-term health complications related to being overweight earlier in his life.

It’s important to me that I bring this back into a normal range this year, somewhere closer to ~145-150 lbs, with a healthy diet and regular exercise regimen. I am planning to be much more active this year, especially since exercise will remain my primary vehicle for actively practicing discipline. I will be working my way back into the triathlon scene this year, as I promised in my Q3 2021 review. I’m hoping to participate in at least one race event each quarter. Though I am open to doing more, in the interest of consistency, I’d much rather see myself do one event each quarter than 4 events in Q1 and no events the rest of the year.

I am still recovering from an injury I sustained in Q4 2021, but I am planning to do a bunch of biking this year until I’ve recovered enough to start running again. I’m coming very close to purchasing a bike second-hand this year. This bike is turning out to be a pretty significant investment—it’s been hard to find what I’m looking for in my size at my original budget range. I am hoping to get a lot of usage out of this bike to justify the investment. Ideally I end up in the range of ~100+ rides this year.

Needless to say, aerobic fitness is going to be a priority this year. I am still interested in CrossFit and in weightlifting more generally, but I think that these are going to have to be supplemental once I’m satisfied with my aerobic training volume. I doubt that I’ll be able to do lifting more than maybe once or twice a week.

Habits and OKRs:

  • Exercise 5-6 times each week
  • Pick a dieting method each quarter and stick to it at least 80-90% of the time
  • Get my weight back down to the ~145-150 lbs range
  • Reach 10% body fat
  • Go on 100+ bike rides this year

Mindfulness 🧘🏻

I am going to continue my mindfulness habits this year, with a commitment to meditate for 20-minutes every morning, and continuing to write in my journal daily. Mindfulness is an important part of stillness for me, so again a lot of overlap here.

Nothing too crazy to write about this. If COVID-19 weren’t a thing, I’d probably commit to visiting one of the Plum Village affiliated monasteries somewhere in the world. I’m not holding my breath on this for this year, but if the situation improves I’d love to do a one or two week retreat in the middle of the year, maybe overlapping with one of my quarterly review periods.

Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom 👊

My work is the main driver of this priority. At a high-level, I’d like to get Midana to a stable, ideally monetized place so that I can start working on at least one new project this year. I’m really itching to start working on some of my ideas around productivity and self-actualization—I’m excited to see what happens if I apply my Midana learnings to these ideas :).

Notably I’m giving up on the idea of 12 projects in 12 months, which was a major theme in my 2021 goals. I’ve learned that approach doesn’t suit me very well. I’ve found that creating a product I’m proud of takes time, and I think I’d rather spend more time (and risk) working on fewer things that I care more about, than less time working on lots of things I’m doing just to make money. I also feel like the pressure I put on myself to finish things that quickly actually makes me impatient and anxious. If reality doesn’t match my expectations, I’ll tend to start feeling shitty, which becomes counterproductive and destroys stillness.

I’d like 2022 to be the year that I start making some money from one of my own projects. Obviously, I can’t guarantee that that will happen, but I am going to be pushing on Midana to make this happen. I’m fairly confident that a pathway monetization exists, though I’m not yet sure how much money there is to be made with this specific product.

I am open to the idea of income from other sources, though I’m unwilling to pursue this at the expense of a real shot at success with my own projects this year. I do, however, usually like to earn at least my annual expenses in income each year for the peace of mind that I’m not going negative year over year.

I’ll be continuing my commitment with Spike Lab this year, taking on a few entrepreneurial high school protégés. I am also going to be piloting a new initiative with Spike Lab this year wherein I provide additional tech-focused tutoring to some of my students. This new pilot has the potential to earn income at a similar rate to tech consulting work, though at a significantly reduced time commitment, which I like.

Currently I’m tutoring just a single student for Spike Lab, though I am open to taking on another student or two this year. A few students would be enough to pay most of my annual expenses.

As a last resort, I am potentially open to taking on some tech consulting work this year, though I would want to wait until Q4 to do so. Even then, I do still want to cap the scope of consulting projects to a couple of months, or maybe a quarter at most. I don’t intend to do any active searching for these projects, but will remain open-minded if one happens to come my way on that time frame.

Habits and OKRs:

  • Launch Midana to the general public
  • Achieve a 4.5/5-star average rating for Midana
  • Make at least $1/month of passive profit with Midana
  • Reach at least 50 weekly active users for a new project

Overcoming my fear of rejection, and living a balanced life full of friends, family, and non-professional interests 🥂

Overcoming my fear of rejection has some overlap with deepening relationships and making new friends, so I’m lumping these together.

Making New Friends 🍻

Now that I’ve been in Taipei for quite awhile, I’d love to invest more into friendships and communities here, and I’d love to meet more cool people. I think in order to accomplish this two things need to happen:

  1. I need to host events that encourage friends to introduce me to more of their friends.
  2. I need to get out more, and potentially go to some new meetups, or go to more events for existing communities.

To the first point, hosting board game events could be a good fit. I can handle ~10 people at my place for an event like this and haven’t done one in awhile. I could invite a few friends, then ask them all to invite a friend to fill the seats!

I could also potentially do ~8 people for dinner if I do dinner potluck style in a similar manner (my kitchen doesn’t have enough throughput to easily cook a whole meal for more than 6).

I could also consider hosting events elsewhere. My girlfriend and I have a portable grill we bought awhile back that we could use to do riverside barbecues, which would be a larger event. I might also be able to find some friends or friends of friends down to do some shorter hikes around Taipei.

To the second point, there are at least a few meetups and events that I could make an effort to go to. I’ve been meaning to visit the Taipei Chess Circle, for example. Once I have my new bike, there are almost certainly cycling-focused groups I could join for longer rides.

Habits and OKRs:

  • Host an event that will allow me to meet friends of friends each quarter
  • Attend at least one new meet-up and aim to meet at least one person to grab coffee or drinks with each quarter
  • Attend a networking-style event and aim to meet at least one person to grab coffee or drinks with each quarter

Improving Family Relationships 💔

I’d also like to do my part to improve family relationships. Though we’ve maybe gotten a little better over time, my immediate family is still pretty dysfunctional. I personally have a particularly tenuous relationship with my Dad. I think there are two things I can do here:

  1. Family therapy.
  2. Make an effort to call my family every weekend.

I think I could handle doing family therapy once every two weeks this year. It’s a bit too much of a time and energy drain to do on a weekly basis in my opinion, but every two weeks is do-able. I know my Dad is interested in continuing some family therapy with me, but I could also look to see if any of the rest of my family would be willing to participate

I also used to be in more of a habit of calling my family every weekend. I think it was a good practice that definitely helped to keep social ties with my parents warm, at least. My Mom seemed to really like that she could expect a call somewhere during her weekend.

Habits and OKRs:

  • Call my parents and sister every weekend
  • Participate in a family therapy session once every two weeks

Rejection Challenges 🙅🏻‍♂️

As mentioned in the section on Courage, I’m going to complete some Rejection Challenges this year as a sort of back-up plan in case I fail to find enough adventures to push my comfort zone.

I’m going to run this pretty similarly to the way I did when I did rejection challenges for the first time. I’ll reach out to friends to farm rejection challenges. I’ll aim for a full list of ~40 challenges, and do ~one a week on weeks where I don’t find a suitable adventure to satisfy my need here.

Notably, since I live in Taiwan, these rejection challenges are likely going to need to happen in Chinese, which is an added discomfort for me. It is, however, good for developing my Chinese skills :P.

Language Learning 🎓

This heading should really read “Learning Chinese”, but the language nerd in me has a hard time committing to only studying Chinese this year. Still, I know that if I only have time to seriously study one language this year, it should be Chinese.

Chinese 🀄

The motivation to continue learning Chinese is pretty obvious: I still live in Taiwan, and improving my Chinese also improves my quality of life here. My approach to Chinese is going to be much the same as it was last year, namely immersion through TV and books with support from Anki for rapidly reinforcing new concepts, grammar, and vocabulary. By the end of last year, I was pretty bad about spending ~20-30 minutes watching Chinese TV every day, so I’d like to bring that habit back.

Last year I took several steps back from Anki because I feared overwhelming myself with daily Anki reviews. This year, I am recommitting to Anki, so while my approach for encountering new things to learn is going to be heavily immersion-based, I am going to lean more heavily on Anki to ensure that I remember new things I’m exposed to after even just 1 or 2 exposures.

I am still worried about overwhelm, but I’ve found a lot of success lately with quickly adding new Anki cards for vocabulary words I encounter out in the world, and having them show up for review immediately the next day. If I ever feel like the Anki load is creeping too high, I can simply take a break from adding cards until the reviews return to a manageable level.

For Chinese, I think I’d like to commit to taking an official language at the end of the year. Since I’m in Taiwan, I’ll likely be taking the TOCFL (as opposed to the HSK). At my current proficiency level, I think level 3 of the TOCFL is probably already in reach. Level 4 is probably a stretch, but I think it probably makes for a good target. Aspirationally, I’d love to pass the test. However, I am using it as more of a diagnostic than anything, so I don’t want to stress too much over passing or failing.

I’ll likely schedule for a testing date in early November so I have most of the year to learn and prepare, but the testing date doesn’t conflict with any potential Thanksgiving or holiday plans.

Habits and OKRs:

  • Do a pomodoro of Chinese active immersion every day
  • Complete my Anki reviews every day
  • Register for a TOCFL Level 4 exam in early November
  • (Stretch) Pass the TOCFL Level 4 exam

Other Languages 💬

Outside of Chinese, I am interested in improving my Japanese to the level that I had previously gotten my French and Spanish to. In Q4 of 2021, I spent a lot of extra cycles doing Duolingo for Japanese and adding new sentence flashcards for Japanese. I don’t think I’m going to make any formal goals for Japanese this year, but so long as it doesn’t get in the way of other things, I won’t complain if I see myself continue to invest a little time into Japanese here and there.

I don’t think I’m going to put much investment into other languages this year. However, I do still have a huge Anki backlog from The Great Anki Lapse of 2020, and I’d like to slowly work my way through it this year.

Here are the backlogged review counts:

  • Chinese: 6616
  • French: 2006
  • Spanish: 5283

If I do a small number of these extra backlogged reviews every day, I should easily be able to clear them out by the end of the year without too much trouble. If I do ~25 extra reviews for each of these languages every day, I should be clear by end of Q3.

Habits and OKRs:

  • Clear my backlog of old Anki reviews
  • Complete 25 backlogged Chinese Anki reviews every day
  • Complete 25 backlogged French Anki reviews every day
  • Complete 25 backlogged Spanish Anki reviews every day

Goals 🥅

Habits 📅

  • Daily
    • Morning
      • Wake up by 6:30am
      • Meditate for 20 minutes a day
      • Write in my journal
      • Leave my phone silenced until my morning routine is complete
    • Evening
      • Get to bed by 10:30pm
      • Leave my phone and all other electronics (Kindle excepted) charging far away from bed
    • Work Days:
      • Take no longer than 1 hour for my lunch break.
      • Do a pomodoro of reading from a book that helps me sharpen and advance my professional skills
      • Leave my phone in Do Not Disturb during work sessions
      • Clear my inboxes
      • Plan tomorrow today
    • Do a pomodoro of Chinese active immersion
    • Stick to my diet plan
    • Complete my Anki reviews
      • Complete 25 backlogged reviews for Chinese
      • Complete 25 backlogged reviews for French
      • Complete 25 backlogged reviews for Spanish
  • Weekly
    • Complete an average of 16 pomodoros each day for a total of 80 pomodoros each week
    • Exercise 5-6 times each week
    • Find something adventurous to do every weekend
    • On weekends where I fail to find something adventurous to do, complete a rejection challenge
    • Call my parents and sister
  • Bi-weekly
    • Complete a sprint planning session
    • Complete a sprint retrospective, and implement actionable takeaways for the next sprint
    • Participate in a family therapy session
  • Quarterly
    • Host an event that will allow me to meet friends of friends
    • Attend at least one new meet-up and aim to meet at least one person to grab coffee or drinks with
    • Attend a networking-style event and aim to meet at least one person to grab coffee or drinks with
    • Participate in a race event of some kind
    • Increase weekly pomodoro target, if feasible
    • Pick a dieting method each quarter and stick to it at least 80-90% of the time

OKRs 🎯

  • Launch Midana to the general public
  • Achieve a 4.5/5-star average rating for Midana
  • Make at least $1/month of passive profit with Midana
  • Reach at least 50 active users for a new project
  • Get my weight back down to the ~145-150 lbs range
  • Reach 10% body fat
  • Go on 100+ bike rides
  • Clear out my backlog of old Anki cards
  • Register for a TOCFL Level 4 test in early November
  • Pass the TOCFL Level 4 test this year
  • Reach out to friends to build a bank of 40 rejection challenges
  • Complete at least 20 rejection challenges
  • Read 40 books

Metrics 📊

  • % compliance for daily, weekly, and bi-weekly habits
  • Body weight
  • Body fat percentage
  • Pomodoros completed each day
  • Average number of pomodoros completed per week
  • Midana average star ratings from Apple App Store and Google Play Store
  • Midana profit per month
  • Weekly active users across all products
  • Number of bike rides completed
  • Number of rejection challenges completed
  • Minutes of Chinese active immersion
  • Number of new Chinese Anki flashcards learned
  • Number of backlogged Anki cards remaining

2021 End of Year Review

I earned a C/C+ in 2021, closing out the year with a reasonably strong Q4 to make up for Q3. Overall, I feel like I had a good year. I could have been more consistent, and velocity could improve, but I’m happy to report that things feel directionally correct and it feels like I’m on my way to larger breakthroughs.

Some highlights from this year:

  • 🏠 I moved into my first independently-leased apartment here in Taipei. It’s been fun having my own space to host for things like dinner parties, board games, LAN parties, holidays, and more!
  • 🚀 I started working on Midana, and made enough progress to start feeling some product-market fit with it! Nearly 700 users now, with a NPS of ~25.
  • 💸 I exercised my Palantir stock options, bringing financial independence into arm’s reach for the first time.
  • 😷 I went through lockdown for the first time when COVID-19 outbreaks in Taiwan caused some panic back in May.
  • 🎮 I played a lot of video games this year, owing to lockdown and getting back into League of Legends.
  • 👊 I experimented with a gamified quantified self platform called Strive, which I suspect will make a return in some form in 2022.
  • 💉 I got vaccinated for COVID-19 during a very long trip to the US, which gave me a lot of time to reflect.
  • 🏝️ My grandma turned 90 and the whole family went to Hawaii to celebrate for a few weeks despite COVID-19.
  • 🍟 I gained a lot of weight, and have been working to get back on track.
  • 🏃🏻‍♂️ I participated in my first race events in a very long time, a 9k and a 5k trail run. I’m very excited to do more of these in 2022!

Here’s what happened in Q4:

  • 🏁 Midana is now available to anyone who wants to try it. Though it isn’t technically fully listed in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, as I’m still running in a public testing mode that I’ve branded “early access”. This is, nevertheless, a fairly big shift in operating mode.
  • 🚀 Midana has grown to ~700 users with a recent NPS of ~25. Growth has been steady, though I’ve been controlling it as I iterate. Feedback has been positive, but also points to some clear areas of improvement that could help bring NPS above 30 (loosely my goal before declaring the product “stable” and pushing for a real public launch).
  • 📉 Midana monetization still needs testing. While I have gotten a decent number of users to agree to 10% of lottery earnings in return for services, only a fraction of those users are using the features that would generate qualifying receipts. I remain overall optimistic that monetization will eventually prove fruitful given the rich dataset that receipt and purchase data provides.
  • 🏗️ Productivity started strong, but fell off as the quarter dragged on. In the beginning I was averaging ~14-16 pomodoros per day relatively easily. By the end, I was reaching ~12 on average.
  • 🤕 I injured my leg doing squats at CrossFit on my first day doing squats in many, many months. This injury continues to keep me away from running and has deterred some of my exercise habits in Q4, though I can still hike and have been trying to get out to bike more often.
  • 🏃🏻‍♂️ I participated in two races, a 9k and a 5k trail run. I completed the 9k in 43:11 at an 8:05/mi average pace, but with a few sub-8:00 miles despite rolling my ankle around the 6k marker. I had to walk the trail run due to my leg injury, unfortunately.
  • ⛰️ I went on a decent number of adventurous hiking trips, including at least one 6+ hour hike, making good on my promise to myself to get out of the house a bit more on weekends.
  • 🦃 I hosted my first Thanksgiving dinner in my new apartment. It was a little cramped, and the turkey barely fit in the oven, but it was a good time :)!
  • 🍔 I lost some weight, but not quite as much as I had hoped. I’ve been waylaid by my reduced activity due to injury and a bit of excessive eating over the holidays. At my lowest this quarter, I got back down to ~165 lbs, but ended probably closer to ~172, down from ~180 when I started.
  • 🎮 I bought a Nintendo Switch OLED to reward myself for an incredibly productive quarantine period and the launch of Midana v2.0.0.
  • 🚴🏻‍♂️ I am closing in on a bike purchase after having spent this quarter learning about bikes, reflecting on what I want out of a bike, and browsing listings. It’s been tough finding the exact combination of things I want in my size and in my original price range, but with a little bit of luck and a bit of budget-fudging, I’ll hopefully make a purchase 2nd week of January 2022.
  • 🌛 I spent a few days in Sun Moon Lake to celebrate the New Year. It was a chill vacation full of hiking, biking, and eating.

Table of Contents

Annual Reflection 🤔

2021 was the second year of the global pandemic. It was the year I moved into my first independently-leased apartment. It was the year I started putting down real (literal and metaphorical) roots in Taipei. It was the year I started working on Midana. It was the year I exercised my Palantir stock options, bringing financial independence into arm’s reach for the first time. It was the year I finally experienced lockdown. It was the year I started playing League of Legends again. It was the year I got vaccinated. It was the year my grandmother turned 90, and the whole family flew out to Hawaii to celebrate despite COVID-19. It was the year I bought a Nintendo Switch. It was the year I emotionally committed to a breakthrough. It was the year I first experienced product-market fit for myself.

On the whole, I feel good about 2021. This year represents one of the longest, continuous periods of time that I’ve worked independently. I’ve established a relatively stable and sustainable lifestyle in Taipei that I’m happy with. I’ve gotten enough done to feel and see some progress, and to begin identifying areas for improvement.

I am excited that my first independent product, Midana, has finally reached a stage where I’m getting relatively constant feedback, both positive and constructive, from real users. I am still beta testing the product and still have not pushed it out to a general release, but the product has grown enough (~700 users!) for me to play with real fear of failure and fear of rejection on a regular basis. It’s starting to help me see that there isn’t that much to fear after all. There are always going to be product and engineering problems to solve (and always more than you or your team have time to solve). Some users are always going to be unhappy. Most things are solvable. Most users just want to feel heard.

In reflecting on 2021, my growth (and the product’s!) is perhaps best illustrated by how my emotions have shifted as the product has moved forward. My fears for Midana have moved away from “What if people hate it?” and “Will anyone even use this? Am I wasting my time?” and instead toward “How can I get more people to love this?” and “Can I make this project worth the effort and time I’ve put into it?” To me, this is a clear sign that I’ve reached early product-market fit—I’ve clearly created something that my target market wants, and which has the potential for raving fans. The question now is whether or not that market was monetize-able in the first place.

Regardless of whether or not it ever makes money, Midana already feels like it’s been more than worth it for everything I’ve learned along the way. I’ve learned what it feels like to run a successful marketing campaign. I’ve found some great tools for drafting landing pages to quickly validate my value proposition. I’ve learned the value of both going fast and going slow at different points in the process. I’ve learned that good products take time, patience, and perseverance. I’ve found a comfortable iterative rhythm that allows me to grow the product one cohort at a time while responding to feedback. I’ve gotten a handle on the idiosyncratic difficulties of creating a mobile app from both a product and engineering perspective. I’ve experienced engineering scaling problems in one of my own projects for the first time (I already have millions of records in my database and am preparing to process thousands of receipts per day), more and more making architectural strategies I’ve learned for resolving these practical needs instead of theoretical possibilities. I’ve been at times amazed, at times humbled by the amount I can achieve as a one-man team. I’m already scheming about how I’ll apply all these learnings to future projects.

Growth, or at least change, can also be seen in how my relationship with money has been slowly evolving this year and, perhaps by proxy, how much more of a sense of abundance I experience on average. I’ve found that it’s tough to feel comfortable spending money without relatively stable income, no matter how much I have in the bank. Financial uncertainty can be scary and has tended to drive me into a scarcity mindset. Historically, some of that fear has also been driven by a scarcity mindset around job and income opportunities—a part of me worried for a long time that I’d somehow made myself less hirable by choosing not to define my career by a sequence of stable, full-time jobs.

I can remember very clearly how nervous I felt at the beginning of the year when I was searching for apartments, and how torn I was when I came to the conclusion that the kind of apartment I wanted to live in was going to cost me more than I had budgeted. I was wrapping up my contract with Karat around that time and I knew I’d soon stop having regular income. In that context, I remember how I agonized about spending an extra $50-100 to buy a nice mattress top so that I could sleep in relative luxury.

By the end of 2021, despite not taking any additional consulting gigs, I feel tangibly more comfortable spending my wealth. Maybe it’s because Palantir going public was a decent windfall. Maybe it’s finally leaning more into the idea of having roots and allowing myself to accumulate a few more things here in Taipei. Maybe it’s because I’ve started to have deeper faith in my own ability, and in the idea that income opportunities will arise if and when I need them.

However it’s happened, I’m starting to realize that certain things are worth spending for. I’m also starting to recognize that wealth exists not to be hoarded, but to make my life and the lives of people around me better. This can be observed in my finally getting myself a triathlon watch I’ve wanted for years, in deciding that I could afford a Nintendo Switch OLED, in choosing to be generous with gifts for friends and family over the holidays, and in my upcoming purchase of a nice (second-hand) road bike. While I do remain vigilant for overall lifestyle creep—I want to be abundant, not wasteful—I have, thus far, not regretted any of these expenditures after the fact.

Still, despite all the goods, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that 2021 had its fair share of struggles, as evidenced by recurring themes in my quarterly reviews. I had trouble staying consistently productive while working for myself. I picked up some bad habits through the pandemic. I gained a lot of weight. I played a lot of video games. I did not always live up to my disciplined and courageous self-image. I spent a lot of time and energy, consciously and subconsciously, finding ways to stay in my comfort zone.

Though I certainly struggled against myself, I feel strongly that the problems I had in 2021 were problems I chose for myself and were, in fact, the problems I wanted to have. I’m grateful that, by sticking to my guns and pressing on with independent work, I’ve had opportunities to test myself, to fail a bit, and to grow and learn from the experiences.

While 2021 could have been a more productive year, I am nevertheless content that things feels directionally correct. I am careful to remember that sometimes I have to go slow before I can go fast—we all learn to walk before we learn to run. For someone as impatient and ambitious as I can be, this is often a hard lesson to internalize.

Now that I have my legs under me, and am starting to gain confidence, I suspect that 2022 will be about picking up the pace while continuing to challenge myself and explore the concepts of balance and living a well-rounded life. More on that to come in my 2022 New Year Resolutions.

Q4 Reflection 🪞

Q4, specifically was an alright quarter. Here’s what happened:

  • 🏁 Midana is now available to anyone who wants to try it. Though it isn’t technically fully listed in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, as I’m still running in a public testing mode that I’ve branded “early access”. This is, nevertheless, a fairly big shift in operating mode.
  • 🚀 Midana has grown to ~700 users with a recent NPS of ~25. Growth has been steady, though I’ve been controlling it as I iterate. Feedback has been positive, but also points to some clear areas of improvement that could help bring NPS above 30 (loosely my goal before declaring the product “stable” and pushing for a real public launch).
  • 📉 Midana monetization still needs testing. While I have gotten a decent number of users to agree to 10% of lottery earnings in return for services, only a fraction of those users are using the features that would generate qualifying receipts. I remain overall optimistic that monetization will eventually prove fruitful given the rich dataset that receipt and purchase data provides.
  • 🏗️ Productivity started strong, but fell off as the quarter dragged on. In the beginning I was averaging ~14-16 pomodoros per day relatively easily. By the end, I was reaching ~12 on average.
  • 🤕 I injured my leg doing squats at CrossFit on my first day doing squats in many, many months. This injury continues to keep me away from running and has deterred some of my exercise habits in Q4, though I can still hike and have been trying to get out to bike more often.
  • 🏃🏻‍♂️ I participated in two races, a 9k and a 5k trail run. I completed the 9k in 43:11 at an 8:05/mi average pace, but with a few sub-8:00 miles despite rolling my ankle around the 6k marker. I had to walk the trail run due to my leg injury, unfortunately.
  • ⛰️ I went on a decent number of adventurous hiking trips, including at least one 6+ hour hike, making good on my promise to myself to get out of the house a bit more on weekends.
  • 🦃 I hosted my first Thanksgiving dinner in my new apartment. It was a little cramped, and the turkey barely fit in the oven, but it was a good time :)!
  • 🍔 I lost some weight, but not quite as much as I had hoped. I’ve been waylaid by my reduced activity due to injury and a bit of excessive eating over the holidays. At my lowest this quarter, I got back down to ~165 lbs, but ended probably closer to ~172, down from ~180 when I started.
  • 🎮 I bought a Nintendo Switch OLED to reward myself for an incredibly productive quarantine period and the launch of Midana v2.0.0.
  • 🚴🏻‍♂️ I am closing in on a bike purchase after having spent this quarter learning about bikes, reflecting on what I want out of a bike, and browsing listings. It’s been tough finding the exact combination of things I want in my size and in my original price range, but with a little bit of luck and a bit of budget-fudging, I’ll hopefully make a purchase 2nd week of January 2022.
  • 🌛 I spent a few days in Sun Moon Lake to celebrate the New Year. It was a chill vacation full of hiking, biking, and eating.

I started very strong, with a couple of extremely productive weeks in quarantine. Quarantine was so productive, in fact, that I continue to joke with people that if I ever need a jump start I should just check myself back into a quarantine hotel. A lot of good habits re-surfaced during quarantine and continued for much of the quarter. I lost some steam near the end, especially with the holidays.

Midana 🚀

Midana has been going well this quarter! During quarantine I completely a full design refresh of Midana, which I branded v2.0.0. I’m now feeling like I have a product that I’m proud to put my name on, and which generally looks and feels nice.

I did have a few delays at the beginning of the quarter, but not because I wasn’t being productive. After doing my UI/UX overhaul, I ran into a some performance issues in the app which required that I delay public testing by a couple more weeks. At this point, though things are running relatively smoothly and the product is growing!

I have not put the product up for general release on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store yet, however. Right now anyone who wants to try the app can, provided they’re willing to jump through a couple of extra hoops to install the early access version. For all intents and purposes, I’m happy with the app being in this sort of public testing mode. It allows me to continue iterating on the app while growing it cohort-by-cohort.

Right now my workflow is essentially to turn on ads, gather feedback about improvements to be made or problems with the app, turn off ads while I fix new things identified, then repeat once I’m ready to test the new iteration. I’m really liking this so far—it’s certainly slowing down growth, but it’s giving me a lot of confidence and peace of mind! It’s also allowing me to really battle test this product before I eventually declare it “stable” and push it out for wider release.

The app is growing substantially despite this, however. I’m up to nearly 700 users (with probably several times that many downloads), and for the last few draw periods, the total number of collected receipts has been growing exponentially. To be totally transparent, this is mostly still paid growth using FB ads credits, so these are all vanity metrics, but it’s motivating and exciting nonetheless.

I’ve been waiting to launch Midana until I feel confident that it will receive overwhelmingly positive reviews on the app stores. I’m hoping to use those positive reviews to generate momentum for growth, and am weary of the fact that negative reviews could have a very detrimental and lasting effect. I realized recently that I’m not actually collecting the right feedback to know how close I am to an acceptable level of confidence here.

To solve that need, I’m now collecting net promoter scores within the app, and so far feedback has really positive! Most of the scores I get are 9s and 10s, though there are also a fair number of people experiencing issues with the app and leaving lower scores. Overall, my NPS is currently hovering around ~20-25, which is decent, but not amazing. I’m hoping to get that number up above 30+ before I launch. Given that most detractors are people experiencing unintended bugs or performance issues (and are therefore likely to leave 1-star reviews, which I’d like to avoid), I think this is very in reach.

Monetization is a different story for Midana, however. Currently my main monetization pathway is an auto-redemption service that allows me to take a % cut of users’ winnings. Unfortunately, this service requires that users use electronic receipts, which is a relatively new behavior for my user base. Currently, less than 10% of my users are using e-receipts. I have been seeing a slow uptick in e-receipt adoption, but not enough to feel confident that this monetization pathway is going to pan out. It’s possible that as I improve the service, more and more people will adopt this (I discovered a bug not too long ago that was probably causing a lot of users trying out e-receipts to be confused), but it’s hard to say.

At the moment, conversion rate for auto-redemption is hovering around 7-8%, which isn’t amazing especially considering that not all of those users are even regularly using e-receipts. I need to do more experimenting to see if I can make this direction work—possibly by reducing the cut percentage and seeing if that improves conversion.

There are other monetization pathways to explore here, as well, and I am still optimistic that something will work—the data I’m collecting is valuable by its very nature, so if nothing else I think there’s potential to find a way to monetize off of that. Once I have enough users, I can also start thinking about ad revenue and premium service to remove ads if nothing else is working.

Stillness 🙏

Creating the space to reflect and write these self-reviews always re-invokes a sense of stillness. In today’s stillness I’m beginning to realize just how much stillness I seemed to lose over the course of the quarter.

I’m beginning to wonder if stillness is the key factor influencing how on top of my goals I feel over time. Coming out of reviews, which are typically periods of relative stillness, I usually feel renewed and ready to tackle the world again. As the quarter goes on, I tend to get caught up in the stresses of life, or I fall back into familiar bad patterns. I start feeling like I have less time for certain things. I stop making time for certain other things. I start to lose balance and things begin to unravel.

It’s worth asking, then: where did stillness break down this quarter? I think there were a few places:

  1. Playing video games in the afternoon too often and sometimes for too long.
  2. Video games before bed sometimes leaking into later bed times, or compounding on top of other excuses to be less disciplined about bed time.
  3. Over fixation on raw amount of time worked after switching to a Pomodoro app that reported hours and minutes rather than pomodoro totals

Video Games 🎮

Regarding the first two points about video games: I’ve found that these both create a cascading effect into the future, where I feel like I have less time (either because I used up too much of my afternoon, or because I woke up later), which leads to me feeling more stressed and less still. Ironically, that sparks a negative feedback loop that presses on the impulse to play more to avoid short-term stress, but with the consequence of creating more long-term stress.

I think I was in a good rhythm at the beginning of the quarter, likely also through the middle of the quarter, where I’d complete two sets of four pomodoros in the morning followed by a 1-hour lunch break and two sets of four pomodoros in the evening. Usually I’d be sure to time it so that I could finish 16 pomodoros by 5:30 or 6:00pm and feel good about relaxing after dinner. 16 pomodoros would usually be enough for me to complete almost everything on my list for the day.

At some point, I started to introduce games into my lunch breaks, since I realized I could sometimes take a longer lunch break and still time it to finish 16 pomodoros in a day before 6:00pm. At the beginning, this was a result of my being extra productive in a morning, or because a particular type of work would force me to skip pomodoro breaks so I’d finish the morning session quicker.

Since I involved a friend in these lunch breaks, and because we had a competitive reason to try to fit more games into them more often (the end of the 2021 League of Legends ladder season and our last chance to prove to ourselves that we’re better at the game than the game thinks we are :P). These longer lunch breaks started to become regular occurrences. Sometimes I’d feel drained by the intensity of the games we’d play. Instead of taking a nap during my lunch break to recover, I’d start the afternoon session feeling tired. Or worse, I’d play, and then still take a nap, cutting into my afternoon session. My daily pomodoro count started dropping from 16 to 14, and later to 12 by the end of the quarter.

I think my original intentions were good, and I think it was OK for me to use video games as an occasional incentive to be more productive in the morning. Somewhere along the way, I got caught up in it, though. In the future, I think I need to avoid allowing this to become a daily occurrence. Probably better for it to be once or twice a week, and then only later in the week as a reward for productivity earlier in the week.

After a successful quarantine, I rewarded myself by buying a Nintendo Switch OLED. Ironically, buying a Nintendo Switch doesn’t generally feel like it’s contributed to problems here. At least for lunch breaks, much of the problem seems to center around the nature of League of Legends as a game—it’s a team game, so I naturally want to play with friends, and a single game can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour (but probably averaging around ~40 minutes). It’s also a tough game to play just one round of—win or lose, you pretty much always feel incentivized to play at least one more game. This makes it tough to fit League into lunch breaks without having some temptation to both do it regularly and to potentially have it overflow into work time.

By contrast, Switch games are mostly single player and super easy to pause and leave alone. Yes, sometimes it’s nice to just find a stopping point (maybe a couple of extra minutes), but it’s nothing like League in that sense.

Where the Switch did affect stillness a bit this quarter, however, was when I let myself break my rule about electronics in bed. I’ve been very good about keeping my phone away from my bed, but for some reason at some point I convinced myself that my Switch wasn’t the same thing. Maybe it was because my girlfriend and I aren’t always totally synced on when bedtime is, and I’d use the Switch to wait for her to come to bed. I’ve been stricter about this recently, however, and it’s been better.

Pomodoros 🍅

Overall, the pomodoro technique was really helpful in Q4. I started out using an online tool called Pomofocus, and it really helped me get into a rhythm. After awhile, though, I got fed up with some of the bugs in the product making my workflows tougher. For example, if I close Pomofocus’ window on accident, I lose all of my pomodoro data for the day. Part way through the quarter I started using Focus Todo on my phone instead.

While generally being pretty good, Focus Todo gives me daily reports where it reports my productivity in terms of hours and minutes rather than in pomodoros. I hadn’t realized just how important this is to me, but I really prefer having the abstraction of pomodoros. Seeing hours and minutes has slowly turned Focus Todo back into a time tracker like Toggl, where I feel like a slave to the timer. I also feel anxious about seeing how many hours I worked because it immediately triggers a comparison with “work norms”.

Even though I know that people don’t get that much focus during a 12-hour or even a “standard” 8-hour day, I can’t help but see a number like 4h30m or 6h and feel bad about my productivity in comparison even if I got important work done and spent my energy in the right places. I’m finding that the abstraction of tracking pomodoros creates rhythm and stillness. Tracking hours and minutes creates stress for me and therefore destroys stillness. I can imagine striving for two more pomodoros each day, but might stress out about the idea of adding an extra hour of work each day. Interesting how that works.

Self-Sabotage 😵

Given my reflections from Q3, it’s important that I examine whether or not stillness issues this quarter were part of a pattern of self-sabotage.

I’m inclined to cautiously say no. I say that because, though my velocity did decrease as the quarter went on, Midana did actually move forward quite a bit this quarter, and in directions that put me in the paths of real rejection and failure. It could be argued that as I leaned more into that, I self-sabotaged a bit to slow my exposure to these things, and I think there might be some validity to that argument.

On the whole, though, I feel OK about what I accomplished this quarter. There’s clear room for improvement, and I intend to keep my eye on this, but I don’t feel like I’m freezing myself where I was the way I might have been Q2 and Q3—Midana has clearly moved into a new mode of operation, and the scope of my responsibilities to users has increased to match.

Exercise 🏃🏻‍♂️

Exercise also started really strong this quarter, but dropped off in the middle. I did have a strong 9k race finish (8:05/mi with a few sub-8 miles in there), and I was feeling really good about where my fitness was headed. Unfortunately, two injuries this quarter have kept me from exercising the ways I wanted to.

First, I rolled my ankle near the 6k marker of the 9k race—I actually still finished the race with a respectable time despite this, but I was off the foot for ~a week after that, which stole momentum.

Next, I strained a muscle in my hip doing squats at CrossFit not too long after I recovered from the ankle injury. It was a stupid injury—it was my first time doing squats in a long while do to the pandemic, and I knew I needed to take it slow. I let the coach goad me into pushing me further than I had intended to go that day, and that’s where the injury occurred. I probably have a right to be mad at the coach, but honestly I’m more mad at myself for not sticking to my game plan.

I’m still recovering from the hip injury—it’s been a couple of months, and it’s still not quite the same. I suspect I could run at this point, but my physical therapist seemed pretty against it last time I saw him, so I’m trying to respect that. I don’t think the injury is anything super serious or permanent, but it has been slow to completely recover.

Because of the hip injury, I’ve found a myriad of excuses to not take exercise as seriously as I wanted to in Q4. In truth, I could probably have done a lot more biking and hiking in Q4 to compensate for not being able to run, but I didn’t. I think part of that was knowing that the public bikes here, while amazing for what they are, are not that great. I’m hoping that having my own bike will change this, and I am hoping to do a lot more biking in Q1 2022 until my hip recovers enough to feel confident about running again.

Courage and Discipline 💪

Courage and discipline were areas I noted for immediate improvement in my Q3 review. I did OK here in Q4—I made some steps in the right directions, and generally biased toward getting myself out of the house to do something adventurous or uncomfortable on weekends.

I think my theory that adventures will create opportunities to demonstrate courage was correct. I went on at least one long hike this quarter where I was forced make a potentially difficult and somewhat scary decision about how to proceed. My girlfriend and I ended up descending a mountain on a side where there were warnings about slippery trail conditions. The reality was nowhere near as bad as I think we both imagined when we saw the warnings, though it was certainly slow going to get to the bottom.

Discipline was good in some ways, less good in others. The major vehicle I chose for discipline was exercise and health, which, as I noted above, got somewhat derailed this quarter. I definitely could have done a better job of adapting to changing circumstances.

On the whole, I was pretty good about things like waking up on time and meditating. There were, however, some obvious lapses in discipline for work to play games, especially as the quarter stretched on. I think lapses in discipline certainly go hand-in-hand with lapses in stillness, which tends to decrease awareness.

I’ll need to continue to focus on these areas in 2022, and perhaps find more intentional ways to exercise these skills.

Quantitative 🔢

Summary 💯

I’m giving myself a C for Q4. I think there was real improvement this quarter over Q3, and I feel decent about the progress I made. I definitely could have done more, but this wasn’t bad.

Combining that with my other scores for the year:

  • Q1: B+
  • Q2: C+
  • Q3: D
  • Q4: C

This averages out to a C/C+ for 2021!

Interestingly, this is about the same score I gave myself in 2020, as well. The downward trend throughout the year was also seen in 2020. While not surprising, I think I’ll need to start exploring methods of staying more consistent in 2022.

Break Down 🧨

Habits:

  • Daily
    • Get at least 8 hours of sleep every night
      • Felt mostly well-rested this quarter, so I’ll give myself this one.
    • Go to sleep by 9:30pm
      • Started to slide bed time back a little bit, especially as we got close to the holidays. Mostly playing video games with friends before bed.
    • Wake up by 5:30am
      • Mostly good on this, but had a few days here and there where I woke up a bit later, and definitely fell off over the holidays.
    • Reserve the first hour after waking for self-care
      • Meditate for at least 20 minutes
      • Write in my journal
    • Leave my phone charging far away from my bed each night
    • Leave my phone silenced until my morning routine is complete
    • Reserve the hour before bed for self-care and relaxation
      • Meditate for at least 20 minutes
        • Was really good about this for ~half the quarter, then stopped doing it because I wanted 20 more minutes of free time haha.
    • Aim for 12-16+ 25-minute pomodoros each day
    • Aim to minimize the need to log more than 8 hours of work a day
    • Plan tomorrow in the evening
    • Clear inboxes in the evening
    • Clear Anki reviews
    • Learn 8 new Chinese Anki cards
      • On accident, I spent more time on Japanese this quarter than on Chinese. Really just what I was finding fun and interesting at the time, but means that I didn’t put the focus into Chinese that I could have.
    • Add an average of 8 new Chinese cards to Anki
    • Actively immerse in Chinese for at least 30 minutes
  • Weekly
    • Watch an episode or two of something on Netflix without subtitles for 30 minutes
    • Exercise 5-6 times a week
    • Make friends, relaxation, and extracurricular activities the priority on weekends
    • Get out to do something adventurous every weekend
    • Plan my week on Sunday nights
  • Semimonthly
    • Attend an improv workshop and participate in at least the bilingual groups
    • Read a book
  • Monthly
    • Host an event for friends in Taipei

OKRs 🎯:

  • Maintaining a healthy mind and body
    • Pick a set of dietary rules quarterly and stick to them ~80% of the time
      • Was meant to track calories this quarter. Did not end up doing that. I did, however, find a couple of repeatable meals that I knew would help me lose weight and stuck to those most of the time. Fell off around the holidays, though.
    • Buy a road bike
      • Making progress, but did not make a purchase. Hoping to close a purchase early January 2022.
    • Register for at least one race
    • Read a couple books about fasting
      • Bought a book, but did not get around to reading it this quarter.
    • Stretch: Reach ~10% body fat
  • Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom
    • Free up time to work on my own projects
      • Stop consulting full-time by February
      • Wind down consulting to the bare minimum by start of Q2
      • Don’t take on more students for The Spike Lab unless I have to
    • Launch at least 1 of my own projects to the general public this year
      • Midana is sort of available to anyone who wants to use it, but it’s still in “early access” mode and not yet fully listed in the stores.
    • Secure at least 1 paying customer for one of my own projects
    • Launch Midana and secure paying customers for it
      • Reach 1000 users in the Midana closed beta.
        • We’re now in public beta, and I’ve reached ~700 users.
      • Test monetization pathways for Midana.
        • Prototype monthly subscription for receipt translation service.
        • Prototype taking a cut of winnings to allow users to throw away scanned receipts rather than keeping them.
        • Prototype taking a cut of winnings through automatic prize redemption via PayPal or other non-Taiwanese payment services.
      • Launch Midana to the general public in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
        • Midana is available to the general public, but is still in “early access” mode and not yet fully listed in the stores.
    • For inspiration and tactical advice:
      • Read Make by Peter Levels
      • Read about other peoples’ experiences doing 12 projects in 12 months
    • Stretch: Launch 12 projects in 12 months
  • Overcoming my fear of rejection, deepening friendships, and expanding my network
    • Make at least 1 close friend in Taipei this year
    • Schedule some time to get to know the other The Spike Lab coaches
  • Learning Chinese
    • Reach an upper intermediate level in Chinese (B2, ~3000 words)
    • Successfully participate in an Improv activity in Chinese
  • Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for a longer period of time
    • Find an apartment of my own

Watching sunset with grandma

I gave myself a D this quarter. It was a tough quarter where I struggled against myself a lot. I’ve had a lot of time to reflect, however, and am feeling ready to break through in Q4!

Here’s the lowdown:

  • 📈 Midana’s closed testing phase has grown to 100 users, and feedback continues to be positive, though scaling up testing proved more difficult than anticipated.
  • 💸 At least one Midana monetization pathway appears to be showing early promise with 25+% of users opting to potentially give up 10% of their lottery earnings in return for services. Scaling this pathway requires training users on a new behavior, however, and no revenue has been generated yet.
  • 🛠 I’ve been preparing Midana for launch to the general public. Last thing to do is overhaul the UI/UX to create a polished experience I can be proud of delivering. I’m targeting a launch date in November.
  • 🤕 I struggled to maintain a consistent level of productivity for Midana in Q3 despite having a launch date in sight.
  • 🙅‍♂️ I turned down a few potential opportunities for consulting gigs so that I can remain focused on delivering a quality product.
  • 🏝 I took 6 weeks off to spend time with family and friends in the States. My grandma turned 90 this year, and we celebrated with a trip to Hawaii. It was a lot of time off, but it was good to make up for lost time with family and friends.
  • 💉 I received two doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine while in the States. Feeling pretty safe now, especially since Taiwan has found its way back down to 0 cases per day.
  • 💩 A lot of my habits and data tracking fell apart this quarter. Strive is unfortunately also on hold as I re-strategize and as I focus on getting Midana out.
  • 🍟 I gained a lot of weight, and am now the heaviest I’ve ever been. Though I’m determined to get back on track.

Next quarter:

  • 💫 Taiwan is back down to 0 cases per day. Most restrictions have been lifted, and I expect to return to relatively normal life this quarter.
  • 🚀 I’m planning to launch Midana in November following release of my design overhaul, and ~2 weeks of feedback in public beta. Additional work to monetize the product will occur after general availability.
  • 🚫 I’m de-scoping work on Strive to focus on getting Midana out the door.
  • 💪 I’m actively working to rebuild my courage and discipline muscles! Also my actual muscles haha ;).
  • 🏃 I’ll be running a few races this quarter as part of my effort to return to a relatively active lifestyle.
  • 🚴 I plan to buy a road bike in Taiwan and casually get back into the triathlon scene.
  • 🙏 I’ll be spending more time in stillness this quarter. This means more meditation, more time with my phone silenced, and an earlier schedule to find calm resolve and quiet discipline.
  • 🍅 I’m going to play with the Pomdoro technique to encourage more consistent productivity and flow. I’m aiming for 12-16 pomodoros per day as a starting point, but have the intention to push myself when I can!

Table of Contents

Quarterly Review 🔍

Qualitative Review 🎨

Reflection 🤔

Q3 2021 was a tough quarter for me. Here are some of the highlights:

  • 📈 Midana’s closed testing phase has grown to 100 users, and feedback continues to be positive, though scaling up testing proved more difficult than anticipated.
  • 💸 At least one Midana monetization pathway appears to be showing early promise with 25+% of users opting to potentially give up 10% of their lottery earnings in return for services. Scaling this pathway requires training users on a new behavior, however, and no revenue has been generated yet.
  • 🛠 I’ve been preparing Midana for launch to the general public. Last thing to do is overhaul the UI/UX to create a polished experience I can be proud of delivering. I’m targeting a launch date in November.
  • 🤕 I struggled to maintain a consistent level of productivity for Midana in Q3 despite having a launch date in sight.
  • 🙅‍♂️ I turned down a few potential opportunities for consulting gigs so that I can remain focused on delivering a quality product.
  • 🏝 I took 6 weeks off to spend time with family and friends in the States. My grandma turned 90 this year, and we celebrated with a trip to Hawaii. It was a lot of time off, but it was good to make up for lost time with family and friends.
  • 💉 I received two doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine while in the States. Feeling pretty safe now, especially since Taiwan has found its way back down to 0 cases per day.
  • 💩 A lot of my habits and data tracking fell apart this quarter. Strive is unfortunately also on hold as I re-strategize and as I focus on getting Midana out.
  • 🍟 I gained a lot of weight, and am now the heaviest I’ve ever been. Though I’m determined to get back on track.

The struggle was pretty real this quarter. Despite being so, so close to a public launch of Midana, I found myself dragging my feet and having trouble maintaining consistent productivity. In my battle against myself, I experimented with a lot of new ideas and methods to keep myself moving.

One example is that I stopped tracking my time this quarter. I used to be fairly religious about tracking all my productive time in Toggl. Before I stopped doing this, I found that the clock felt rather arbitrary, and that I’d frequently feel stressed out and behind if my day didn’t go exactly according to plan and I still had a lot of time to track left in the day. I also commonly found myself despairing if, already fairly late into the evening, I still had a pretty large number of hours left to track. More often than not, I’d find myself giving up in that situation.

When I stopped tracking my time, I was trying to recreate the sense of calm, flow-like productivity that I sometimes experience when I try to get things done early on a Saturday morning so that I can enjoy the rest of my day guilt-free. There’s no sense of frenetic stress on those days—just the sense that each item I cross off my list is one less thing I need to worry about for the rest of the day.

I guess I didn’t want to feel like a robot for whom every minute needed to be productive, and for whom flexibility couldn’t exist because it might ruin a perfectly productive day or result in a smaller number on the timesheet. While I do think I’ve found my way to feeling less stressed out, ultimately, I still feel like I was mentally or emotionally blocked, and that I didn’t complete as much as I had hoped to.

Some amount of that was certainly video games. Despite identifying that video games posed a potential risk to my goals, I wasn’t able to reign that in nearly as much as I had hoped. I still played quite a bit, and I still spent quite a bit of my energy thinking about games and how to improve at them instead of applying that energy to my goals. Most of the evenings where I’d stare at the timer and feel overwhelmed by still needing to put in a 2-3 hour working session after dinner were days where I’d spent a little too much time playing games with friends in the afternoon.

Things didn’t go great on the personal side this quarter, either. I spent almost 6 weeks on vacation in the US this quarter, but even before that it felt like a lot of my core habits had fallen apart. Leading up to leaving, my diet fell apart. I still tried to stay consistent with exercise, but I was definitely less disciplined about it than I had been in the past. I stopped tracking things in Strive, likely out of a sense of shame for just how badly I was doing on everything.

In the confluence of everything, I started feeling pretty bad. There were moments this quarter where I felt disappointed in myself, where I didn’t feel like myself, and where I felt like I didn’t know how to get back to being myself. I felt a little like I was in a tailspin, moving a little bit further from the person I want to be with each passing date.

Fortunately, having just taken 6 weeks off, I’ve had a lot of time thinking about what happened and why I ended up where I did this quarter. I think it’s been a combination of a lot of things:

  • Lingering effects of lockdown. I developed some bad habits during lockdown, and even though lockdown was on its way to disappearing by the end of Q2 and before I left Taiwan in Q3, a lot of those bad habits stuck around.
  • Anxiety over leaving Taipei. It had been a long time since I left Taiwan. I’ve definitely become quite comfortable here, and my looming departure date definitely kicked up some fear and anxiety, especially given that I was about to jump on a plane for the first time while still unvaccinated for COVID-19. Even though I knew I was coming back, I think emotionally I couldn’t help but feel some of what I used to feel when I’d prepare to leave a place during my nomadic travels.
  • Anxiety over working independently. This is now one of the longer periods that I’ve worked completely independently. In the past, these periods usually get interrupted by consulting projects or something else. This time I’m sticking with it, and I’m willing to bet that, emotionally, I’m moving into some new territory as I settle more and more into that reality.
  • Becoming complacent without travel as a driver for challenge. In settling in Taipei, I think I’ve become a little complacent. I’m realizing that travel was a really important forcing function for pushing me out of my comfort zone, for offering new challenges, and for giving me sources of adventures and inspiration. In my life in Taipei, I don’t think that I’ve consistently re-created much of that. I’m beginning to wonder if the courage and discipline I built up over the years has languished in this complacency.

There are probably some factors external to me as well, like my relationship, the particular environment here in Taipei. I’m still thinking about a lot of it.

Ultimately, though, I lean heavily on the idea that I have agency over my life and my actions. If I feel like I’m failing, I don’t want to blame anything or anyone other than myself for it. At the same time, I know I’m human. I’m not perfect. I stumble and lose my way sometimes. I hope I can forgive myself for that.

Anyway, after I left Taiwan I spent 2 weeks in San Diego with my parents, lying low after getting my first shot of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. Then I spent 2 weeks with my family in Hawaii where we celebrated my grandma’s 90th birthday (she’s a total badass, btw—I can only hope to be so active and lucid at her age). I came back to San Diego to get my second vaccine shot, then drove north with the family up through Big Sur. I spent a few days in the Bay Area prior to departing for Taipei through SFO.

The good news is that, having really sat with myself to reflect on a lot of these things while on vacation, I think I’m starting to have a handle on what I’m going to do about all of it, and I feel generally pretty good about where I am now.

While on vacation, I also started getting back into exercising a little more seriously. I’m not going to lie, I’m in pretty bad shape right now—I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life as I write this, and my average mile on runs is embarrassing—but I think the athlete’s mentality has returned even if my athletic abilities haven’t yet.

I also started reading books again, primarily as a means to seek advice, perspective, and inspiration from collective wisdom. I had forgotten just how important reading and, perhaps more generally, learning is to my feeling inspired and motivated on regular basis. In 6 weeks of vacation I read something like 10 books. I’m glad to be building that back into my life.

I started meditating more on vacation. I was doing a half-hearted 10 minutes per day for most of this year, and I’m pleased to say that I’m now taking 20 minute morning meditations much more seriously. In fact, as I write this from a quarantine hotel in Taipei, I’m even doing 20 minutes of meditation twice a day. I’m re-discovering how powerful a tool mindfulness can be on my journey of self-actualization. In part, I have inspiration from books like Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty to thank for that. I also have my memories of Plum Village to keep as a reference.

Here are a few important insights from my recent reflections that I’d like to write down:

  1. My courage and discipline have regressed a bit. I’ve been OK about designing my life around courage and discipline in a macro sense, but reflecting on my day-to-day behavior, I realize that I’ve let fear and procrastination creep back into my life because I’ve lost the habit of recognizing when I’m afraid or uncomfortable and choosing to lean into rather than run away from those feelings.
  2. In trying to make my goals more focused, I de-emphasized a lot of the things that help me to practice courage and discipline, and which more generally inspire me. Those are things like reading, exercise, and meditation, all of which I reduced my commitments to at the beginning of the year for fear of creating an overwhelming set of goals that might distract me from the larger challenges. I hadn’t realized how important some of those things were to supporting my ability to deal with the larger challenges.
  3. It’s possible to become complacent even in discomfort. I think that, in a weird way, I’ve actually become comfortable, or maybe “familiar”, with the discomfort I experience at this stage in my entrepreneurial journey. I’m comfortable with my narrative as a struggling entrepreneur fighting a personal battle against his demons. So much so, in fact, that I think I’m afraid to evolve that narrative, because then I’d be stuck dealing with something new, scary, and unfamiliar. The discomfort you know is always less scary than the discomfort you don’t.
  4. I am, consciously or subconsciously, sabotaging myself to keep myself exactly where I am. As a corollary to insight #3, there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to push past where I am. That part of me is probably scared of real exposure to failure. Or, maybe worse, real exposure to success. There’s a part of me that is scared of the responsibility of success. There’s a part of me that probably has a weird relationship with money, and somehow believes that having too much of it is bad or that somehow it’s supposed to be hard to make, and so conspires to keep it just out of reach.
    1. I realize now that video games are a part of this cycle for me. They aren’t the root cause—they’re simply an outlet for the part of me that is afraid, wants to escape, and potentially wants to sabotage because it’s scared it can’t handle the uncertainty that pushing through might bring.
  5. I am literally the only thing standing in the way of a breakthrough. I know that this isn’t really a question of ability, intelligence, or grit—I’ve been down this road for clients and employers and executed admirably. Rather, it’s always been a question of self-belief and readiness to let go of the limitations I place on myself.
  6. I’m ready to commit to a breakthrough. Finally seeing myself for where I am, I’m ready to take action to stop sabotaging myself. I’m ready to see for myself what lies behind the curtain rather than imagine demons that may not even be there.

To sum up, it really wasn’t the best quarter for me productivity-wise haha. That said, this is far from the quarter where I tap out and give up. Though it made me anxious to take 6 weeks off, I’m grateful that I got to make up for lost time with friends and family, and that the long break actually proved fruitful in terms of personal learning and insight. I’m feeling refreshed with renewed determination to get back to work for Q4 and start applying my learnings.

Midana 🚀

Things are going well for Midana, but they’re moving relatively slowly. I had initially hoped for nearly 1000 closed beta testers from the almost 5000 email addresses I had on hand. Getting those email addresses to convert—even the ones who left survey responses—proved more difficult than I anticipated. Ultimately, I ended up with a conversion rate of closer to 1 in 50 than 1 in 5.

Still, feedback has been good with the 100 users I have so far. There are a few clear power users, and I’ve received emails from people who are ready to evangelize Midana in key expat communities.

Nevertheless, progress has been slow due to vacation, and, I think, due to me being slow to get my head wrapped around the design (UI/UX) and implementation of certain new parts of the app. I’m finding that I need to be better about separating the design and engineering processes. It’s tough for me to be “designing on the fly,” trying to create a first-class experience for users while writing code and trying to implement new features. I’m starting to get into the practice of really outlining things in Figma before I start building.

I also found myself dragging my feet this quarter from a productivity standpoint, and feeling nervous about the idea of launching the app to a wider audience as is.

Ultimately, I took the time this quarter to step back and draw-up a full re-design of the app in Figma. While this could just be another detour to avoid pushing past my fear, I’m starting to realize that one of my blockers was feeling like the app didn’t exactly meet my professional standard. The existing design of the app is really more an outgrowth from the prototyping phase than anything else, and never really benefited from time taken to really think through how things should look and feel across both platforms.

I’m realizing that in terms of features and functionality, the app is more than ready to launch. I’d just like to make sure that things look and feel professional and that the app presents in a way I can be proud of before I push the big red button. Beyond that, I’m realizing that there’s value to really nailing down the core user experience before I start thinking seriously about tacking on more bells and whistles.

The current plan is to finish implementing the Midana re-design before leaving quarantine on October 27. Once the re-design is deployed, I intend to launch ad campaigns for the open beta of the product, allowing all-comers to try the app. After ~2 weeks of testing in open beta, I’ll launch the app on the app stores provided feedback from testing is positive and all critical issues have been fixed. I’m ideally aiming to launch in mid-November, end of November at the latest.

Quantitative 🔢

This review covers July 6, 2021 through October 12, 2021 for a total of 98 calendar days. Of that time, I was on vacation from ~August 24, 2021 until October 12, 2021 for a total of 50 calendar days.

Summary 💯

I’m giving myself a D this quarter. In complete fairness, I was out on vacation for much of the quarter, but I don’t feel like I made good use of the time that I had available to me. Many of my important habits and routines fell apart, and I stopped tracking many of the things I had been tracking in Q2.

Break Down 🧨

Habits:

  • Daily
    • Get at least 8 hours of sleep every night
    • Go to sleep by 11pm
    • Get out of bed by 7:30am
    • Reserve the first hour after waking for self-care
      • Meditate for at least 10 minutes
      • Write in my journal
    • Reserve the hour before bed for self-care and relaxation
    • Aim to log 7-8 hours of work a day
    • Aim to minimize the need to log more than 8 hours of work a day
    • Plan tomorrow in the evening
    • Clear inboxes in the evening
    • Clear Anki reviews
    • Learn 8 new Chinese Anki cards
      • I was alright about this until I went on vacation. I added no new Chinese Anki cards while on vacation.
    • Add an average of 8 new Chinese cards to Anki
      • Upping this to match the learning rate so I never run out of new cards to learn!
    • Actively immerse in Chinese for at least 30 minutes
  • Weekly
    • Watch an episode or two of something on Netflix without subtitles for 30 minutes
      • I vaguely remember doing this for a few weeks early in the quarter, but don’t feel like I made it a habit.
    • Exercise at least 3 times a week
      • Exercise felt like it fell off leading up to vacation. It picked up again at points during vacation. This could have been better.
    • Make friends, relaxation, and extracurricular activities the priority on weekends
    • Plan my week on Sunday nights
  • Semimonthly
    • Host an online game event for one of my communities
      • Hosted an event for The Spike Lab.
    • Attend an improv workshop and participate in at least the bilingual groups
      • Didn’t start attending these despite my identifying this as at risk in Q2

OKRs 🎯:

  • Maintaining a healthy mind and body
    • Pick a set of dietary rules quarterly and stick to them ~80% of the time
    • Stretch: Reach ~10% body fat
  • Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom
    • Free up time to work on my own projects
      • Stop consulting full-time by February
      • Wind down consulting to the bare minimum by start of Q2
      • Don’t take on more students for The Spike Lab unless I have to
    • Launch at least 1 of my own projects to the general public this year
      • This one is still on track, so long as Midana launches in November as currently planned.
    • Secure at least 1 paying customer for one of my own projects
      • This is possible, but not guaranteed given Midana’s current trajectory.
    • Launch Midana and secure paying customers for it
      • Reach 1000 users in the Midana closed beta.
        • Conversion rate to get people into the closed beta was much lower than expected. I ended up with ~100 users in the closed beta.
      • Test monetization pathways for Midana.
        • Prototype monthly subscription for receipt translation service.
        • Prototype taking a cut of winnings to allow users to throw away scanned receipts rather than keeping them.
        • Prototype taking a cut of winnings through automatic prize redemption via PayPal or other non-Taiwanese payment services.
          • This worked out! People seem open to doing this, though this isn’t actually producing revenue yet because it requires that users adopt electronic receipts, which thus far are not very widely used.
      • Launch Midana to the general public in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
        • Still on track to make this happen. Aiming for end of November, after pushing out a design refresh and doing ~2 weeks of testing in open beta.
    • Continue experimenting with Strive
      • Start automating quarterly reviews and using more data to evaluate how the quarter is going and how things should be improved for the next quarter.
        • Create a quarterly Strive report email to start automating Q3’s quarterly review.
      • Eliminate Strive’s dependencies on AirTable premium.
        • Set up my own server for generating and sending report emails.
        • Create data pipeline to automatically move data from AirTable to Google Big Query.
        • Create a prototype dashboard for exploring and analyzing data pulled from Google Big Query.
      • Experiment new Strive data visualizations for keeping users motivated and interested.
        • Prototype a “heat map”-style visualization to help users visualize how they’re performing over time.
      • Prototype Strive’s first automatic data integration.
      • Experiment with solutions for maintaining a fun and competitive feeling between players who don’t have the same habit load.
      • Sadly, I made 0 progress on Strive this quarter. Additionally, use of the system fell off as I fell very, very far off the cart in Q3. Hoping to re-visit some of this in Q4, but the focus will definitely be on getting Midana out the door.
    • For inspiration and tactical advice:
      • Read Make by Peter Levels
      • Read about other peoples’ experiences doing 12 projects in 12 months
    • Stretch: Launch 12 projects in 12 months
  • Overcoming my fear of rejection, deepening friendships, and expanding my network
    • Make at least 1 close friend in Taipei this year
    • Schedule some time to get to know the other The Spike Lab coaches
  • Learning Chinese
    • Reach an upper intermediate level in Chinese (B2, ~3000 words)
      • My last diagnostic puts me somewhere in the ~2600-2800 word range, so I’m feeling alright about this.
    • Successfully participate in an Improv activity in Chinese
      • I think it’s likely that I could do this if I tried a few times and got used to it, but I haven’t made that effort so far this year.
  • Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for a longer period of time
    • Find an apartment of my own

Quarterly Planning 🗓️

Goal Modifications ✏️

Taiwan is back down to 0 cases per day! Life here is mostly returning to normal, with businesses re-opening and events starting up again. For the most part, this won’t affect my goals, but it will make it possible to return to my gym, and look to have more adventures outside again :).

Midana 🚀

To codify the plan for Q4, here are the goal modifications for Midana:

  • Launch Midana and secure paying customers for it
    • Reach 1000 users in the Midana closed beta.
    • Test monetization pathways for Midana.
      • Prototype monthly subscription for receipt translation service.
      • Prototype taking a cut of winnings to allow users to throw away scanned receipts rather than keeping them.
      • Prototype taking a cut of winnings through automatic prize redemption via PayPal or other non-Taiwanese payment services.
    • Launch Midana in public beta
      • Implement new designs for Midana “v2.0”
    • Launch Midana to the general public in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store by the end of November.

Re-iterating here, but the idea is to de-prioritize work on new features until the core app is stable, polished, and out in the wild. Current blocker to getting that out is implementing some new designs. Once that’s ready, I’ll launch the app for testing in public beta. After a few weeks of feedback and fixes from public beta, I’ll launch the app on the Apple App and Google Play Stores.

Ideal timeline has me done with the design implementations before I leave quarantine, then running a public beta for ~2 weeks before launching the app in mid-November. I’ve left ~2 weeks of buffer in here in case a) design implementation takes longer than expected or b) I need more time to iterate on feedback from public beta than expected.

Strive 👊

I’ve decided to de-prioritize work on Strive for the remainder of this year. There are a lot of interesting things I want to play with and explore here, but I haven’t done a good job of handling this as a “side project.” If I’m going to get to this, and I’d like to, I’ll need to push through whatever is blocking me for Midana first.

  • Continue experimenting with Strive
    • Start automating quarterly reviews and using more data to evaluate how the quarter is going and how things should be improved for the next quarter.
      • Create a quarterly Strive report email to start automating Q3’s quarterly review.
    • Eliminate Strive’s dependencies on AirTable premium.
      • Set up my own server for generating and sending report emails.
      • Create data pipeline to automatically move data from AirTable to Google Big Query.
      • Create a prototype dashboard for exploring and analyzing data pulled from Google Big Query.
    • Experiment new Strive data visualizations for keeping users motivated and interested.
      • Prototype a “heat map”-style visualization to help users visualize how they’re performing over time.
    • Prototype Strive’s first automatic data integration.
    • Experiment with solutions for maintaining a fun and competitive feeling between players who don’t have the same habit load.

Risk Mitigation 🛠️

Re-building Courage and Discipline 💪

As identified in my review, I think the biggest risk to my long-term success right now is the atrophy of my courage and discipline muscles.

I’d like to start looking for ways, both large and small, to challenge myself along these axes. It’s likely that this will return as a major theme in my 2022 goals, but for now I’d like to get started on re-building the habit of finding and taking opportunities to challenge myself.

Simply put, this means leaning into discomfort of all forms, but particularly:

  • Doing things that scare me.
  • Choosing the hard way over the fast, easy, or comfortable way.

Courage

Courage is the tougher of the two to tackle. One approach would be to create a list of things I’m afraid of, and then push myself to do one of those things each week. There’s a place for that, and it’s likely I’ll commit to this in 2022.

However, my focus in the moment is finding a way to better integrate courage into my lifestyle as a sort of habit or instinct that can be applied to situations on a micro, day-to-day level. I’m also looking to create lifestyle changes that cultivate a mental/emotional environment conducive to leaning into fear rather than running from it.

I’m going to choose adventure, inspiration, and mindfulness as focal points here. I’d like to push myself to get out of the house more on weekends, and to seek new experiences and potential challenges. While this may just sound like thrill-seeking, I think that this will naturally lead to opportunities to be courageous and step out of my comfort zone.

Inspiration and mindfulness are both part of the more mental/emotional side of courage. A healthy dose of adventure should lend itself to more inspiration in general, but I’m remembering that reading is a really important source of inspiration for me that I’ve been neglecting. I’d like to spend more time with books, perhaps in audio form while I exercise or do chores, or potentially as breaks from working (as an alternative to things like video games during my working day).

Revised habits:

  • Get out to do something adventurous every weekend
  • Meditate for at least 10 minutes a day
  • Meditate for at least 20 minutes, twice a day
  • Read a book every week or two

Discipline

For discipline, I’m going to use exercise and maintaining a healthy lifestyle as focal points. Of course, there are other areas of my life that will require discipline, and I plan to look for opportunities wherever they may appear. I’m thinking about keeping a sort of “challenge journal” to help me get into the habit of spotting these opportunities, taking them, and celebrating the small successes.

With regard to fitness, I’m not aiming to do anything insane like an Ironman or a marathon, but I’d like to start training more often and more seriously. 3 days a week isn’t going to cut it anymore—I’m thinking something closer to 6. I’d also love to have a couple of events to look forward to and train for. For now, I’m thinking 5k or 10k races, and I’m also considering getting back into shorter format triathlons (Olympic distance and down). This time around, I brought all of my cycling equipment back to Taipei. All I need now is a bike ;).

I’m also going to be getting back on the diet train. I’ve had 6+ weeks of fairly unmoderated eating haha… and it’s definitely showing. I’ve been resistant to calorie counting in the past because it can be a lot of effort, but I think it is one of the more tried, true, and predictable ways of body re-shaping. Plus, the resistance I know I’ll have for it makes for good discipline training.

This idea is fairly extreme, but I am considering experimenting with fasting this quarter not only for potential weight loss impact, but also as an exercise in discipline. I’ll need to do some reading about this before I feel comfortable doing that safely, however.

Between increased exercised and reduced calorie intake, I should start peeling off pounds. This quarter, I’m hoping to get back to where I started Q3 at the very least.

Revised OKRs:

  • Buy a road bike
  • Exercise at least 3 times a week
  • Exercise 5-6 times a week
  • Read a couple books about fasting
  • Register for at least one race

Stillness 🙏

To help combat my tendency to find outlets to run away from my fears, I’m going to try to build more stillness into my life. This may seem counter-intuitive—if I’m failing to be productive, why am I prioritizing “being still” of all things?

Something I learned years ago at Plum Village is that when you stand still long enough, you are forced to face yourself. You’re forced to face whatever you’re running away from and deal with it rather than mindlessly finding an escape. Ultimately, my goal is to be able to deal with my fear without needing to escape to things like video games when I need to be working.

To this end, I’m going to take my meditation practice a lot more seriously. Until now, I’d been going through the motions of a 10-minute meditation every morning. I’m going to kick this up to 20 minutes, ideally twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, and I’m going to try to really take the practice seriously. I’ve actually already started to implement this—since leaving for vacation, I have been meditating about 20 minutes every morning.

The goal of meditation is to get good at accepting whatever is happening for me in the moment, to notice how it feels both in my body and in my mind, and to be OK with it rather than running away or trying to avoid it.

The more I do this, the more of a habit it will become. As I get better at it, I’ll begin to be more and more aware of when I’m off task or distracted because I’m avoiding something I need to do. Over time, I hope to develop the ability to automatically make a different choice in response to fear or other negative impulses.

In addition to meditation, I’m also going to try to structure my days so that they’re more conducive to stillness. One thing I know works well for me is waking up very early. I’m talking 5:30am early. It can be tough to maintain that kind of sleep schedule while balancing social commitments, which is part of why I don’t do it regularly, but I am naturally inclined to rising early and I find that plenty of time and space to myself before the world wakes up helps me feel calm and productive. I love the feeling when I have a super productive morning and then look at the clock to discover it’s still before 10am, and I still have the whole day ahead of me to do whatever I want with.

Ideally, a perfect morning for me will start at 5:30am. I’ll leave my phone on “Do Not Disturb” for the first few hours. I’ll meditate, journal, get some exercise, and settle in with some coffee or tea as I start my work day around 8 or 9am.

In my last few sets of reviews, I’ve struggled with establishing and maintaining a good routine. I think some of that is outside influence—like I said, it can be hard to maintain a schedule like this with social commitments. It also doesn’t help that my girlfriend isn’t exactly an early riser herself, so the mismatch in our rhythms tends to make it that much harder for me to maintain.

Still, I’m optimistic about this this quarter. Additional meditation should passively make it easier to start and maintain habits. I’m also notably planning to start leaving my phone away from my sleeping space. I’m sure we all do this, but I’ve noticed that having my phone next to my bed tends to mean that I’ll spend extra time on it before I sleep, which de-conditions my body to sleep when I’m in bed.

Having my phone next to me when I wake up also usually means that I spend a groggy first 10-20 minutes in bed just wasting time on my phone rather than getting up and getting started. I’ve been experimenting with leaving my phone charging on my desk and away from my sleeping area and so far it’s been helping a lot. I’m also no longer using my phone as an alarm, preferring the silent vibration alarm on my watch instead (which should also help me wake up without disturbing my girlfriend).

Being intentional about winding down for the day by meditating for 20 minutes will also start to help my body wind down and prepare for sleep. My experiments with this so far have also been positive, and I find that I’m usually easily in bed by 9:30pm, and waking up before my alarm. Granted, a lot of my recent experimentation has been while on vacation and while currently in quarantine. The real test will be seeing what happens when I try to apply these things during my typical day-to-day.

Regardless, I’m convinced that more stillness is a key. In a lot of ways, I think this is what I was driving towards when I chose to stop tracking my time—I wanted to experience less passive anxiety/stress, and generally more calm. I’d love for my productivity to come from a place of quiet discipline rather than a place of frenetic anxiety.

Revised habits:

  • Leave my phone charging far away from my bed each night
  • Leave my phone silenced until my morning routine is complete
  • Go to sleep by 11pm
  • Go to sleep by 9:30pm
  • Get out of bed by 7:30am
  • Wake up by 5:30am
  • Meditate for at least 10 minutes a day
  • Meditate for at least 20 minutes, twice a day

Productivity 🚧

Productivity is clearly continues to be a big risk this quarter. Many of the previous sections are aimed at addressing adjacent issues that no doubt affect my productivity. This section will discuss specific tactics for more directly improving my productivity.

Before that, however, I want to be clear: I don’t really buy into the productivity myth anymore. I used to believe that productivity was unequivocally good, and that being able to produce more work output in the same amount of time was pretty much the goal for anyone who wanted to succeed in the workforce. But the truth is I left the workforce and not in small part because I sensed that this particular definition of productivity is an endless treadmill, and one that has us treating ourselves more like robots than human beings.

For me, productivity is no longer about maximizing every minute. Rather, I think the purpose of productivity is to help me make consistent progress towards my goals. I don’t believe in productivity for productivity’s sake anymore, and I don’t believe working harder for the sake of working harder should be a badge of honor.

That clarification aside, I’m going to make some changes to both how I work and how I track my work.

First, Toggl and the timer aren’t coming back. I don’t think they’ve been serving their purpose well. For independent work, when the goal is time-based it’s too easy to fixate on how much time I’ve spent in my chair trying to get things done. The timer doesn’t require a focused state. It also doesn’t guarantee or understand outcomes. I’d still like the amount of time I’ve spent working to be a trackable metric so that I can understand how other things affect it, but I don’t want to be obsessed with it to the point where it adds additional stress.

Instead, I think I’m going to play a little bit more with the Pomodoro technique this quarter. Here’s why I think that makes sense:

  • The Pomodoro technique requires a series of focused sprints, where I really commit to a task or set of tasks, and try to get them done as quickly as possible. It requires focus and intention rather than simply turning on a timer, and I think that this will lead to better flow and increased efficiency.
  • It’s more approachable to commit to ~25 minutes of work at a time than it is to expect myself to sit down and somehow crank 8 hours of work in a day. Once one chunk is done, it’s not hard to renew that commitment to another, and then another, and then another. When training for an Ironman, I’d often mentally break up my workouts in this way to keep myself sane and motivated.
  • If I’m strict about sticking to the Pomodoro cadence (i.e. short break timings), I’ll be forced to just move from task to task without stopping to think about how daunting the tasks may be or how little I want to do some of them. Otherwise, I sometimes find myself procrastinating between large tasks. Often all that’s needed is to just get started—the rest of the resistance tends to melt away after that.
  • Pomodoros still allow me to track high-level metrics about the time I spend working each day.
  • I can use the Pomodoro technique as a training tool for focus. Over time, I’d love to see if it gets easier to do more Pomodoros in a day, or even if it starts getting easier to approach longer Pomodoros.

In the past, I’ve been resistant to Pomodoros because it’s sometimes difficult to break software development into 25-minute chunks without losing flow. It also runs very counter to the “use every minute” ethos, which I did once buy into.

I think flow is still a valid concern, but so far I’m finding that the Pomodoro technique is creating more flow than it’s destroying. If I’m really into what I’m doing right now, I actually feel excited to pick it right back up again in 5 minutes. It doesn’t change things that much. If this starts to become a problem, though, I can consider longer Pomodoros for sessions of development work.

I’m going to start myself easy with a goal of 12-16 Pomodoros a day. As things start to feel natural and easy, I’ll challenge myself to do more.

Aside from the Pomodoro technique, I’m going to try to get into the habit of silencing my phone during work sessions so I’m never pulled away by messages or emails.

Underwhelming, but I think that’s kind of it! I’m going to leave the rest of the structure of my day relatively flexible, but I can imagine feeling pretty good about getting started around 8 or 9am, doing a set or two of Pomodoros in the morning before lunch around noon, and then settling back in to do another couple of sets of Pomodoros before dinner.

With an emphasis on stillness, I’m less overall worried about things like video games taking over my time. I am going to make an active effort to limit my exposure to video games during the work day, but in general whatever I want to do during my Pomodoro breaks is fair game so long as I’m strict about returning to work when the time is up.

Revised habits:

  • Aim to log 7-8 hours of work a day
  • Aim for 12-16+ 25-minute pomodoros each day

Summarized Habits and OKRs 🎯

Green for additions, red for subtractions.

Habits

  • Daily
    • Get at least 8 hours of sleep every night
    • Go to sleep by 11pm
    • Go to sleep by 9:30pm
    • Get out of bed by 7:30am
    • Wake up by 5:30am
    • Reserve the first hour after waking for self-care
      • Meditate for at least 10 minutes
      • Meditate for at least 20 minutes
      • Write in my journal
    • Leave my phone charging far away from my bed each night
    • Leave my phone silenced until my morning routine is complete
    • Reserve the hour before bed for self-care and relaxation
      • Meditate for at least 20 minutes
    • Aim to log 7-8 hours of work a day
    • Aim for 12-16+ 25-minute pomodoros each day
    • Aim to minimize the need to log more than 8 hours of work a day
    • Plan tomorrow in the evening
    • Clear inboxes in the evening
    • Clear Anki reviews
    • Learn 8 new Chinese Anki cards
    • Add an average of 8 new Chinese cards to Anki
    • Actively immerse in Chinese for at least 30 minutes
  • Weekly
    • Watch an episode or two of something on Netflix without subtitles for 30 minutes
    • Exercise at least 3 times a week
    • Exercise 5-6 times a week
    • Make friends, relaxation, and extracurricular activities the priority on weekends
    • Get out to do something adventurous every weekend
    • Plan my week on Sunday nights
  • Semimonthly
    • Host an online game event for one of my communities
    • Attend an improv workshop and participate in at least the bilingual groups
    • Read a book
  • Monthly
    • Host an event for friends in Taipei

OKRs 🎯:

  • Maintaining a healthy mind and body
    • Pick a set of dietary rules quarterly and stick to them ~80% of the time
    • Buy a road bike
    • Register for at least one race
    • Read a couple books about fasting
    • Stretch: Reach ~10% body fat
  • Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom
    • Free up time to work on my own projects
      • Stop consulting full-time by February
      • Wind down consulting to the bare minimum by start of Q2
      • Don’t take on more students for The Spike Lab unless I have to
    • Launch at least 1 of my own projects to the general public this year
    • Secure at least 1 paying customer for one of my own projects
    • Launch Midana and secure paying customers for it
      • Reach 1000 users in the Midana closed beta.
      • Test monetization pathways for Midana.
        • Prototype monthly subscription for receipt translation service.
        • Prototype taking a cut of winnings to allow users to throw away scanned receipts rather than keeping them.
        • Prototype taking a cut of winnings through automatic prize redemption via PayPal or other non-Taiwanese payment services.
      • Launch Midana to the general public in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
    • Continue experimenting with Strive
      • Start automating quarterly reviews and using more data to evaluate how the quarter is going and how things should be improved for the next quarter.
        • Create a quarterly Strive report email to start automating Q3’s quarterly review.
      • Eliminate Strive’s dependencies on AirTable premium.
        • Set up my own server for generating and sending report emails.
        • Create data pipeline to automatically move data from AirTable to Google Big Query.
        • Create a prototype dashboard for exploring and analyzing data pulled from Google Big Query.
      • Experiment new Strive data visualizations for keeping users motivated and interested.
        • Prototype a “heat map”-style visualization to help users visualize how they’re performing over time.
      • Prototype Strive’s first automatic data integration.
      • Experiment with solutions for maintaining a fun and competitive feeling between players who don’t have the same habit load.
    • For inspiration and tactical advice:
      • Read Make by Peter Levels
      • Read about other peoples’ experiences doing 12 projects in 12 months
    • Stretch: Launch 12 projects in 12 months
  • Overcoming my fear of rejection, deepening friendships, and expanding my network
    • Make at least 1 close friend in Taipei this year
    • Schedule some time to get to know the other The Spike Lab coaches
  • Learning Chinese
    • Reach an upper intermediate level in Chinese (B2, ~3000 words)
    • Successfully participate in an Improv activity in Chinese
  • Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for a longer period of time
    • Find an apartment of my own

A word cloud of my 2021 Q2 daily journal sentiments.

I gave myself a C+ for the quarter. I think a B- was within reach, but I don’t feel like I was proactive enough about adapting my goals to the evolving COVID-19 crisis in Taiwan.

Some highlights:

  • 😷 I’ve mostly been at home sheltering in place since COVID-19 outbreaks got out of hand here in Taiwan on May 15.
  • 👩🏻‍❤️‍👨🏻 My girlfriend has been sheltering in place with me. Expectedly, we’ve had some fights given such close proximity, but on the whole I think we’re doing a really good job of navigating new relationship challenges.
  • 🎮 I’ve been playing way too many video games during shelter in place. Mostly League of Legends, Legends of Runeterra, and Starcraft 2. This is sometimes starting to distract me from work lately.
  • 🚀 Midana is launching to its first cohort of real users this week. Though it’s taken longer than I had hoped to get to this point, things look promising with over 2000 people on the waiting list and users literally begging me to let them test the app.
  • 👊 I’ve started working on a gamified quantified self platform called Strive. Much of the data and metrics in this quarter’s review come directly from Strive, which has been providing some really awesome long-tail motivational support for goal follow-through.
  • ✍️ The most common moods from my journal were optimistic, rested, tired, behind, productive. The word cloud featured in this post is generated from an aggregation of all sentiments recorded in my journal. I usually try to get myself to choose 3 sentiments each day.

Next quarter:

  • 🏡 Operating under the assumption that Taiwan will still be sheltered in place through the end of the quarter. Though I am cautiously optimistic that Taiwan will be in a good place in the next few weeks.
  • 🤑 Aiming to test monetization pathways for Midana and scale the closed beta up to 1000 users.
  • 💪 Will be doubling down on both usage and development of Strive to support my own workflows and start automating pieces of these reviews.
  • 🚫 Implementing some new rules and restrictions in Q3 to make video games a potentially motivating reward rather than a potentially crippling distraction.
  • 😴 Will be placing more of an emphasis on getting the right amount of sleep and preparing for the coming day / week in Q3. Hopefully “tired” and “behind” won’t show up as much in next quarter’s word cloud ;).

Table of Contents

Quarterly Review 🔍

Qualitative Review 🎨

Reflection 🤔

Q2 of 2021 has been an interesting quarter. I’ve been making progress on many of my goals! Though more slowly and in some unexpected ways.

The main things that happened this quarter are:

  • 😷 Taiwan entered shelter in place on May 15. In an incredible reversal, just as some parts of the world begin to recover from COVID-19, Taiwan entered shelter in place for the first time, leaving us at home for more than half of the quarter. This has obviously had a huge influence on some of my goals!
  • 👩🏻‍❤️‍👨🏻 My girlfriend and I have been sheltering in place together. In a sense, we’ve moved in together at my place to weather the storm. Since she’s been working from home we’ve spent nearly every minute of every day for the last 6 weeks together and, though we’ve fought over a few things, it’s been pretty cool on the whole.
  • 🚀 Midana is launching to its first cohort of real users this week. Development has taken longer than I expected, but the app is starting to come together and, having completed a round of testing and feedback with friends, I’m finally feeling ready to throw this thing over the fence! As I ramp up my marketing efforts, the waiting list has grown to over 2000 people and I’ve literally had people messaging and emailing me begging for access to the app. I’ve also collected signal on adjacent products and services for the same demographic that look very promising.
  • 👊 I’ve started working on a gamified quantified self platform called Strive. The project is still in its early stages and is currently taking a back seat to Midana, but in testing on myself and on my girlfriend the results in terms of motivational support have been very promising.
  • 📊 For the first time, this quarterly review is (partially) data-driven. Much of the data in this review comes directly from Strive, which is starting to provide a fun, interesting, and, most importantly, consistent way to collect and track data about personal goals and self-improvement.

I’ll elaborate on the above shortly! But before I do here are a few other high-level things that happened this quarter:

  • 🎓 I’m starting to pick up my Anki habit again! After a break for nearly half a year, I’m finally feeling motivated and excited to be learning and retaining knowledge through Anki again. I’m still trying to keep the load far below previous levels, but Anki is once again beginning to power my studies of things like Chinese, Japanese, software engineering, math, and more.
  • ⚠️ Much of the “new place, new life” mood and productivity boosting effect from last quarter has worn off. I’m still falling into a generally good routine, but it’s felt tougher and overall less successful than before.
  • 🏡 I’m still loving my new place! Especially with shelter in place I’m feeling extremely grateful that I locked this place down (pun intended) before things got serious. Sheltering here has been, honestly, really comfortable. I can’t imagine doing the same in my old place.
  • 🎭 Due to the pandemic shutting in-person Improv down, I haven’t been able to go.
    • I was, however, going fairly regularly before things shut down.

Shelter in Place 😷

Up until very recently we here in Taiwan had been very lucky and very privileged to be one of the only places in the world left virtually untouched by COVID-19. While the rest of the world weathered the storm in lockdown, Taiwan was able to hold some of the first live concerts since the start of the pandemic. Travel around the island had been unrestricted and easy—I myself had planned trips to go scuba diving in Green Island and hiking in Yushan, Taiwan’s tallest mountain, in May.

Through a series of unfortunate reversals Taiwan entered shelter in place status on May 15, 2021 as a few COVID-19 outbreaks began to spread uncontrollably. Technically Taiwan never did and still hasn’t “locked down”—Taiwan has 4 pandemic alert statuses, and for most of this time we’ve been on level 3 which is technically “pre-lockdown”—but at this point I feel that that distinction is more political than practical. For all practical purposes, most places in Taiwan have been locked down for the past 6 weeks, and people have mostly been treating it as such.

It all happened very quickly, but I was prepared. There was a moment the week before the government announced a pre-lockdown alert status where I knew things were going to get bad. In my opinion, restrictions came too little too late, and people here took too long to recognize how serious the problem could be and react accordingly. As has been said many times since the pandemic began, people just don’t seem to intuitively grok that the spread of things like COVID-19 are exponential, not linear.

I remember calling my girlfriend at work on a Wednesday and telling her “Hey, I know you’re not worried yet, but I’m pretty sure we need to go to Costco and stock-up today. Once everybody catches on that this could be bad, it’s already going to be too late.” She thought I was crazy, but decided to humor me. We went to Costco that night and stocked up on $600 worth of food and supplies to make sure we’d be able to stay comfortable through a potentially extended shelter in place.

Sure enough, things got quickly worse and by that Saturday (unfortunately also my girlfriend’s birthday), the government announced pre-lockdown restrictions, including the closing of non-essential businesses, restrictions on movement, and restrictions on gatherings. We heard stories of people trying to get in to Costco and grocery stores and literally waiting in lines wrapping around several city blocks just to fight for whatever was left.

Fortunately, having already made our supply runs, we were free to celebrate her birthday as best we could given the circumstances. We stayed home and baked a cake. We played some board games. We even went and had a miniature socially distanced picnic in Da’an Park.

By now, things in Taiwan are starting to get better. Personally, I’m cautiously optimistic—we’re at 57 local cases per day, down from nearly 500 cases per day in the week following the level 3 announcement. It’s unclear that there’s a real path back to normalcy without vaccination—a complicated and political subject here in Taiwan, in part due to regional geopolitics with China—but things do feel like they’re getting better.

Myself, I haven’t felt as affected by the closures as I’m sure others have. I’ve been working from home and online for years now. On an average day before level 3 alert status, I spent the majority of my time at home anyway, mostly just going out for exercise and lunch. Mostly, I just don’t go out for those things anymore. There are a few things that have changed since things got worse, though.

Probably most prominent on that list is that my girlfriend is living with me as we shelter in place together. She’s working from home, so we’ve been spending a lot of time together. Honestly, it’s been nice! We’ve gotten into a routine where one of us cooks and one of us cleans on a given day. We’re more directly able to pursue certain goals together like diet and exercise—particularly through Strive, more on this below. Yes, there have been some rough moments where we’ve fought—I think this is only to be expected when you put two people together in a space and ask them to figure out how to truly live comfortably in it together—but so far we’ve been able to resolve problems as they come up. I don’t know what we’ll plan to do when things go back to normal, but I do like having her around.

Obviously, my social life has taken a hit due to some of the new restrictions. By the end of Q1 I had been feeling really excited about the community of friends I was building around myself here in Taipei! This is, hands down, the longest I’ve ever spent anywhere during my adult life. As weird as it is to say, I’ve never really lived somewhere where I felt like I had a large and inter-connected network of friends. Even when I lived in Palo Alto I didn’t feel this way—likely because I was always so busy working and so frequently out of town for business travel. Unfortunately, the pandemic has shut down many of the key drivers of that budding social life.

On a macro level, many of the friends I met and started deepening relationships with in Q1 have made the tough call to move on from Taiwan either temporarily or permanently due to the pandemic. Some of this was only inevitable. Here in Taiwan we’ve become fond of calling a certain type of expat, expats who found their way to Taiwan primarily to escape pandemic restrictions elsewhere, “COVID refugees.” I’ve always known that most of those people would likely leave after the pandemic lifted, and I have at least a few friends that fit this bill. For obvious reasons, the recent worsening of the pandemic here in Taiwan has sparked a recent mass exodus of COVID refugees from the country. Even some of my longer-term friends who have lived in Taiwan for years have been bouncing recently, at least to escape e.g. to the US for a few months and get vaccinated before coming back.

Personally, I plan to stick around in Taiwan. I’m not in a rush to leave, and plan to be here through the end of my lease next February. I’ll likely stay longer than that as well, since Taiwan recently passed a law lowering the time required for alien residents to become permanent residents from 5 years to 3 (and next year will be my 3rd year). There is, however, a part of me that longs to have the opportunity to spend an extended period in a new country again… perhaps Japan, France, or Mexico. The desire isn’t urgent yet, but I also don’t see it disappearing anytime soon. I don’t think that this would mean abandoning my “nest” here in Taiwan, but it does mean that I’ll eventually need to figure out how to maintain this place while taking some extended trips.

On a micro level, some important keystones of my social life have been put on hold. For example, before all of this started I had been co-working with a friend (shout out to Brandon Huang, if you’re reading this) on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He’d come to my place on Tuesday, I’d co-work with him at Taipei Tech Arena on Thursdays. I had been really enjoying that! Both because Brandon’s a fun friend to hang out with, and because Taipei Tech Arena happens to be the local Silicon Valley microcosm. Despite my sometimes love/hate relationship with my own Silicon Valley background, I found that it was often easy to relate to and have fun with people from that crowd.

Other things are closed too, of course. My gym is closed and my membership is on indefinite hold. My girlfriend and I have been doing home CrossFit workouts on our own (and some of them are surprisingly spicy!!). Improv has been closed since this began, though they’ve been trying to do some online workshops that I haven’t yet made time to try out.

For better or for worse I’ve been playing a lot more video games since shelter in place started. Mostly I’ve been playing League of Legends, Legends of Runeterra, and Starcraft II. I’ve been enjoying having more excuses to stay home and play video games, but it’s probably a fair bet that this is one of my coping mechanisms. In some small ways it allows me to maintain social ties with people—a couple of my Taiwan friends occasionally play League and Starcraft with me (shoutouts to Chris, Geoff, and Brandon).

That said, though, there have been at least a few weeks where I’ve felt like video games have distracted me from work, and I don’t feel great about that. Mostly this comes in the form of me getting to bed later than I should because of playing games, but occasionally this happens because I’ll play a couple of games with friends from California in the middle of my work day (shoutout to Rhed, you enabling SOB ❤️).

I don’t personally believe that video games are fundamentally bad and zero value, so I don’t think trying to give up video games entirely is the answer. I do expect, though, that finding ways to balance this to keep myself generally on task is going to be a theme in this review, especially since I expect shelter in place to continue for at least a good chunk of Q3.

Midana 🚀

Midana is steadily progressing! For those who don’t know, Midana is Taiwan’s first mobile barcode receipt lottery app in English. That was a mouthful haha, so let me break it down:

  1. Every receipt in Taiwan is a free lottery ticket!
    1. The government draws winning receipt numbers every 2 months.
    2. This is a government internal revenue program to encourage consumers to demand receipts from merchants, which in turn leads to merchants being forced to report taxable income.
    3. Prizes for this lottery go all the way up to 10 million NTD (~$333,333 USD)!
  2. The government also provides a way for consumers to collect electronic receipts rather than printed paper receipts.
    1. This involves a “mobile barcode” which is basically just a barcode you let vendors scan when you checkout.
    2. When a vendor scans your mobile barcode, you receive an electronic receipt.
    3. This system saves the government money and reduces the environmental footprint of the receipts.
    4. The government actually further incentivizes consumers to use electronic receipts by releasing a ton of extra prize money only available to electronic receipt holders.
  3. There are tons of apps for helping people use mobile barcodes in Chinese, but no apps that do this in English!

So Midana will be the first app to provide this service in English! It turns out there are a bunch of problems expats have here in Taiwan, usually due to the language barrier. Fortunately, this provides a lot of really awesome opportunities for me!!

So far Midana has ~15 users, all of whom are either friends or acquaintances of mine. The goal up to this point has been to collect initial feedback from people who I know well enough to be able to reach out to individually to get feedback on how the app could still be improved. Feedback so far has been decently positive! There have been a few rough edges to smooth out, but things are feeling good.

In fact, I’ll finally be ready to launch the app to my first round of non-friendly beta testers this week! I’ll be sending out the invite emails to my first cohort of 20 users just as soon as I finish this review :).

In the background I’ve been running ads to build up an email list for Midana, and have so far collected more than 2000 email addresses. I also give users an opportunity to fill out a customer research survey to move to the front of Midana’s waiting list. So far over 1000 users have opted to submit a survey response, which has given me some super helpful insights into who my target audience actually is.

For example, through these surveys I’ve learned:

  • Most of my users are going to be Filipino overseas workers
  • Most of my users are on Android
  • Most of my users have no idea what a “mobile barcode” is
  • There is decent demand for some adjacent products and services I’ve been hinting at

Anyway, suffice to say that people seem excited about Midana! So much so that I’ve actually been occasionally receiving emails and messages from potential users begging me to let them become testers for the app. This all feels super validating and I’m glad to be working on something that so many people seem to care about and have a clear need for.

I’m still not sure if Midana itself is going to have a viable business model, but that’s something I’m hoping to start testing in Q3. If nothing else, I believe that Midana will be a great wedge for building trust with this audience to provide other products and services that are more clearly monetize-able.

All that said, I want to examine why it’s taken me 4 months to get here in this review. Initially, I thought it would take me 2-4 weeks to build the first version of Midana. Instead, it’s taken me closer to 2-4 months.

I think I’d attribute the slower than expected progress to:

  1. Ramping up on React Native.
  2. Changing product scope as I receive feedback.
  3. Getting distracted from work by friends and video games.

Ramping up on React Native

One of the reasons I wanted to start working on Midana was to have an excuse to build a mobile app in React Native! I’ve been working with React for the last few years now and have really enjoyed the experience. A long time ago, I had some experience building native iOS and Android apps, but I was intrigued by React’s “learn once, write everywhere” paradigm. There have been some vocal criticisms of React Native and other cross-platform technologies like it, but I finally wanted to understand for myself.

On the whole, React Native hasn’t been a huge leap from React. There have, however, been a few places where figuring things out has been complicated. On the whole, it’s actually taken me way longer to build out a cross-platform mobile app of this complexity than I expected, but I’m fairly certain it would have taken me 2-3 times as long if I had tried to build two separate mobile apps. Not to mention what a pain that would be to maintain…

I’m not sure I’d attribute the extended development timeline to React Natives being particular hard to pick-up, however—more that Midana turned out to require some tricky features that are potentially more advanced and required me to learn a few things more deeply than I otherwise would have.

A few examples of this are:

  • Home screen widgets. In gathering feedback from testers it quickly became obvious that a home screen widget displaying a user’s mobile barcode was a need to have. These aren’t super common for mobile apps in general, but they seem particularly rare for React Native apps. Documentation and examples for this were sparse, and it turned out that doing this required me re-visit native app development for the widget while learning how to connect native code to JavaScript over the bridge (another advanced feature).
  • Camera-based live QR code scanning. This is a basic feature of a lot of the other mobile barcode apps in Chinese. There are React Natives libraries for doing this, but using some of them in combination with other libraries I wanted to use put me in dependency hell for awhile. Suffice to say that I learned more than I ever wanted to know about Gradle and Maven, Android’s dependency tools, than I ever wanted to know in order to wade through some hairy issues.
  • Proxied WebView. I needed to find a smooth way for my users to essentially interact with a Taiwanese government website in Chinese without the Chinese. My solution ended up being to “frame” the government website in an undisplayed WebView and inject JavaScript into it to manipulate the website on the user’s behalf. The big challenge came from needing to export captchas from the government site for my users to fill out in Midana in order for me to submit information on their behalf. Unexpectedly, this turned into one of the more complicated pieces of technology in my stack, and is certainly one of the most difficult and brittle to maintain. These WebView flows were primarily for registration and onboarding, so getting them right turned out to be especially crucial.

In reflecting on it, I think I’ve learned and accomplished a lot!! But some of these things definitely took way longer than I thought they would. Live and learn.

Changing product scope due to feedback

This one actually isn’t a bad thing! I think this means I’m doing my job as a product manager, and not just as an engineer. I’m listening to feedback I’m getting and making real-time strategic decisions based on that feedback. Sometimes those decisions do change the product roadmap and milestone timelines, but when they’re necessary, they’re necessary.

As an example, I had one user who described very nearly having a panic attack when one of the steps in my original onboarding process required her to open an email containing several paragraphs of Chinese. Based on that feedback, I decided I really needed to work on my onboarding flow. Unfortunately, as alluded to above, the onboarding flow has turned out to be one of the trickiest pieces of code in my entire system.

Getting distracted

Even before shelter in place I found myself getting distracted week-to-week by social obligations. As much as I enjoyed the routine of having a people to co-work with on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in the weeks before shelter in place I was finding that, more often than not, going to Taipei Tech Arena on Thursday would mean that I’d get pulled into happy hour, eat a bunch of pizza, drink a bunch of whiskey, and hang out with people instead of doing work. Technically this was networking, though, and, in the long-term it’s probably a net positive. In the short-term, however, it started feeling bad to be getting less than half a day of work done on Thursdays (and sometimes on Tuesdays) due to all the distractions.

Now that I can’t co-work with people anymore, video games have started to become this distraction. The influence hasn’t been huge, but there have been some weeks where I’ve averaged closer to 6 hours of logged work a day. There have also been some weeks where every day I woke up feeling tired, likely because I stayed up in bed playing too many games of Legends of Runeterra on my phone. A chain of those in a week is enough to really trash productivity, and seriously mess with outcomes.

I talked about video games a bit in the last section, so I won’t re-hash that, but I do think that the larger theme of getting distracted from my actual work needs to be addressed better. This probably isn’t the biggest reason why things have taken as long as they have, but it certainly contributed.

Strive 👊

Strive is a gameified quantitative self platform for tracking, understanding, and predicting self-improvement. I dropped some hints about Strive during my Q2 review. Back then Strive was just an inkling and an experiment. The project is slowly evolving and, though my focus is still on Midana, I’m starting to get very excited about how it’s working and where it could be going.

In its simplest current form, Strive is a competitive and collaborative habit tracker. My girlfriend and I are presently the only users, and we use Strive to help motivate ourselves and each other to continue striving to become our best selves.

Without going into too much detail, here’s how it works:

  1. My girlfriend and I have each defined a set of metrics and habits that we want to track, each associated with a larger goal like losing weight or, in my case, maximizing productivity for personal projects.
  2. On a daily basis, we track our habits and copy our metrics from their primary data sources, earning points for each habit completed and each metric recorded.
  3. At the end of each week we tally the points in order to:
    1. Evaluate how we each did against ourselves from last week.
      1. As a team, we collectively earn a prize if everyone does at least as well as they did last week.
    2. Evaluate who earned more points this week to assign a winner.
      1. Individually, the winner also earns a prize, but only if everyone did at least as well as they did last week.

So far this system has been super interesting. I have, of course, experimented with habit tracking in the past. I have, of course, also previously had the brilliant idea to try and use habit tracking data to self-evaluate during my annual and quarterly reviews.

Unfortunately, the problem with most habit trackers is that tracking habits is, itself, a habit, and sooner or later I always ended up falling off the cart. When I do, it’s a downward spiral, and any forward momentum that habit tracking was creating turns on itself, usually resulting in me never opening the habit tracker ever again.

Strive is proving itself to be very different! There have been weeks where I’ve fallen off the cart with Strive. However, rather than throw the baby out with the bath water, Strive is managing to motivate me to reset and rally each week, and try to do better this time. It’s almost like bringing the “it’s a new year and a clean slate” feeling to every week. Yes, I might have been terrible about all of my habits last week. But thanks to Strive I have a reason to decide to change that this week. The buck does stop here.

I think there’s a huge amount of potential behind this as a tool or a product. With at least just me and my girlfriend, I’ve been able to semi-artificially create an environment where my girlfriend and I both support and push each other on a daily basis. Since she and I are both fairly competitive people, there is an air of friendly competition and she and I have clearly internalized the value of earning these otherwise worthless points that I’ve conjured from the ether. This, I think is the most powerful part of what Strive has accomplished: it’s successfully created a gameified economy and alternate reality that my girlfriend and I are actually consistently buying into.

Now that the points have an established value to us, all we really need to do in order to motivate ourselves toward certain behaviors or away from others is to make it trackable and make it worth something in Strive.

I have no idea whether or not Strive is something I can adapt to work for other people, or even if it can extend beyond the context of a couple. Even in its current form though, applied just to me and her, the concepts have been super interesting to play with. For now, I plan to continue testing this and slowly layering on more and more value. Later, when I’m convinced that Strive has something sticky and valuable, I’ll start thinking about how to market it or prototype versions of it that might work for others.

Though Midana has my focus right now, something I’m realizing as I nerd about designing Strive is that Strive is the kind of thing that, if I never had to worry about money, I could easily imagine myself wanting to pour all of my time and energy into. If the masterwork of my life were something like Strive that could tangibly help people improve themselves in a data-driven, I think I’d die a happy and fulfilled man.

Quantitative 🔢

This review covers April 5, 2021 through July 2, 2021 for a total of 89 calendar days. In Taiwan, this covers 64 working days accounting for 3 holidays of which I observed 1.

Summary 💯

I’m giving myself a C+ this quarter. Things went OK on the whole, and many of the things that were least successful this quarter can be at least partially attributed to the pandemic. Still, I think I could have been more proactive about adapting. I also wish I had made more progress and stayed more focused on my work.

Break Down 🧨

Habits:

  • Daily
    • Wake up early
      • I did well with this for parts of this quarter, but often found that I was tired in the morning and feeling tired would affect my productivity for the day. I’ve settled on the idea that sleeping long enough not to feel lagged in the morning is more important than exactly when I wake up. Realistically if I want to wake up earlier (and part of me does), I need to make sure I’m asleep much earlier. Video games and wanting time to play in the evening has been an obstacle here.
    • Reserve the first hour after waking for self-care
      • My feeling is that I did well on this.
      • Meditation, journaling, weighing myself, and taking my vitamins are all parts of my morning routine, so I’m basing my evaluation of this on those habit scores.
    • Reserve the hour before bed for self-care and relaxation
      • I’ve done OK on this. Too often this quarter, though, this has translated into video games that extend beyond my true bed time.
      • Typically this also includes planning tomorrow, which only happened 14.61% of the time. (Down significantly from last quarter, though I still really appreciate this habit.)
    • Go to sleep early enough to get ~8 hours of sleep
      • My sleep data shows that I’ve gotten good quality sleep (82%) this quarter on average
    • Meditate for at least 10 minutes
      • I meditated 79.78% of the time. See the metrics section for details.
    • Journal for at least 10 minutes
      • I journaled 74.16% of the time. See the metrics section for details.
    • Aim to never obligate myself to log more than ~8 hours of work a day
      • I did well on this, but on the whole my feeling is that I’m currently actually having the opposite problem where I’m, on average, not putting in enough working time. This is nowhere near as extreme as it’s sometimes been in the past while working on my own projects, but it’s nevertheless something I have my eye on.
      • I worked ~6 hours and 45 minutes per day. See the metrics section for details.
    • Clear Anki reviews
      • I cleared my Anki reviews 60.67% of the time.
      • I’m slowly started to re-introduce some of my old backlogged cards.
    • Add an average of 5 new Chinese cards to Anki
      • I created new Anki cards 49.44% of the time.
      • 5 turns out to be an awkward number, though, since my Anki cards come in pairs. I usually end up adding 6 new cards each day. Even so, correcting for this, the average number of cards created per day was ~2.97.
    • Learn 5 new Chinese Anki cards
      • I learned new Anki cards 59.55% of the time.
      • Likely the discrepancy between this number and clearing reviews is from days where I completed my reviews, but I didn’t have any new Chinese cards to learn because I neglected to add new cards.
    • Actively immerse in Chinese for at least 30 minutes
      • I completed 1744 minutes of active immersion in Chinese this quarter, which comes out to an average of 20 minutes per day.
  • Weekly
    • Free-flow immerse in Chinese for at least 30 minutes
      • This one’s a little harder to track and I don’t have data for it… if I count conversations with my girlfriend or my girlfriend talking to (or at 😅) me, I’m probably approaching this number. I did not make a real effort to make this happen, however.
    • Exercise at least 3 times a week
      • I exercised 37 times since my Q1 review, for ~2.9 times/week
    • Always make friends, relaxation, and extracurricular activities the priority on weekends
  • Semimonthly
    • Call my sister and debrief on progress and blockers around deepening friendships
      • I haven’t made time to call, but it also turns out that, on average, my sister is very hard to reach. Before shelter in place, however, I wasn’t feeling like I needed a coach—my social life was flowing nicely on its own!
    • Attend an improv workshop and participate in at least the bilingual groups
      • I still haven’t attempted to do Improv in Chinese! In my defense, the pandemic shutting these workshops down has a lot to do with that, though I could still be trying to attend this workshops in their online format.
  • Monthly
    • Attend a networking event
      • This has obviously been impossible since shelter in place started, but before that I had been attending a networking event every week in the form of Taipei Tech Arena’s Thursday happy hours.

OKRs 🎯:

  • Maintaining a healthy mind and body
    • Pick a set of dietary rules quarterly and stick to them ~80% of the time
      • I haven’t been great about this, but recently my girlfriend and I are doing the slow carb diet together and we’ve been pretty good about sticking to it!
    • Stretch: Reach ~10% body fat
      • This one is… pretty far away right now haha.
  • Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom
    • Free up time to work on my own projects
      • Stop consulting full-time by February
      • Wind down consulting to the bare minimum by start of Q2
      • Don’t take on more students for The Spike Lab unless I have to
    • Launch at least 1 of my own projects to the general public this year
      • Still behind where I wanted to be, but on track for this to happen during Q3 or Q4 this year!
    • Secure at least 1 paying customer for one of my own projects
      • Hoping this happens during Q3 this year! On track.
    • For inspiration and tactical advice:
      • Read Make by Peter Levels
      • Read about other peoples’ experiences doing 12 projects in 12 months
    • Stretch: Launch 12 projects in 12 months
      • Given that I’m still on my first project 4 months in, I think it’s safe to say I’m not going to hit 12 this year :). Still, I think I’m spending my time the right way and learning what I need to.
  • Overcoming my fear of rejection by deepening friendships and expanding my network
    • Complete any homework assignments given to me by my sister
      • Haven’t really been getting assignments from my sister lately
    • Make at least 1 close friend in Taipei this year
      • Unsure about this one right now! Felt pretty on track for this Q1, but since shelter in place started Q2 my social life is in a little more disarray.
    • Schedule some time to get to know the other The Spike Lab coaches
      • Have spent no time at all on this, unfortunately.
  • Learning Chinese
    • Reach an upper intermediate level in Chinese (B2, ~3000 words)
      • I have no sense of how close or far I am from B2 at the moment, but I am back into a rhythm for studying Chinese and feeling good about my efforts and learning rate.
    • Successfully participate in an Improv activity in Chinese
  • Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for a longer period of time
    • Find an apartment of my own

Metrics 📊

  • Work
    • 411 hours and 37 minutes of “work” time tracked in Toggl
      • Filtered out from 511 hours 49 minutes of total time tracked in Toggl
    • ~6 hours and 45 minutes of work done per day on average
    • Habits
      • Plan tomorrow: 14.61% completion
  • Health
    • Average weight: 158.3 lbs
    • Average body fat: 14.7%
      • Likely underreported by my Yunmai scale as I’m almost certainly closer to 18 or 19% right now.
    • Average resting heart rate: 58 bpm
      • Reported by my Garmin Fenix 6X
      • Includes just the last 4 weeks of data
    • Average water drunken per day: 84 fl oz (out of a goal of 96 fl oz)
    • Average sleep quality: 82%
      • Measured by Sleep Cycle
    • Habits
      • Exercise
        • 37 total exercise sessions
        • ~2.9 exercise sessions per week
      • Taking Vitamins: 79.78% completion
  • Mental Health
    • Average mood score: 3.64 out of 5.
      • Pulled from my Notion journal through a Strive script powered by the Notion API.
      • Daily mood score scored out of 5 with 5 being amazing and 1 being absolutely terrible. Logged in my journal each morning.
    • Most common sentiments: optimistic, rested, tired, behind, productive.
      • Pulled from my Notion journal through a Strive script powered by the Notion API.
      • Aggregated from 3 adjectives I associated with every journal entry each morning.
      • See the featured image in this post for a full weight word cloud.
    • Habits
      • Meditation: 79.78% completion
      • Journaling: 74.16% completion
  • Language
    • Chinese
      • Total minutes of active immersion: 1744
      • Average daily minutes of active immersion: 20
    • Anki
      • Total new cards added: 324
      • Average new cards per day: 4
      • Total reviews: 1928
      • Average reviews per day: 21

Quarterly Planning 🗓️

Q3 of 2021 will run from July 6, 2021 through October 1, 2021 for 88 calendar days. This covers 55 working days accounting for 9 days of vacation I’ll be taking in Hawaii with my family in September to celebrate my grandma’s 90th birthday.

Goal Modifications ✏️

Have circumstances changed that might necessitate tangibly modifying the goals you laid out for yourself at the beginning of the year? If so, outline them below. Deep dive into any of these using sub-headings.

Shelter in Place 😷

It came late for us here in Taiwan, but Q2 2021 finally brought pandemic-related restrictions! Though this may not turn out to be true, I’m going to work under the assumption that we’ll continued to be sheltered in place for all of Q3.

I’m actually going to keep my goals mostly the same, but am going to make a few modifications, particularly around networking and friendships.

If in-person gatherings aren’t possible, I’m having trouble seeing how networking could take a real focus this quarter. So instead I’m planning to focus my efforts on strengthening or deepening my ties to existing communities and friends both here in Taiwan and abroad!

Right now the particular communities of interest are:

  1. Longer-term friends here in Taiwan.
  2. The Spike Lab coaching network.
  3. Formosa Improv Group (FIG).

The Spike Lab and FIG do present some opportunities to network in a limited capacity, so spending energy on these communities could be doubly good!

For both friends in Taiwan and The Spike Lab, so long as we continue to be socially distanced, my plan is to start hosting game events online. This is a type of event that I enjoy and would ordinarily host in-person, and which I think a lot of my friends would appreciate right now. For the friends that are a little more hardcore about games, organizing time to play Starcraft or League also counts here, but probably shouldn’t overshadow more casual game events for friends who don’t play those kinds of games.

For The Spike Lab in particular, seeing some of the other coaches at a game event would help to make reaching out to them to get more acquainted separately will feel less like a cold email, which I think will lower the activation energy while boosting the response rate (not that other coaches aren’t happy to meet, but we are all super busy).

Midana 🚀

In addition to my existing high-level OKRs for executing on independent projects, I’d like to give myself a few specific OKRs for Midana! Here are the goals for Midana before the end of Q3:

  • Reach 1000 users in the Midana closed beta.
  • Test monetization pathways for Midana.
    • Prototype monthly subscription for receipt translation service.
    • Prototype taking a cut of winnings to allow users to throw away scanned receipts rather than keeping them.
    • Prototype taking a cut of winnings through automatic prize redemption via PayPal or other non-Taiwanese payment services.
  • Make my first cent from a Midana user from the wild.
  • Stretch: Launch Midana to the general public in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

In order to accomplish these, I’m going to need to really start ramping up marketing efforts and the number of invites I sent to waiting list users on a weekly basis. My first cohort starting next week will be 20 users, after that I’ll need to start inviting more cohorts each week or expanding the cohort size.

I don’t have any data about invite conversion rate yet, so I’m assuming a 20% conversion on my emails (I think this is conservative, but time will tell). That means I need to invite ~5000 people to get 1000 users. Since I’ll be on vacation at the end of September, I really only have 10 weeks to accomplish this.

Thus, the invite schedule will look something like this:

  • Week 1: 20 invites
  • Week 2: 20 invites (Cumulative: 40)
  • Week 3: 40 invites (Cumulative: 80)
  • Week 4: 40 invites (Cumulative: 120)
  • Week 5: 80 invites (Cumulative: 200)
  • Week 6: 300 invites (Cumulative: 500)
  • Week 7: 500 invites (Cumulative: 1000)
  • Week 8: 1000 invites (Cumulative: 2000)
  • Week 9: 1500 invites (Cumulative: 3500)
  • Week 10: 1500 invites (Cumulative: 5000)

Keeping the cumulative total smaller initially will give me time to really respond to feedback and make sure that each new cohort of user produces better metrics than the last.

It should also be noted that I presently only have ~2000 users on my email list to send invites to, so I need to make sure marketing efforts are scaling up so I’m prepared to make the last 3000 invites by week 9.

Strive 👊

I’d also like to give myself a few specific OKRs for Strive this quarter!

Right now, the general goal for Strive is to create something that is useful to me which I can also test with my girlfriend. After I’m convinced I have something compelling to power my own workflows, I’ll start searching for ways to beta test it with other people or market it to a wider audience!

Here the goals for Strive before the end of Q3:

  • Start automating quarterly reviews and using more data to evaluate how the quarter is going and how things should be improved for the next quarter.
    • Create a quarterly Strive report email to start automating Q3’s quarterly review.
  • Eliminate Strive’s dependencies on AirTable premium.
    • Set up my own server for generating and sending report emails.
    • Create data pipeline to automatically move data from AirTable to Google Big Query.
    • Create a prototype dashboard for exploring and analyzing data pulled from Google Big Query.
  • Experiment new Strive data visualizations for keeping users motivated and interested.
    • Prototype a “heat map”-style visualization to help users visualize how they’re performing over time.
  • Prototype Strive’s first automatic data integration.
    • This will likely be some kind of automatic syncing of journal data from Notion to Strive’s main data store (which is currently AirTable, but that may change in the near future).
  • Experiment with solutions for maintaining a fun and competitive feeling between players who don’t have the same habit load.

Since Strive is not my primary project, these things will mostly need to happen on the weekends. I think each bullet point here will take me a single weekend to accomplish.

Risk Mitigation 🛠️

Summarize the risks identified in quarterly review. Outline actions that need to be taken to mitigate those risks. Deep dive into any new methodologies that need to be explained or thought out using sub-headings.

Video Games 🎮

At present, I think one of the biggest threats to my goals in Q3 is potentially spending too much time on video games!!

I’d like to continue giving myself the flexibility to spend available free time how I want, and I don’t want to regiment my days to the point where I don’t have the flexibility to choose how and when I want to spend my energy. Additionally, when used correctly, I’ve found that allowing myself to play video games as a reward for being productive or meeting some milestone in my day can be very motivating!

To that end, I’m trying to avoid absolute (but potentially effective) rules like:

  • No video games during the work day
  • No video games until before I’ve logged 7-8 hours of time in a day
  • No video games until I’ve completed everything else

I may revisit rules like the above if Strive data shows that I’m not meeting my work goals consistently, but for now I’d like to try something more like:

  • Aim to log 7-8 hours of work each day.
    • This will help to make sure that a certain amount of time each day is earmarked for making progress on work.
    • Journaling in the morning doesn’t count as work.
    • Language studies don’t count as work.
    • Networking meetings, catch-ups with friends, and therapy can count toward this number, but should generally not exceed ~1-2 hours in a day.
  • No video games during the work day until I’ve logged at least half of my work hours for the day and completed all language-related goals.
    • I think this will help motivate me to start my day earlier and have super productive mornings so that I can potentially still make it to a short video game session with friends in the afternoon around lunch time.
  • No video games in the evening until after I’ve met my work hour goals, planned tomorrow, and gotten ready for bed.
  • No video games after 11pm on nights before a working day.
    • This along with the habit above it will help to prevent me from playing video games at the expense of sleep and being prepared to be productive tomorrow.

Since it’s easy to just say these things but then fail to do it, I will be using Strive to both track and assign point values to these habits to provide further motivational support for following through.

Reducing Fatigue 😴

Anyone else notice how prominently “Tired” appeared in the word cloud of sentiment adjectives I tracked in my journal? I did, and I think it presents a real risk to both productivity on independent projects and willpower available to apply discipline towards these goals. When I’m tired, everything is harder. Getting work done is harder. Making disciplined decisions harder. Avoiding bad habits is harder.

I need to do everything I can to make I’m getting enough sleep and starting my days right (and early!).

Here’s how I plan to modify my daily habits to attack this problem:

  • Wake up early
    • This isn’t specific enough!
  • Go to sleep early enough to get ~8 hours of sleep
    • This isn’t specific enough!
  • Get at least 8 hours of sleep every night
  • Get in bed by 11:00pm
  • Go to sleep by 11:15pm
    • Actually in bed and trying to sleep!! None of this playing video games on my phone in bed until 2am crap haha.
    • Exceptions can be made if I stay up reading because I’m having trouble sleeping, so long as I’m in bed by 11pm and have already made a real effort to fall asleep by 11:15pm.
    • Generally will try to only keep this a hard rule if it’s not a Friday or Saturday night, but will keep this as an aspirational goal on those nights if nothing else is going on.
  • Get out of bed by 7:30am
    • Not just awake and browsing the internet on my phone in bed. Actually out of bed and starting my day!!
    • Again, this mostly applies to weekday mornings, but will keep this as an aspirational goal for weekends if nothing else is going on.
    • Priority-wise, it’s more important that I wake up feeling rested than that I get out of bed by 7:30am. Starting my day early but setting a tired and groggy tone to my day isn’t worth it. For this reason, I actually won’t be setting an alarm in the morning except on mornings where I have early meetings or commitments.

Again, easy to say these things, harder to follow-through. I’ll be using Strive to track the related habits and assign point values to provide additional incentive to stay on track.

Optimizing Energy Allocation ⚡️

If all of the above in Video Games 🎮 and Reducing Fatigue 😴 go well, there’s still one missing piece to optimize my productivity and reduce the risk that progress on my own projects continues to happen slowly: optimizing how I allocate my energy.

This quarter one of my epiphanies was realizing that there comes a certain point in every day where the most important thing I can be doing with the energy I have left in the tank actually isn’t continuing to code, trying to push out one more feature, or even finishing what I was doing.

At some point in every day, the most important thing I can be doing with my remaining energy is figuring out how to make the most out of tomorrow’s energy and making sure that there’s as much energy to use tomorrow as possible! This is because, inevitably, the energy left at the end of the day is usually—though admittedly not always—the fumes and the dregs. It’s usually enough to start thinking about how tomorrow’s refueled tanks should be used, but often isn’t enough to efficiently complete something today.

Usually I’m tempted to keep working on something today because of some false sense that I need to have “completed” something today. Truth is, since I’m my own boss, it doesn’t really matter if I can report that I completed something today because I stayed up late to finish it or if I finished it first thing in the morning. In fact, on average, most of the things I choose to stay up finishing I would almost certainly have finished more quickly if I had let them wait until the morning. Staying up later to finish something also messes with my routine and potentially affects productivity for the rest of the week. Not a good trade-off.

I’m also realizing that this principle applies not just to each day, but actually to many time scales! For example, there is also a point in the week where the most important thing I can be doing is recovering my energy and preparing for next week. Naturally, that part of the week is called the weekend :).

It may seem obvious, but re-framing my weekends this way has been interesting: each weekend, my priorities are informed by the need to make next week as successful as possible. That might mean taking care of errands that might leak into the coming week or steal energy away from other things. It could also mean recovering sleep debt so I have as much physical and emotional energy as possible in the coming week.

The analogy does continue extend, I think into larger and larger timescales, too! I don’t think I quite realized it when I started doing this, but my quarterly reviews are actually the manifestation of me subconsciously realizing that it’s worth it to burn one working day each quarter to create a 3-day weekend that really allows me to recharge and think about how the next quarter is going to be a good one.

Similarly, I usually take the last week or two at the end of the year off. This is usually when I spend the most time reflecting on my year and figuring out how the next year is going to be successful!

So I’ve already been starting to do this naturally, but this quarter I’m going to make it more formal with the following new habits:

  • Daily: Plan tomorrow in the evening
    • This helps to make sure I have a clear picture of what tomorrow’s priorities are!
    • This practice should include writing down 3-5 DMAs or difference making actions for tomorrow. That is, the 3-5 actions where, if I somehow got nothing else done, I’d still feel like it was a super successful day.
  • Daily: Clear my inboxes in the evening
    • This is a low energy task that actually funnels in to planning tomorrow (after all, I need to take account of everything people want/need me to do before I can accurately prepare).
    • If I don’t specifically aim to do this in the evening, I will sometimes end up doing it first thing in the morning which is a colossal waste of my best energy in the day.
  • Weekly: Plan my week on Sunday nights
    • This includes sprint planning for all projects so that I can start my morning on Monday knowing exactly what I should be executing on.

Summarized Habits and OKRs 🎯

Green for additions, red for subtractions.

Habits:

  • Daily
    • Wake up early
    • Go to sleep early enough to get ~8 hours of sleep
    • Get at least 8 hours of sleep every night
    • Go to sleep by 11pm
    • Get out of bed by 7:30am
    • Reserve the first hour after waking for self-care
      • Meditate for at least 10 minutes
      • Journal for at least 10 minutes
      • Write in my journal
    • Reserve the hour before bed for self-care and relaxation
    • Aim to log 7-8 hours of work a day
    • Aim to minimize the need to log more than 8 hours of work a day
    • No video games during the work day until I’ve logged at least half of my work hours for the day and completed all language-related habits
    • No video games in the evening until after I’ve met my work hour goals, planned tomorrow, and gotten ready for bed
    • No video games after 11pm on nights before a working day
    • Plan tomorrow in the evening
    • Clear inboxes in the evening
    • Clear Anki reviews
    • Learn 5 new Chinese Anki cards
    • Learn 8 new Chinese Anki cards
      • Upping this because my Anki cards come in pairs so 5 is an awkward number. Also feeling ready to increase the Anki load slightly.
    • Add an average of 5 new Chinese cards to Anki
    • Add an average of 8 new Chinese cards to Anki
      • Upping this to match the learning rate so I never run out of new cards to learn!
    • Actively immerse in Chinese for at least 30 minutes
  • Weekly
    • Free-flow immerse in Chinese for at least 30 minutes
    • Watch an episode or two of something on Netflix without subtitles for 30 minutes
      • Just trying to make this one more specific, actionable, and potentially track-able
    • Exercise at least 3 times a week
    • Make friends, relaxation, and extracurricular activities the priority on weekends
    • Plan my week on Sunday nights
  • Semimonthly
    • Call my sister and debrief on progress and blockers around deepening friendships
      • My sister is a little too hard to reach on a regular basis for this to make sense, plus may not be as relevant in a socially distanced context.
    • Host an online game event for one of my communities
    • Attend an online improv workshop and participate in at least the bilingual groups
  • Monthly
    • Attend a networking event

OKRs 🎯:

  • Maintaining a healthy mind and body
    • Pick a set of dietary rules quarterly and stick to them ~80% of the time
    • Stretch: Reach ~10% body fat
  • Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom
    • Free up time to work on my own projects
      • Stop consulting full-time by February
      • Wind down consulting to the bare minimum by start of Q2
      • Don’t take on more students for The Spike Lab unless I have to
    • Launch at least 1 of my own projects to the general public this year
    • Secure at least 1 paying customer for one of my own projects
    • Launch Midana and secure paying customers for it
      • Reach 1000 users in the Midana closed beta.
      • Test monetization pathways for Midana.
        • Prototype monthly subscription for receipt translation service.
        • Prototype taking a cut of winnings to allow users to throw away scanned receipts rather than keeping them.
        • Prototype taking a cut of winnings through automatic prize redemption via PayPal or other non-Taiwanese payment services.
      • Launch Midana to the general public in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
    • Continue experimenting with Strive
      • Start automating quarterly reviews and using more data to evaluate how the quarter is going and how things should be improved for the next quarter.
        • Create a quarterly Strive report email to start automating Q3’s quarterly review.
      • Eliminate Strive’s dependencies on AirTable premium.
        • Set up my own server for generating and sending report emails.
        • Create data pipeline to automatically move data from AirTable to Google Big Query.
        • Create a prototype dashboard for exploring and analyzing data pulled from Google Big Query.
      • Experiment new Strive data visualizations for keeping users motivated and interested.
        • Prototype a “heat map”-style visualization to help users visualize how they’re performing over time.
      • Prototype Strive’s first automatic data integration.
      • Experiment with solutions for maintaining a fun and competitive feeling between players who don’t have the same habit load.
    • For inspiration and tactical advice:
      • Read Make by Peter Levels
      • Read about other peoples’ experiences doing 12 projects in 12 months
    • Stretch: Launch 12 projects in 12 months
  • Overcoming my fear of rejection, deepening friendships, and expanding my network
    • Complete any homework assignments given to me by my sister
    • Make at least 1 close friend in Taipei this year
    • Schedule some time to get to know the other The Spike Lab coaches
  • Learning Chinese
    • Reach an upper intermediate level in Chinese (B2, ~3000 words)
    • Successfully participate in an Improv activity in Chinese
  • Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for a longer period of time
    • Find an apartment of my own

My apartment in Da'an, Taipei

I gave myself a B+ for the quarter. I might have given myself an A- or A if I hadn’t ignored language learning.

Some highlights:

  • 🏡 I moved! I now live in a nice lofted studio apartment in Taipei’s Da’an district (featured image), where I can now see the iconic Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall from the roof of my building, and can walk to Da’an park (Taipei’s version of New York’s Central Park) in ~15 minutes.
  • I’ve wound down my consulting obligations and have almost completely recovered my time. My recent client, Karat Financial Technologies, left me a very positive testimonial to share with potential future clients. I continue to coach a few students through The Spike Lab.
  • 👨🏻‍💻 I’ve started working on Midana, my first independent project of the year, and am excited to report that the project is gaining traction with over 250 people on the waiting list and more signing up every day!
  • 🤗 I’ve made a few new close friends in Taipei, having finally had more time to invest in relationships here.
  • 👨‍👦 My Dad and I have reconnected and our relationship is improving. We’ve been playing Factorio together this year, and it’s been a surprisingly effective way to enjoy quality time together in a non-threatening way.
  • 💃🏻 My girlfriend and I are celebrating a year together on Monday, April 5! Technically next quarter, but close enough.
  • 🔓 The lock-up period on my Palantir stock options ended, and I’m now fortunately looking at a financial windfall. This has me starting to think about my work and finances in new ways.

Next quarter:

  • ⛵ Smooth sailing for most goals. Just need to keep things up!
  • 🇹🇼 Committing to pick up Chinese studies more actively again, but time-boxed to <60 minutes per day. I’ve added a fair number of new habits to track based on the Refold methodology.

Table of Contents

Quarterly Review 🔍

Qualitative Review 🎨

Reflection 🤔

Q1 of 2021 turned out to be a great quarter! Despite feeling tired coming into the end of 2020 and some of that fatigue carrying over into the beginning of 2021, I seem to have rallied and am generally feeling and doing great!

The main things that happened this quarter are:

  • 🏡 I moved! I now live in a nice lofted studio apartment in Taipei’s Da’an district (featured image), where I can now see the iconic Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall from the roof of my building, and can walk to Da’an park (Taipei’s version of New York’s Central Park) in ~15 minutes.
  • I’ve wound down my consulting obligations and have almost completely recovered my time. My recent client, Karat Financial Technologies, left me a very positive testimonial to share with potential future clients. I continue to coach a few students through The Spike Lab.
  • 👨🏻‍💻 I’ve started working on Midana, my first independent project of the year, and am excited to report that the project is gaining traction with over 250 people on the waiting list and more signing up every day!
  • 🤗 I’ve made a few new close friends in Taipei, having finally had more time to invest in relationships here.
  • 👨‍👦 My Dad and I have reconnected and our relationship is improving. We’ve been playing Factorio together this year, and it’s been a surprisingly effective way to enjoy quality time together in a non-threatening way.
  • 💃🏻 My girlfriend and I are celebrating a year together on Monday, April 5! Technically next quarter, but close enough.
  • 🔓 The lock-up period on my Palantir stock options ended, and I’m now fortunately looking at a financial windfall. This has me starting to think about my work and finances in new ways.

Some of the above deserve elaboration, but before I do that here are a few other high-level things that did (or didn’t!) happen this quarter:

  • 🏋🏻 I’ve found a new CrossFit gym closer to my new place and have been consistently going 3-4 times a week.
    • I was having persistent shoulder issues continuing through the beginning of 2021, but am now feeling fully healed!
  • 🌅 I’ve been consistently waking up at 6:30am on week days since moving into my new apartment.
    • This is at least in part because the convenient CrossFit classes are so early (7:20am!) and I no longer have client meetings to worry about in the morning.
  • 🧘🏻‍♂️ I’ve been consistently meditating every day since moving into my new apartment.
A quick demo of my new personal journaling system.
  • ✍🏻 I’ve been consistently journaling every day since moving into my new apartment!
    • I’m experimenting with a new journaling system I’ve created for myself in Notion, and am really enjoying it so far.
    • This is probably the longest continuous streak of journaling I’ve ever had despite having wanted journaling to become a more regular habit for years.
  • 📆 I’ve been playing with a new habit of planning the next day at the end of the current day along with actually blocking off chunks of time on my calendar to do everything I plan to do.
    • So far I’m finding the exercise allows me to wake up each morning with a sense of purpose and momentum.
    • I’m also really liking how this exercise makes it easier for me to zoom out on my day and realize that I have too much or too little of certain things happening so I can re-orient around my macro goals.
    • This is also a habit I had been wanting to implement for years, and this is my first successful go at it!
Please excuse my language / excitement
  • 🍳 I’ve been cooking a lot more since moving into my new apartment!
    • I’m now making my own yogurt, my own flour tortillas, my own pasta, and all kinds of other fun things!
    • It helps to be paying $$$ for my new place and my new kitchen, so I feel guilty not using it haha.
    • I’m really enjoying how cooking for myself on a regular basis (believe it or not, I’ve never had to do this before!) is upping my culinary game by encouraging me to exercise my intuition and improvisational skills to whip something up using orphaned ingredients in my fridge.
    • On average, this has meant that I eat healthier and I eat less. I actually lose ~5-8 lbs of weight shortly after moving into my new apartment.
    • However, the trade-off is that I haven’t been as strict about any particular dietary rule set. Sometimes if there’s a particularly large amount of, say, rice left over my body metrics balloon for awhile haha.
  • 🏝️ I’ve continued to be on an extended break from Anki and serious language learning.
    • I haven’t made a lot of progress on Chinese, so much so that one of my uncles bluntly told me “Your Chinese hasn’t improved much since last time” which was hilariously awkward and hurt to hear, but was definitely true. I am planning to start back on this in a limited capacity with some new methods in Q2, so expect to see more about this in the Q2 planning section.
  • 🎭 I haven’t really made time to go back to Improv.
    • Improv used to be a 10-minute walk from my old place, and is now a 10-15 minute metro ride plus a 10-minute walk. For much of Q1 I was too busy either searching for a new apartment or setting up my new apartment to feel like I had much extra time for this outside of work.

Moving 🏡

It was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster getting myself to start the moving process. Despite years of being nomadic, for whatever reason I got stuck in a mode here in Taipei where the uncertainty and upheaval required to move places terrified me. I was extremely resistant to the idea, so much so that I dragged my feet on looking for a full 6 months last year. (In my defense, I also got really busy with client work and decided it wasn’t a good idea to start searching.)

When I finally did find a place I liked, I agonized about the cost. Ultimately, I landed on something significantly more expensive than what I had originally set out to pay (by nearly 20-40%), but as I searched around and started to clarify what I actually wanted out of a place, I began to realize that I needed to be willing to fork over more cash if I wanted to land in a place I was really excited about. By the end I was looking for:

  • Somewhere with an obvious working area with lots of natural light (since I primarily work from home)
  • Centrally located in a nice part of the city and very close to a metro hub (<5 minutes walking).
  • At least a basic kitchen, if not something bigger or better equipped to satisfy my cooking cravings.
  • Enough space to host friends for small events like dinner parties and board games.

After some intense budgeting, I’ve realized that I can stay mostly within my original budget if I re-balance in a few places (e.g. cooking more at home vs eating out all the time).

Now that I have moved, though, I’m super happy with the decision and I don’t regret the added expense. I don’t think I realized it while I was there, but at my old place I seem to have essentially compressed myself emotionally to fit the lack of physical space. I also don’t think I realized just how much the environment I had chosen was holding me back or promoting negative patterns as a result.

Moving was like making a clean break and flipping a switch. The first day I lived in my new apartment, I found it easy to establish a new routine that included many of the habits that I’ve been struggling to implement for years. Things like meditating every morning, or journaling, or taking time at the end of my day to plan the next day. It’s been over a month in this new place now, and I’m still going strong on all of them.

It’s absolutely crazy. The only explanation I have for it so far is that, before, the self-denial that went in to continuing to live in my old situation was subconsciously communicating to myself that I wasn’t worth or deserving of more or better. I’d guess that that seeped out into other things, and that believing that it wasn’t worth investing in making my living situation better meant that maybe it also wasn’t worth investing in myself in other important ways like self-care or self-improvement.

What’s more, in the process of setting up my new place I feel like I’ve been re-discovering and re-experiencing parts of my identity that have been gathering dust on a shelf since I turned nomadic. As I’ve been designing my new space, I’m becoming re-acquainted with the version of me that once lived in Palo Alto and enjoyed entertaining through lavish dinner parties and late nights playing games with friends. I’m re-discovering the joy of being able to arrange small details like the plates I use to serve my guests, or the shelves for my pantry, or my new office space.

True to my word in my 2020 resolutions, I’ve been investing time and money into making this place comfortable. Given the increased expense in my living budget, I was initially a little squeamish about spending extra money on things like a nice office chair or new furniture or a small oven. By degrees, I began to realize that many of these things are worth the expense—at one point I turned to my girlfriend and asked “If you knew your ass was going to be sitting in that chair for 70-80% of your waking hours for the next year, you’d buy a nice chair, right?!”

A few weeks (and a few thousand dollars 🤕) later I’m now very settled in. My set up here includes things like: an almost dangerously comfortable office chair (my ass is, indeed, very happy); a standing desk (hand cranked); fiber internet service; a Chromecast so I can play movies on the TV; a mattress top and pillows that make my bed sleep (almost) like a luxury hotel bed; a large dining table that can be extended to accommodate more guests or a particularly large dinner spread; an oven that heats hot enough to tackle culinary endeavors like pizza, bread, or pastéis de nata (Portuguese egg tarts); an instant pot; and a fledgling herb garden on my balcony complete with planters that hang over the rails.

In fact, I’m so settled in here now that my friends here have all taken to telling me that I’m “nesting”—a word that the nomad in me is finding hard to accept. And yet, though I still haven’t figured out whether or not I intend to stay here in Taiwan past the one year term of my lease, I’m finding myself more and more excited by the prospect of finally having a place to call “home” again and increasingly resistant to the idea of giving this place up. Lately I’ve become fond of telling people that, while I’ve known for a while now that Taipei was going to become a home base, I’m still feeling out whether or not it’s going to be the home base. (Though I still have no idea what it means for a place to be a home base without being the home base!)

If this is what “nesting” is, apparently I like it.

Midana 💡

Midana is my first independent project this year. As advertised on my landing page, Midana will be Taiwan’s first real English receipt lottery app.

For those who don’t know, the Taiwanese government has an incredibly clever receipt lottery system, which turns every receipt issued by any vendor into a lottery ticket. The system (successfully) aims to increase internal tax revenue by incentivizing consumers to ask merchants for receipts, which then creates a paper trail for income that must be reported to the government. Every two months, several receipt numbers are drawn and winning receipts can win as much as 10 million Taiwan dollars (~340k USD). Anyone—even foreigners and tourists!—can play and it costs nothing to participate—you simply need to keep your receipts and check them against the winning numbers every two months.

In tandem, Taiwan has a government-run electronic invoice system that aims to reduce paper waste and decrease the cost of the invoice process. Using this system, consumers can register for a mobile barcode which they can then show to vendors when they check out. Vendors equipped with a compatible system (which is 70-80% of them these days) can scan the barcode to upload the receipt details directly to the cloud instead of printing things out. This system is still relatively new all-considering (started in ~2006), so the government is also incentivizing people to use it by artificially inflating the prize winnings odds for electronically issued receipts.

While there are actually a few existing (crappy) receipt lottery apps out there in English like Colibri, Midana will be the first to offer access to the mobile barcode system and will aim to make major improvements over the user experience of other apps (and holy crap is the bar low, even for the ones designed for native Chinese speakers 😅).

Midana represents the first of a set of problems that I’ve personally been dealing with here in Taiwan: navigating processes and systems like a local despite not (yet) being fluent in Chinese. This is a problem that I know isn’t unique to me, and, actually, I’m confident isn’t even unique to Taiwan (my nomadic travels have taught me as much, though when I was nomadic I likely had less incentive to invest in figuring some of these things out than I do now). While I’m still not 100% confident that I’ll be able to monetize Midana yet, I am pretty confident that something in this space will generate revenue.

I had been slowly preparing to start Midana as early as January, when I started applying for access to the relevant APIs. Now that my consulting work has spun down, I’m working on Midana full-time and have been for the last ~6 weeks. Progress on the app itself has been slower than I would have liked (I originally thought it would take me 2 weeks to build haha… oh the hubris), and I’ve been slowed down by all of the tasks related to Moving 🏡 (so many trips to IKEA and Nitori haha).

Things are progressing steadily, however. Every now and then I have a slower or less productive day, but this tends to be more because I didn’t sleep well that day than because I’m feeling afraid of failure or rejection.

In recent weeks I’ve learned a lot about React Native and NestJS, and have finished some big features including QR code scanning, lottery result matching, push notifications, and manual receipt entry. There are still a few important things I need to finish before the app feels complete enough in its basic functions that I (and my beta users) are actually likely to switch to using it as my primary app:

  • iOS and Android home screen widgets for easy access to showing a user’s mobile barcode when they’re checking out
  • A more useful summary view for all collected receipts, including a place in the app where winning receipts are displayed
  • Better documentation and resources for completing common tasks like resetting one’s mobile barcode password or collecting one’s winnings
  • At least one play at potential monetization (without ads!!), and hints at a few others so I can start gathering data around demand

All of the development progress is nice, but the real breakthrough with Midana is that my landing page and Facebook ads are crushing it 🔥. Right now I’m advertising to people who speak English and either live or have lived in Taiwan, and I’ve already collected over 250 email sign-ups (and am continuing to collect sign-ups at a rate of ~20/day).

Even better, my acquisition cost right now is stupidly cheap. Each of these email addresses is costing me a little less than $0.10. That means 250 email addresses has cost me in the range of $25. This is by far the clearest signal I’ve ever received when marketing any independent project I’ve worked on.

I also checked, and in the past ads for products like Serenity (GTD task management) and Strive (goal actualization) were costing me ~$0.45 just to get someone to click on the ad!! Right now I’m getting people to not only click on the ad, but then to take action on the landing page for a fraction of that cost.

All of this is to stay that I’ve clearly stumbled upon something that people want and the market is actually way more underserved and much larger than I originally thought, though I may quickly need to expand in a direction I hadn’t originally planned to build for my MVP.

I’m very excited about what’s happening here, and really excited about some of the other products and services I’m already thinking about building up around Midana. Whereas before working on products like Serenity I constantly battled against the fear that I was building something that nobody but me wanted, I’m now building my product with complete confidence that once I finish it, people will gobble it up. My biggest worry now isn’t that I’m completely wasting my time, it’s that I won’t be able to convince my users to pay for any value-added features and services. All-in-all, a very good problem to have 🙂.

I want to say a huge thank you to my friend Richard who kept pushing me to put my idea in front of actual potential users, and also for introducing me to no-code tools like Carrd*, which have helped to take most of the thinking (and time cost!) out of putting up a simple landing page.

After my first experience putting up a landing page by designing something in Figma and then translating it into code by hand, I’ve been extremely resistant to setting up landing pages for new projects. This resistance has definitely hampered me, and it’s pushed me away from the original intention to sell first before thinking about designing and building a product, a piece of advice that one of my mentors, John Vrionis (then at Lightspeed Venture Partners), hammered into my head long ago, but which I had been tricking myself into ignoring.

No more!! With Carrd, it took me ~30 minutes to put up the first iteration of my landing page. When I came back to polish it a little more, it didn’t take me more than ~an hour to clean up the messaging and arrive at the current version of the landing page, which is getting something like 40-50% conversion on page. I’m definitely taking this learning and these tools with me for future projects!

For those curious / interested, I’m currently doing an experiment where I record a stand-up video every day recounting progress, plans, and blockers for Midana. I post these videos on Twitter every day.

* Full disclosure: this is my referral link for Carrd, and I earn 30% of any amount paid toward an upgrade or renewal from people who sign-up through it. That said, I’m only mentioning Carrd because it helped me make a major breakthrough in building beautiful single-page landing pages stupidly quickly.

Factorio with my Dad 🎮

My Dad and I have had a pretty shaky relationship over the last few years. There hasn’t been a lot of trust, and there’s definitely been a lot of emotional baggage making it hard for either of us to talk about, well, anything to each other in any kind of non-threatening or productive way.

I’ve written about this extensively before, probably most prominently in the journal I kept during my stay in Plum Village in 2018. It’s been over 2 years since then, and my relationship with my Dad hadn’t improved much. Things had been very up and down. I kept searching for ways to reconnect, but often found myself drained by the attempts. In some extreme cases, my attempts left our relationship even worse off than before.

Things got so bad that in 2020 I sought the help of a therapist (who I’m still seeing on a regular basis). Improving relationships with my immediate family became a major goal in 2020. All through 2020, though, I failed to make any real breakthroughs in my relationship with my Dad.

I almost didn’t get my Dad anything, but last-minute for Christmas 2020 I got him a copy of Factorio. I was inspired by a Reddit post I had seen months ago about a Redditor who was able to spend quality time with his Dad because of Factorio. I’ve been looking for a way to spend time with my Dad that might be fun and relaxing for both of us. Playing Factorio with a friend is something I imagine I might otherwise want to do on a random Sunday afternoon anyway.

For about a month I didn’t hear anything from my Dad about the gift, and I didn’t bother pinging him or reminding him about it. Then, one day in January I decided to check up on it. A couple of weekends later, my Dad and I had our first Factorio session.

I was hopeful, but I wasn’t sure this was going to work. The first time I had the idea of playing a game with my Dad (The Lord of the Rings Adventure Card Game back in maybe ~July of 2020), I shared a project idea with him, which led to a conversation that essentially shut our relationship down for the next 6 months. We didn’t even get into the game we had planned to play that day before both hanging up the phone in a huff.

This time, I skipped the small talk and we got directly into the game. The first session was a little tough—the game is quite complicated, and video game controls have never come naturally to my Dad. I think he’s always been a little self-conscious about this, which is probably why he never played video games with me much when I was a kid.

My Dad also has a habit of being defensively non-communicative, which means that any time he perceives that he might be threatened, attacked, or criticized, he defaults to being non-verbal. It’s a perfectly reasonable defense mechanism that he’s developed through decades of coping with some of my Mom’s defense mechanisms, but which has also extended itself to interactions with me because, well, let’s just say I’m like my Mom in more ways than I sometimes care to admit.

Practically what this meant in the game was that, sometimes I’d be trying to help my Dad, or I’d say something and he just wouldn’t acknowledge me. At times, it made it very difficult, if not possible, for me to teach him concepts he needed to know or for us to collaborate on things in the game.

I put myself in teacher / coach mode and, with a little bit of patience, we persevered! I explained the basics, and my Dad started to pick things up. Over the now, ~10 hours we’ve spent playing the game together over several weekends, we’ve almost finished researching all of the red and green science technologies. We’ve progressed from mining and moving things by hand to now having access to cars and trains. My Dad has started communicating with me more when we play, and we operate more like a team. We’ve had a surprisingly large amount of fun along the way!

I think a huge turning point in our time playing the game together came a couple of weeks back when I needed to hop off to go to an exercise class. I asked my Dad if he wanted me to leave the server on so he could finish what he was doing, and he seemed to like the idea.

Fast forward 2 hours, I’ve just come home from my class and taken a shower and am sitting back down at my desk. I unlock my laptop and Factorio is still running. I can see little flashing power symbols indicating that a lot of our machines are unpowered. Curious, I walk around to investigate and I quickly realize that our main power supply has disappeared. Naturally, my first thought is “Holy crap, what in the hell did he do??” My second thought is “Uh oh, did we get attacked?”

Then I check my phone and I see a series of panicked messages from my Dad where he’s frantically typing “DANIE, ACKKKK! HELPPPP!!!” Turns out while I was gone, my Dad figured out how to get enough working that he started generating enough pollution to trigger our game’s first few waves of enemy attacks, and he got himself killed in the process.

I laughed for a full few minutes after I saw that. In that moment, I realized that both me and my Dad had started investing in the game and, through it, in each other again. We’ve been able to create some positive memories together. In turn, I think that’s created a more positive atmosphere for our relationship to start regrowing in. One moment that really stuck with me was when, after a few hours of playing Factorio with my Dad with my girlfriend in the room, my girlfriend said to me “The way you and your Dad talk to each other has changed a lot. You both seem calmer and happier.”

This is all still very early, and there are, of course, many deep emotional wounds that will require much time, much patience, and much love to heal. I expect that there will be setbacks and obstacles still to come. But for now, I’ve already started to notice that the positive emotions associated with playing the game together have begun to leak out into other areas of our relationship. Random messages my Dad sends now carry less of a default negative connotation. I’m more likely to read them and at least respond with an emoji.

My Dad and I also seem to, more and more, be able and willing to ask each other questions or engage in small conversations about other things. For example, for a very long time I haven’t wanted to ask anything of my Dad because I often feel like he’ll hold any favor he does for me over my head as a way to make me guilty for not doing more for him. Recently though, I feel comfortable reaching out to ask random, simple, stupid things. Things like questions about finance, or even just how to save one of the plants in my fledgling herb garden.

I can’t explain exactly how or why this all works where other things like book clubs or conflict resolution techniques from self-help books, or attempts at regular phone calls and dinner conversations have failed. Jane McGonical, an expert in game design, claims that parents who spend more time playing games with their children tend to develop closer and more resilient relationships with those children, and I have to say that so far I believe her. If I had to guess, I imagine it has something to do with allowing us both to let our guard down a little and actually see each other and interact with each other as human beings rather than as personifications of our demons.

Whatever it is, I can’t express how nice it is to finally be able to look forward to something involving my Dad rather than dreading it. I used to worry that I’d never have a chance to reconnect with my Dad before it became too late. Worse, in the past I’ve even considered whether or not cutting off contact with my Dad would be the most emotionally healthy thing for me to do in the long-term. For the first time in a long time I feel like we have time and a path forward. That’s a precious thing, and I very much hope that it continues into the future!

Romantic Relationship 💑

Ting Wei and I are celebrating a year together! It’s been awhile since I came back from my emergency Okinawa visa run. She was there for me to help me quarantine, bringing me treats and snacks to make the 14 days of isolation a little warmer. She and I got together not long after that.

I think I’ve mentioned before that my relationship with Ting Wei is now my longest relationship since college—I dated someone for about 3 years in college, and most of my relationships since have been ~a few months at most. There have been a variety of reasons the relationships before this one have stayed short, but one of the bigger themes for me is probably a fear of commitment. So, for me, a year with Ting Wei is no small feat! And though every relationship has its problems, on the whole I’m quite content with ours. Ting Wei makes for wonderful company—I think we experience a lot of play and laughter together—and, more and more a potentially wonderful partner.

Some problems seem solvable with effort and intention. For example, the language barrier can make it tough to connect as deeply as I would like as frequently as I would like. There was a point of some contention earlier this year, when I told Ting Wei honestly that if learning English to a high level wasn’t something she could imagine herself wanting to commit to, then I’m not sure I can imagine a future together. It sucks to say, and it wasn’t meant as an ultimatum—it’s just a fact: most of my life is and will continue to be in English. Just as most of her life is and will continue to be in Chinese. If we expect to be able to fully experience each other and participate in those parts of each others’ lives, we’re going to need the language skills to do so. She’s now taking English classes regularly, and I’m gearing up to dive back into my Chinese studies.

As being with Ting Wei begins to feel like being “at home”, I’m also realizing that many of the deep patterns programmed into me by observing my parents through childhood are starting to surface. For example, I’m starting to catch myself responding to Ting Wei with the same harsh judgement and criticism that my Mom often employed with my Dad when I was growing up. On more than one occasion, Ting Wei has, rightfully, gotten upset, telling me that I’m being unnecessarily mean about something that probably shouldn’t matter that much. More and more I’m realizing that, terrifyingly, the only template I have for an adult relationship is what my parents had. Despite knowing that their relationship is, in most ways, not the one I want to emulate, the behavioral patterns can be hard to control. I hope that with time, practice, and intentionality, I can rewrite these patterns rather than subject my romantic partners to them… Awareness is the first step toward transformation.

Other problems are harder to deal with, but potentially not insurmountable. For example, there’s are definitely parts of me that I’m not sure are 100% ready to be done with never being single again. Those are the parts of me that are afraid of commitment, and the parts of me that believe there is still more to learn, explore, and challenge with respect to women, relationships, and my deeper insecurities there. I still haven’t figured out what (if anything) I can do about that. It’s an open question to me whether or not one ever fully feels “done” being single, or if one must, at some point, simply accept that what they’ve found is good enough to be worth the sacrifice of not experiencing more.

On a more macro level, I do also sometimes worry that my relationship with Ting Wei might be missing something important for me. I think it may have to do with how I believe love and authenticity are related—loosely summarized, I believe that love is meant to help us inspire each other toward authenticity. I think my concept of this is similar to what some people have described as a feeling of “being inspired to be the best version of myself” when in certain relationships. (I’ve been meaning to write about “Ideal Love Theory” for ages now to elaborate on my philosophy here… one day!)

In our case, I think it’s hard to say. I feel like Ting Wei is in a place in her life where she’s still discovering what authenticity means to her and finding the courage to express it. The coach in me is happy—excited, even—to be a guide to her on that journey. But in the meantime, until we hit a certain nebulous milestone that I can’t fully articulate (is it a moving target??), I think I only intermittently experience a sense of inspiration from and through her.

Nevertheless, part of what keeps me excited and motivated in the relationship is the prospect of finally getting to that place, and what I can potentially learn from being a part of Ting Wei’s journey. I am however, aware of, and cautious about, the fact that this is a significant amount of pressure to apply to a person or to a relationship… and that it sounds like I’m asking for a certain kind of fundamental change or a shift in a person’s behaviors in order for the relationship to be successful long-term. I know that these are ingredients for a potentially unhealthy relationship dynamic, and that needing or wanting someone to change is a common relationship pitfall.

I suppose my rebuttal is that what I want from her isn’t that she fundamentally change, but rather that she have the courage to be and express, in as many ways as she can, who she fundamentally already is. In the small glimpses I get to see of that person when her guard is down, I have an inkling that that person is really quite a beautiful being.

So far, she is making progress! And I’m excited about the direction she’s heading in. I think that, despite being afraid of the possibility of disappointing herself (and me?), a very real and authentic piece of her is cautiously excited, too.

Even when things are going well it can be tough though. It’s important to me that she ultimately do all of these things for herself and not because she wants my approval. I think romantic relationships muddy the waters on that question—we can’t help but want our partners’ approval. Within those murky depths there’s an extremely fine and dangerous line between influencing someone to become who you want them to be versus encouraging them to become who they themselves want to be. I can only hope that I’m navigating this quagmire with grace and self-awareness.

At the end of the day, though, most of the problems I’ve elaborated on here are, well, me overthinking things rather than me being present with the relationship moment by moment, day by day. The truth is, when I stop thinking and instead just be, mostly what I experience in my relationship with Ting Wei are feelings of playfulness, contentment, and appreciation. Despite my hyper-active logical mind, I think in order to be experiencing all of those things so regularly, we must be doing something right 🙂. Only time will tell.

Palantir Options 📈

As I think most people reading this probably know, I’m a Palantir alumni. I worked there between 2015 and 2017 right after graduating from college and before quitting Silicon Valley and the US more broadly to become a nomadic entrepreneur.

I am fortunate to be sitting on a non-trivial amount of employee stock options from my time there. To be honest, after leaving Palantir I kind of felt like these options were a scam, and I strongly regretted choosing to earn more equity over more salary while I was there. Most of this was because, before I left, Palantir had a strong anti-IPO stance (they’d commonly say things like “this is an advantage we get by staying private”), and while they were a private company they made it notoriously hard to liquidate any of those options or, frankly, even to understand the current value of those options so that I could make an informed decision around exercising.

I fully expected that those options were going to expire before Palantir ever went public, and since selling options on the private market is complicated (or, at least, I personally don’t understand how that works), I never expected to see a cent from my options.

All of this is to say that I’m pleasantly surprised by Palantir’s recent IPO and the timing of it. These kinds of things are never over until they’re over, so I’m cautious of counting my chickens before they hatch, but the prospect of receiving a decent windfall from my options has recently pushed me to think about my finances and my wealth a little more critically.

For example, lately I’ve been looking more into what FIRE actually is and how FIRE investment strategies work. It may surprise some to know that during my nomadic travels I never much cared what FIRE was, nor really understood it. Now that I’m educating myself about it, I’m pleasantly surprised to find that my lifestyle for the last several years has been very well-aligned with FIRE principles—not because I wanted to retire early, but because I was anxious to find ways to preserve my runway so I could continue my entrepreneurial pursuits in perpetuity.

I’ve learned a few important things from FIRE:

  1. The average person doesn’t need nearly as much money as they probably think they do to retire.
    1. In my head, the typical retirement goal had always been at least a million dollars. I’m realizing more and more that I need significantly less than that to maintain my current lifestyle without ever having to worry about doing things I don’t really want to do to make money. (Obviously, your milage may vary depending on your life style.)
  2. There are multiple models for early retirement, and some of them involve supplementing investment income with regular part-time income.
    1. Since I work as a coach through The Spike Lab and already have regular part-time income through that, my baseline early retirement numbers are significantly lower so long as I can continue to depend on that job (though, obviously, this isn’t the smartest thing to assume).
  3. There are some clever and perfectly legal ways (without excessive taxes or penalties) to convert existing retirement accounts for incremental withdrawal inline with early retirement.

Of course, all of these calculations are being done against maintaining my existing lifestyle. I’m not at all accounting for the idea of having a wife and kids or other future life expenses. Still, though, especially with everything I mentioned in the section about Moving 🏡, the notion that I could perpetually maintain my current lifestyle with minimal stress is incredibly liberating to consider. Given that I don’t intend to actually retire, I think it’s reasonable to expect that my wealth will continue to grow—just primarily through more independent means rather than through e.g. consulting or full-time employment.

All of this is to say that, while I don’t consider myself rich based on my Palantir options (and neither should you), I may have enough. I’m finding myself in a really fortunate place where, at my current spend level, in the worst case scenario I may be financially independent while maintaining a small amount of monthly part-time income from coaching, and in the absolute best case, I may be financially independent even without my part-time gig (though I’d likely keep doing that part-time gig because I honestly really enjoy it and it’s extremely mission-aligned for me).

Potentially being in a place where I don’t have to work to maintain my lifestyle has had me thinking a lot more about the question of “What would I do if money weren’t a problem?” Interestingly, and happily, I’m realizing that nothing much changes for the foreseeable future—I still want to improve my entrepreneurial skills by tackling a series of smaller projects. As I develop my skills (and my confidence), I expect I’ll naturally finding myself wanting to tackle larger and larger and more and more mission-aligned problems.

These recent revelations have also taken a huge weight off my shoulders. Others who have walked the entrepreneur’s or artist’s path can probably empathize with how stressful it can be to watch your life’s savings dwindle from month to month as you struggle to keep yourself on task to launch and monetize a project. There’s so much space for self-doubt and other demons to creep in when you know a lot rides on your ability to execute and some amount of luck that you chose the right thing to execute on.

If things continue in the direction they’re heading, I may never have to worry about that problem ever again. I’m finding that, so far, removing that stress has made it much easier to stay optimistic, excited, motivated, and productive while working on things like Midana 💡, likely because I can be more equanimous since I no longer feel like I’m staking my future on the success of the project.

Quantitative Review 🔢

Summary 💯

I’m going to give myself a solid B+!

I think that this quarter could have been an A- or even an A if I hadn’t completely ignored Chinese. I’ve been cautious about reintroducing language studies as I’m worried it will pull other things out of balance, but I definitely need to play with that in Q2 to improve this score.

Break Down 🧨

Habits ✅:

  • Daily
    • Wake up early
    • Reserve the first hour after waking for self-care
    • Reserve the hour before bed for self-care and relaxation
      • I’ve been OK about this, but not always amazing. My new habit of planning tomorrow today has been working really well for me! But sometimes leaves me needing to finish planning and clearing inboxes before I can get to sleep on time. Right now I do this around 9:30pm for a 10:30pm bed time, so I probably need to do this a little earlier in the night.
    • Go to sleep early enough to get ~8 hours of sleep
      • Lately not so great about this. I keep wanting time to play some video games before bed, but I don’t quite finish work early enough… so I end up just losing sleep instead ☹️
    • Meditate for at least 10 minutes
    • Journal for at least 10 minutes
    • Aim to never obligate myself to log more than ~8 hours of work a day
    • Read in Chinese for ~15 minutes
    • Clear Anki reviews
    • Learn 10-20 new Chinese Anki cards
  • Weekly
    • Exercise at least 3 times a week
    • Always make friends, relaxation, and extracurricular activities the priority on weekends
  • Semi-monthly
    • Call my sister and debrief on progress and blockers around deepening friendships
      • My sister is surprisingly hard to reach haha. But the good news is that the outcomes are coming regardless.
    • Attend an improv workshop
  • Monthly
    • Attend a networking event
      • I went to one? Maybe two this quarter?

OKRs 🎯:

  • Maintaining a healthy mind and body
    • Pick a set of dietary rules quarterly and stick to them ~80% of the time
    • Stretch: Reach ~10% body fat
      • This has been all over the place so far this year. I’m currently ~13.5% on my scale, which is probably something like 15-17% in actuality.
  • Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom
    • Free up time to work on my own projects
      • Stop consulting full-time by February
      • Wind down consulting to the bare minimum by start of Q2
      • Don’t take on more students for The Spike Lab unless I have to
    • Launch at least 1 of my own projects to the general public this year
      • Marking green because this is on track to happen, though it hasn’t happened yet. I anticipate I’ll have at least one product launch in Q2.
    • Secure at least 1 paying customer for one of my own projects
      • Marking yellow because this is on track to happen, but isn’t guaranteed. I anticipate I’ll have at least one potentially monetize-able product in Q2, but it’s hard to say if my monetization strategies will bear fruit.
    • For inspiration and tactical advice:
      • Read Make by Peter Levels
      • Read about other peoples’ experiences doing 12 projects in 12 months
    • Stretch: Launch 12 projects in 12 months
      • So far pacing isn’t on target, but I’m feeling good about the progress I’m making and the things I’m working on, so I think I’m following the general spirit here.
  • Overcoming my fear of rejection, deepening friendships, and expanding my network
    • Complete any homework assignments given to me by my sister
    • Make at least 1 close friend in Taipei this year
      • I think I’m on track to make at least 2-3, and there are at least a few other people that I’d love to invest more deeply in so far!
    • Schedule some time to get to know the other The Spike Lab coaches
      • I got to know one other Spike Lab coach really well this quarter and I’m really enjoying that because she’s awesome 🙂. Still on my todo list to reach out to the others and potentially start playing a more active role in that community.
  • Learning Chinese
    • Reach an upper intermediate level in Chinese (B2, ~3000 words)
    • Successfully participate in an Improv activity in Chinese
  • Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for a longer period of time
    • Find an apartment of my own

Quarterly Planning 🗓️

Goal Modifications ✏️

So far 2021 has been relatively smooth sailing (*knock on some serious wood*). So far, there haven’t been any major upheavals that would necessitate my drastically changing 2021’s goals. I’m pretty happy to continue committing to the existing goals in Q2 of 2021. I also, for once, feel like the work load is pretty sane, though adding language learning back into the mix may temporarily throw some other things out of balance.

Risk Mitigation 🛠️

Based on my Q1 review, I think I’m doing pretty well on the whole. There are, however, two areas where I think I need to intervene:

  1. Language learning. I’ve been on an extended break from Anki and most other serious forms of language learning for all languages.
  2. Improv. I haven’t been going despite saying I would go approximately every other week.

Language Learning 💬

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been on an extended break from most language learning activities since probably November or December of last year. Language learning (for Chinese) is a part of my 2021 goals, however, so analyzing and course correcting here is important.

The main reason I haven’t returned to language learning is Anki trauma. I had a lot going on in Anki before and was finding it stressful to keep up. I’d often feel behind or pressured to get my Anki cards done every day, and that pressure would sometimes affect my work or social lives. I also don’t think I have quite that much time to spend on language studies given all of my other priorities—for Q2 of 2021, I’d like to keep things to ~30 minutes a day if possible.

Since I was mainly just doing Anki to learn languages, learning languages was also becoming a chore. A lot of the joy and excitement of learning new words, grammar, and concepts got lost in the monotony.

Now that I’ve been on a break for ~4 months, I’m actually reaching the point where I’m naturally missing language learning and feel motivated to get back into it again. I think I need to make some adjustments to avoid having things to the same way as last time, though.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and doing some research, particularly on the Refold language learning methodology.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

  • Follow the fun. Language learning is most efficient and most maintainable as a habit when I pursue methods that bring enjoyment.
  • Corollary: prefer spending time consuming natural language media (books, TV, movies, video games) to rote memorization tasks with Anki.
  • Be judicious with what I add to Anki. Aim for quality over quantity, meaning more sentence cards and fewer vocabulary cards.
  • Use Anki to learn new things quickly, not to retain things forever.
    • I had been using Anki as a sort of second brain, expecting that my Chinese Anki deck might one day include every word I’ll ever want or need to know in Chinese. This is not realistic, and does not play to Anki’s primary strength which is scheduling the repetitions required to acquire a new word or concept in the first place. For long-term retention of fluency, regularly consuming natural language media is likely the way to go.
  • My previous Anki settings were actually slightly wrong. The way I had the ease set up likely led to more reviews in the short-term, and my lack of a cap on review interval likely meant that I had less reviews in the long-term.
    • The new settings will probably be less overloading upfront, and carry less risk of forgetting information over long periods of time (though with the trade-off that every piece of information will need to be reviewed at least once per year).

On the whole, I really like Refold! I think there are some super interesting ideas here that I’m excited to try. I also love their emphasis on keeping things fun and interesting. I am, however, in pretty strong disagreement with Refold on one major point: Refold doesn’t even want you to think about producing (speaking or writing) in your target language until you hit Stage 3.

From the Refold website:

You’re ready to move to Stage 3 when you have level 5 comprehension of slice-of-life TV shows intended for adults, without using any significant supports.

Refold defines level 5 comprehension as near-complete comprehension of words, grammar, and ideas but without a native-level understanding of the nuance behind the wording. (E.g. In “We’re quite normal, thank you very much” someone at level 5 comprehension might not grasp that thank you very much communicates an emphasizes a sense of dismissal or obstinance.)

A “slice-of-life” TV show is something like Friends or How I Met Your Mother where the topics, vocabulary, and slang closely mirrors what you’ll likely encounter in everyday life and conversation.

In other words, Refold essentially wants you to be able to fluently comprehend a large part of the domain of everyday language before you even think about writing or speaking. They have some OK reasoning for why this is, namely that all of the input you’re consuming is actually helping your brain to build subconscious patterns for how natural language is pieced together which will then get leveraged when you try to output the language. Refold thinks that if you build-up a really solid foundation for comprehension, all you need to transition to production is a little bit of time to connect the dots.

I see their argument, and I think it’s interesting, but I still think that waiting this long to speak or write in a language is absolutely nuts. Specifically I think this is nuts for a few reasons:

  1. For many language learners the barrier to speaking is emotional, not knowledge-based. This is, for example, the primary reason why my girlfriend struggles to speak English—it’s not that she doesn’t know and understand quite a bit of English, it’s that she’s afraid to sound stupid or make mistakes around native speakers (especially ones whose opinion she cares about, like me).
    1. Refold is targeted at pretty hardcore language learners, however, so it may be fair to assume that this isn’t the primary problem for this particular demographic.
  2. Speaking a language is one of the most effective ways to internalize patterns in natural language. Both because you’re forced to use them until they become second nature and because the act of conversing in a language provides a ton of level-filtered natural language input, especially since language partners tend to automatically adjust their grammar and diction to match your perceived proficiency level. Writing in a language has similar benefits, but lacks the immediate feedback and added comprehension practice that normally accompanies conversation.
    1. The risk, though, is that without a solid foundation for comprehension, you may internalize some bad habits that you’ll have to unlearn or re-learn later. Personally, I think this is an acceptable risk if it means achieving the goal of being able to communicate weeks, months, or even years faster.
  3. There’s no faster or more motivating way to learn to converse than to have actual conversations. Watching yourself succeed (or struggle!) in a conversation with native speakers is incredibly motivating.
    1. To be fair, people have a wide range of reasons for wanting to learn a language, but if I had to guess, being able to converse in a language probably ranks near the top.
  4. For more difficult languages, it could easily take months or years to reach level 5 comprehension for a significant portion of everyday language. Particularly for a language like Chinese, this is a long-ass time to not even consider speaking or writing.
    1. I can, however, imagine this being an acceptable upfront investment for languages more similar to English like French or Spanish, where this process might be achievable in 3 to 6 months of intensive study. To be fair, Refold is also recommending that learners spend at least twice as long each day for more linguistically distance languages like Chinese or Arabic, so it may be reasonable to expect ~twice the speed of progress (though I personally don’t think language progress scales linearly with time input).

Essentially, I think Refold’s model for language acquisition and build-up of comprehension is brilliant, and I want to give that a try. I have an inkling that their methodologies for production and building up confidence and competence are also brilliant, so I’d like to finish reading up on that. In my humble opinion, however, the production should be incorporated earlier in the language learning process in tandem with comprehension activities potentially as early as Stage 2A.

Anyway, my personal gripes aside, I’m still going to try templating my language learning habits around many of the suggestions made by Refold. Specifically, I’m going to work generally around the guidelines from Stage 2B, which I think approximately matches my current Chinese comprehension level.

At Stage 2B, Refold pretty much recommends:

  • ~2 hours of focused immersion every day : 30 minutes intensive (really trying to understand everything), and 90 minutes free-flow (still focusing, but not bothering to break flow to understand everything).
    • Active immersion should be spent on content aimed at adults.
    • Free-flow immersion can be spent on content for children and adolescents, but at least 50% of this time should be spent without subtitles if watching TV.
  • Immersion time is spent “reading” TV or comics, since these are media sources that come with a lot of extra contextual clues (visual, aural, textual).
  • At least half of the free-flow immersion time should be spent without subtitles.
  • Refold also recommend that most of this time be spent on immersion through TV, usually accompanied by subtitles because this provides language input with 3 channels for cues (video, audio, text). Comics or webcomics are also recommended at this stage.
  • Create Anki cards for comprehension only. Refold doesn’t want you to mess with production at this stage.
    • Cards should primarily be one target sentences captured from immersion.
    • Refold’s baseline recommendation for number of Anki cards to add per day is 5, where the rule of thumb is that 5 new cards per day will lead to 7 times that number, or 35, reviews per day at steady state.
  • Clear Anki reviews daily.

To fit my specific needs, interests, and goals, I’ll be modifying the following:

  • I will be creating production Anki cards for all new grammar and vocabulary in addition to comprehension cards. Since I’m already speaking Chinese daily, it’s often not terribly useful for me to learn a new word, but then not be able to recall it in conversation.
    • Refold doesn’t recommend this until Stage 3.
  • I want to make sure there is a component of regularly speaking or writing (or both!) in my target language.
    • Since I live in Taiwan, have a Taiwanese girlfriend, and am constantly immersed in my target language, I don’t actually need to plan for this. My normal everyday immersion and conversation is enough on this front, though the added supplement of Improv will provide even more opportunities.
    • Again, Refold doesn’t recommend this as a regular activity until Stage 3.
  • I’m only really going to be able to intentionally schedule ~30 minutes a day for active immersion, and won’t be scheduling much free-flow immersion time.
    • I think Refold’s recommendation of 2 hours per day is good here, but I honestly don’t have that kind of time to commit to language learning at the moment. I can do ~30 minutes a day, and am willing to increase that if I manage 30 minutes a day while balancing everything else.
    • Since I live in Taiwan, though, I think I’m likely to get exposed to a lot of extra unscheduled free-flow and passive immersion. I’m hoping this ends up balancing itself out.
    • I will try to do some free-flow immersion during mealtimes, but won’t plan to obligate myself to do so.
  • I’m going to start reading much sooner than Refold otherwise recommends.
    • Refold seems to generally recommend a combination of active and free-flow immersion primarily through TV shows in Stage 2B. Reading comes up more in Stage 2C. However, being able to read some of my favorite books (e.g. The Alchemist) is a big (and motivating) goal for me, so I’m going to mix in some reading earlier on.
    • I plan to primarily use graded readers for this for now, as I think trying to work through The Alchemist directly is going to be too challenging and not time efficient.

With all that said, here are the habits I’m committing to for language learning this quarter:

  • Daily
    • Learn 5 new Chinese cards in Anki.
    • Corollary: Add an average of at least 5 new Chinese cards to Anki.
    • Complete Anki reviews.
      • At a rate of 5 new cards per day, I should end up with ~35 reviews per day. Assuming a rate of ~20 seconds per card (which I think is generous), this should take me about 15 minutes per day to clear. That sounds manageable.
      • Since I have a huge number of overdue reviews from everything I haven’t done for 4 months, I’m actually going to move all of my existing cards into a backlog and potentially add those back in slowly over time. The most important thing is to clear the way to being able to quickly learn cards I add through my new language input channels.
    • Spend 30 minutes actively immersing myself in Chinese.
      • Loose high-level plan is to divide this across: reading, TV, and podcasts. Where I expect to read 2 days a week, watch TV 3 days a week, and listen to podcasts 2 days a week. I intend to give myself flexibility to play with this ratio, however.
      • For reading, I plan to use graded readers purchased through Pleco, my Chinese dictionary app.
      • For TV, I’m planning to use the Bruce Lee TV series on Netflix.
      • For podcasts, I’m planning to use ChinesePod’s upper-intermediate episodes, which are all taught in Chinese only.
  • Weekly
    • Spend 30 minutes free-flow immersing myself in Chinese.
      • I’m primarily planning to use TV aimed at teenage audiences without subtitles for this.
      • I’ll most likely watch Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix since it’s reasonably easy to understand, and I’ve already watched it many times in other languages.
  • Semi-monthly
    • Go to Improv and participate in at least the bilingual groups, if not the Chinese-only groups.

Improv 🎭

The main obstacles preventing me from going to Improv are:

  • How far it is from where I live now (i.e. activation energy is high).
  • The fact that Improv happens on Mondays when I normally also have CrossFit. The two don’t conflict, but having two large extracurricular commitments in the same day tends to sap away the work day.

I’m going to do the following:

  1. I’ve gone ahead and added the workshop to my calendar on a recurring once every two weeks basis. This will help me catch and plan for the event when I plan my Monday on Sunday night.
  2. On weeks when I have Improv, instead of attending Monday morning CrossFit, I will instead attend Thursday morning CrossFit. I’m also notating this in my calendar now to make this clear to myself.
  3. On days when I have Improv, I will work out of a cafe closer to Improv in the afternoon and buy dinner in the area.

I’ve also invited my girlfriend to Improv and dinner before Improv for added accountability. Since she lives close to where Improv happens, I think this could easily turn into a regular date night activity for us, which will further cement the habit.

Summarized Habits and OKRs 🎯

Red is for subtractions, green for additions.

Habits ✅:

  • Daily
    • Wake up early
    • Reserve the first hour after waking for self-care
    • Reserve the hour before bed for self-care and relaxation
    • Go to sleep early enough to get ~8 hours of sleep
    • Meditate for at least 10 minutes
    • Journal for at least 10 minutes
    • Aim to never obligate myself to log more than ~8 hours of work a day
    • Read in Chinese for ~15 minutes
    • Clear Anki reviews
    • Learn 10-20 new Chinese Anki cards
    • Learn 5 new Chinese Anki cards
    • Add an average of 5 new Chinese cards to Anki
    • Actively immerse in Chinese for at least 30 minutes
  • Weekly
    • Free-flow immerse in Chinese for at least 30 minutes
    • Exercise at least 3 times a week
    • Always make friends, relaxation, and extracurricular activities the priority on weekends
  • Semimonthly
    • Call my sister and debrief on progress and blockers around deepening friendships
    • Attend an improve workshop and participate in at least the bilingual groups
  • Monthly
    • Attend a networking event

OKRs 🎯:

  • Maintaining a healthy mind and body
    • Pick a set of dietary rules quarterly and stick to them ~80% of the time
    • Stretch: Reach ~10% body fat
  • Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom
    • Free up time to work on my own projects
      • Stop consulting full-time by February
      • Wind down consulting to the bare minimum by start of Q2
      • Don’t take on more students for The Spike Lab unless I have to
    • Launch at least 1 of my own projects to the general public this year
    • Secure at least 1 paying customer for one of my own projects
    • For inspiration and tactical advice:
      • Read Make by Peter Levels
      • Read about other peoples’ experiences doing 12 projects in 12 months
    • Stretch: Launch 12 projects in 12 months
  • Overcoming my fear of rejection, deepening friendships, and expanding my network
    • Complete any homework assignments given to me by my sister
    • Make at least 1 close friend in Taipei this year
    • Schedule some time to get to know the other The Spike Lab coaches
  • Learning Chinese
    • Reach an upper intermediate level in Chinese (B2, ~3000 words)
    • Successfully participate in an Improv activity in Chinese
  • Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for a longer period of time
    • Find an apartment of my own

2021 is going to be the first year in a long time where I know from the start where I’m going to be for the entire year. This year’s goals and resolutions will aim to take advantage of that as much as possible.

Additionally, this year I’m going to experiment with more aggressive prioritization. Not every goal is created equal. Rather than aim to cram as much as I can into the year, I’m going to focus on just a few of the most important goals, and then trust myself to fill the remaining time with whatever I need or want to in the moment.

I’m doing this partly because I’d like to try creating a mental environment for myself that has more space and less pressure and partly because I worry having such a long list of goals makes it easy to work on the less important things at the expense of the more important things.

Most of the items I’ve chosen have shown up in some shape or form across multiple iterations of my annual goals, and I’ve made inconsistent progress on them. That’s why this year I’ve asked myself “What goals would actually change my quality of life if I accomplished them this year?”

Here’s my high-level answer:

  1. Maintaining a healthy mind and body.
  2. Overcoming my fear of failure.
  3. Working towards financial freedom.
  4. Overcoming my fear of rejection.
  5. Living a balanced life full of friends, family, and non-professional interests.

Here’s what’s situationally important given that I’ll be spending the next year in Taipei:

  1. Reaching native-level fluency in Chinese.
  2. Establishing deeper friendships and expanding my network.
  3. Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for an extended period of time!

That’s it. Everything else is secondary. And everything here is aspirational–when I say “reaching native-level fluency in Chinese” I don’t mean that I expect myself to be fluent by the end of the year. I simply mean that I expect myself to regularly commit some time and make a real effort to move in that direction. (Though I will give myself a more realistic target for just this year further down in this document.)

In going through this exercise, I actually tried to keep myself to three things, but failed. However, while it may still look like there’s a lot here, there’s actually a ton of overlap in the goals that I’ve chosen. For example, the vehicle for overcoming my fear of failure is still my entrepreneurial pursuits, which are also aimed at generating revenue for financial independence. Likewise, my fear of rejection probably affects my friendships just as much as it affects my romantic life, so putting in the effort and taking risks to meet new friends and deepen existing relationships will push me to confront some of those fears. I plan to be intentional about seeking out overlaps between these goals to reduce the risk of overload.

Of course, there are a bunch of other things I’d like to do, and I could commit myself to some of them, but this year I’m choosing not to. I think my fear is always that, without a granular roadmap for how I should spend my time, that I’ll end up doing nothing. And, yes, when I’m feeling really tired I know I can, for example, binge video games for literally days on end.

But I think the thing that I usually forget is that, inevitably, when the dust settles and I leave my metaphorical man cave feeling recharged, I find myself bored by the idea of continuing that existence. Once that happens I tend to naturally look for things to learn or ways to improve myself–that’s just who I am.

For example, this past holiday break I initially spent a lot of time playing video games. But after that, I went on a trip, and on that trip I found myself spending the down time learning about how to grow plants, or watching Garry Kasparov’s MasterClass on chess, or alternating reading The Alchemist in Chinese and English with my girlfriend.

I think the truth is that so long as I create a balance, a routine, and an environment for myself that constantly charges me up instead of draining me, I can trust myself to do what’s best for me in the moment. If that sometimes means that, hey, I really do just need to play video games until I’m feeling OK again, then I need to be able to give myself the space to do that without feeling judgement, guilt, or shame.

Even though there are a million things I want to do and life is short, this year I’m going to try trusting myself a little more by giving myself the space to pursue or not pursue some things as I feel fit.

All that said, I am still going to be neurotic about the things that I’ve decided are important–I’ve chosen these things because even if I accomplish nothing else this year, these are the things that I think will really keep me moving in the direction I want to go. Making sure I have a handle on what attacking these goals means is important, especially because I chronically avoid some of them because, frankly, they scare the shit out of me.

Breakdown

Maintaining a Healthy Mind and Body

To me, this includes:

  • Daily habit: Wake up early
  • Daily habit: Reserve the first hour after waking for self-care
  • Daily habit: Reserve the hour before bed for self-care and relaxation
  • Daily habit: Go to sleep early enough to get ~8 hours of sleep
  • Daily habit: Meditate for at least 10 minutes
  • Daily habit: Journal for at least 10 minutes
  • Weekly habit: Exercise at least 3 times a week
  • Pick a set of dietary rules quarterly and stick to them ~80%+ of the time
  • Stretch OKR: Reach ~10% body fat

I’d also add that I don’t want to be exercising more than ~6 hours/week max. I’m not planning to train for anything crazy this year–though I do want to maintain a high standard of fitness, competing in events or completing other athletic feats isn’t a priority this year.

While I do want to continue working on lowering my body fat and maintaining a healthy weight, I also don’t want to see myself going super out of my way–in terms of time–to support this. If I can make this happen semi-passively by establishing and sticking to a fairly low-effort diet, great. If I need to go out of my way to make it happen beyond that, it’s not a priority if it’s going to detract from important goals.

Some of these habits continue to hint at the desire to create strong morning and evening routines that will support long-term well-being and productivity. I do still think that’s important, and want to work toward finding a routine that works for me, and which I can reasonably tweak as I learn about new things I want to try. I’m going to leave some of the ultra-specifics out, though, to give myself flexibility to determine e.g. what the right wake-up and sleep timing is for my body / workflows.

Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom

The primary lens for this is going to be my entrepreneurial pursuits. The primary problem in those pursuits so far has been a resistance to launching and putting a product out there (rejection) and then watching it die (failure). If I continue to find excuses not to launch, I can keep tricking myself into believing that I didn’t really fail because I never really tried.

So this year I need to focus on getting things out the door. Which means the following things potentially need to matter less:

  • Finding the perfect idea
  • Creating the perfect product
  • Having a perfect marketing strategy or business plan
  • Alienating the potential customer base

The thing that really matters, is launching something because that’s where all the learning is for me.

Fortunately, after consulting for so long in 2020, I’ve got a long runway. It’s time to start using it.

The high-level goals, then, need to be:

  • Free up time to work on my own projects
    • OKR: Stop consulting full-time by February
    • OKR: Wind down consulting to the bare minimum by start of Q2
    • OKR: Don’t take on more students for The Spike Lab unless I have to
  • OKR: Launch at least 1 of my own projects to the general public this year
  • OKR: Secure at least 1 paying customer for one of my own projects
  • For inspiration and tactical advice:
    • OKR: Read Make by Peter Levels
    • OKR: Read about other peoples’ experiences doing 12 projects in 12 months
  • Stretch OKR: Launch 12 projects in 12 months

At first glance, the OKR of launching just one project may seem a little… unambitious. However, after a few years of finding this journey daunting (and finding ways to get distracted from it), I’ve decided to really chunk this down and try to keep myself focused on the smallest scale version of the success I want to see here. I’m hoping that after I launch one project, or after I find one paying customer, it won’t be as hard or as scary to scale my efforts from there.

Somewhat contradictory, I am also loosely going to aim for launching 12 projects in 12 months this year. After a few years trying to get myself to do this and failing, I’m realizing that I’ve stopped believing in the idea of being able to launch a project in a month–a month isn’t a lot of time, and things have to stay small and pretty tightly scoped to fit into a 1-month time span.

When I started this journey, though, 1-month projects were the intention. I generally want to work on things that are fast to validate and fast to fail so that the majority of the time is spent gaining entrepreneurial experience rather than just straight-up building things (which is always the engineer’s instinct). However, I don’t expect myself to follow the letter of “12 months 12 projects” as much as the spirit.

In the past I’ve struggled with self-motivation in this area–often the fear is strong enough to keep me from being productive. I’m optimistic that this year will be different because:

  • I’m more focused. I won’t be moving around. This year I expect to plant some roots and really focus on this. I’m even willing to invest in creating a real home office environment for myself to boost my productivity.
  • My support network is stronger. I have quite a few friends now who are on a similar journey, some of whom are also pushing themselves to launch for quantity over quality. I expect to chat with them frequently, and hope that these interactions will help to keep me accountable.
  • My runway is longer than it typically has been in the past. This doesn’t shove away some of the existential, career-oriented fears that this path has always presented, but it certainly does relieve some of the time pressure and stress of feeling like I’m “pissing away my life’s savings.”

Overcoming my fear of rejection, deepening friendships, and expanding my network

I expect that launching my own projects is going to, itself, be a form of rejection therapy–there’s often a fear that what I’ve created isn’t good enough, that people won’t like it, or even that people simply won’t care. In that sense, making good on the goals in the previous section will also do wonders here.

However, I’d also like to push my rejection comfort zone through the lens of deepening my friendships and expanding my network, specifically with people here in Taiwan. This pairs well with embracing the experience of living in Taiwan for a longer period of time and improves my sense of balance and well-being by strengthening my support network out here.

For this goal, I’m also going to try something new: I’m getting a coach. Well, sort of. I’m going to be working with my little sister on this one. I think the advantage of having a coach is that I get to learn from someone else’s experience, and I get to benefit from that experience to avoid needing to struggle to find the best strategy to accomplish this goal.

The goals here are as follows:

  • Bi-monthly habit: Call my sister and debrief on progress and blockers
  • OKR: Complete any homework assignments given to me by my sister
  • Monthly habit: Make time to attend a networking-like event roughly once a month
  • Bi-monthly habit: Make time to attend improv workshops twice a month
  • OKR: Make at least 1 close friend in Taipei this year
  • OKR: Schedule some time to get to know the other The Spike Lab coaches

Last year I wondered if I had regressed a bit, since I’ve recently found myself pretty uncomfortable at networking events. I’ve told myself that it’s because I don’t love how networking events are always so focused on “what you do” and “how you can be of value to me” as opposed to “who you are” and “what I can learn from you.”

I think there is an element of that, but I think a lot of it is that I’m afraid. Especially when the crowd at a networking event is older and more traditionally “accomplished”, it’s easy to feel a sense of “I don’t belong here” or “I’m not enough.” I think at networking events it’s easy to fall into the trap of comparing myself to others… and that combined with not having the deeper conversations sometimes leaves me feeling awkward and uncomfortable.

I don’t know that I’m ever going to love networking events, but I do think that this could be a good environment to challenge my beliefs around self-worth and self-value that likely sit at the root of my fear of rejection.

The improv workshops I’ve referenced above are actually conducted in Chinese and English, so this synergizes well with improving my Chinese fluency. Usually they break activities into groups of English speakers, bilingual speakers, and Chinese speakers. I’ve always been intimidated by the idea of doing improv in Chinese, so when I’ve gone I’ve usually gravitated towards the English groups. I want to challenge myself to finally try the bilingual and, ultimately, the Chinese-only groups.

In the past, when I’ve brought up fear of rejection, women and dating have been common focal points. While those areas do remain important challenge areas for me when it comes to rejection, since I’m currently in a relationship I’m not planning anything specific in that direction. I am, however, puzzling over whether or not there are ways to continue pushing past my fears even in the context of a relationship. I’m not sure what that might look like, but those are conversations that I continue to have with my girlfriend, who is aware of my desire to continue growing in this area. When it comes down to it, though, even if I weren’t in a relationship right now, I think that if I had to choose between focusing on my entrepreneurial pursuits and focusing on this, my entrepreneurial pursuits are more important.

Living a balanced life full of friends, family, and non-professional interests

This one is coming as a reaction to re-discovering in 2020 that, under the right conditions, I will sometimes drive myself way too hard, to the point where I start suffering from balance issues like feeling too tired or stressed to see friends. It’s also all too easy for me to end up in a place where I’m “always on” and even a small disruption in my day can lead to a feeling of constantly being behind.

Now, I’ve only ever had the opposite problem while working solo on projects, but to head this off anyway, here’s the plan:

  • Daily habit: Aim never to obligate myself to log more than ~8 hours of work a day
  • Weekly habit: Always make friends, relaxation, and extracurricular activities the priority on weekends

My hope is simply that this will create enough space in my life that I won’t feel as stressed, and that I’ll then naturally make time for friends, family, and hobbies. Additionally, rather than see myself work 10, 11, 12+ hours per day, I’d rather see myself finding ways to be more focused and efficient in 8 hours.

If there’s nothing else going on and I feel like it, can I work more than 8 hours a day? Sure. At the same time, I don’t want to find myself stressing myself out to do this on a regular basis, and especially not at the expense of health or well-being. Life is more than just work.

Learning Chinese

I want to try something a little different this year. I’ve been using Anki for a couple of years now, and it’s a great tool, but lately I’ve been finding language learning has become a chore rather than a hobby I look forward to.

Last year, I pulled a lot of vocabulary from the Taiwan official vocabulary lists. This wasn’t always very effective for a couple of reasons:

  1. It’s not terribly motivating.
  2. The words don’t come with a lot of context.

I’m finding that Anki is also potentially weak as a long-long-term memorization strategy. The hope has been that, over time, the Anki reviews will monotonically decrease in number, eventually approaching 0. In reality, though, I’m finding that there’s likely always going to be some leakage, especially for Anki cards that aren’t scheduled to show up for e.g. years. 

Additionally, the progression down to 0 is taking… much longer than I had hoped it would. After nearly 2 years of maintenance on French cards, I still have ~50 cards to review a day. It doesn’t take that long (5-10 minutes), but combined with all of the other ~50-100 reviews I have to do each day across other categories, it tends to add up to a solid hour of slogging through Anki reviews.

After some pondering, I think the real goal is to reach a level in each language where maintenance of the language can be done through normal daily activities like consuming media. At that point, Anki ceases to be necessary, since frequent words will continue to reinforce themselves.

For that reason, this year I hope to focus more on functional fluency, with special attention to reading and conversation. For now, I’m still expecting to use Anki to help me memorize new words, but I hope the motivation to memorize those words will be so that I can fluently read a book or immediately use new grammar and expressions in conversation! I expect this to be a much more interesting and motivating experience.

Here are the goals:

  • OKR: Reach an upper intermediate level in Chinese (B2, ~3000 words)
  • OKR: Successfully participate in an Improv activity in Chinese
  • Daily habit: Read in Chinese for ~15 minutes
  • Daily habit: Clear Anki reviews
  • Daily habit: Add 10-20 new Chinese Anki cards each day

Not strictly a goal or a habit that I intend to codify, but since I’m not committing myself to a reading goal this year, a lot of my passive listening time can potentially go to podcasts! Lately I’m re-discovering that I’m a fan of ChinesePod for level-focused content in coffee-break-sized episodes.

I explicitly plan to not add any new cards for any previously studied languages this year, but will likely try to maintain the existing cards for now. The focus is on Chinese at the expense of all other languages. If I find myself wanting to study other languages in my free time, I’m welcome to do so informally so long as it doesn’t start detracting from what’s been listed here as important.

Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for a longer period of time

Since I’m going to be in Taiwan for the next year, I think it’s finally time to leave travel mode, at least for a little while. My current living situation has always been kind of temporary, in part because much of 2020 I wasn’t sure what might happen with my visa situation. After a year in a place more equipped for a stay of a couple months… I’m starting to feel the pain. I think I’m ready to make steps to fully embrace being here for a full year.

For now, this is more of an intention for the year than anything concrete, but I will put down:

  • OKR: Find an apartment of my own

I’m also prepared to put some money down for this to make myself comfortable. Things like: real office equipment (a nice chair, some extra displays?), small kitchen appliances, and furniture to host people for small gatherings.

I’m not ready to commit to staying beyond a year yet, however, so I am still thinking about these things as semi-temporary, and do want to avoid accumulating too much unnecessary stuff.

Summarized 2021 Goals, Habits, and OKRs

Habits:

  • Daily
    • Wake up early
    • Reserve the first hour after waking for self-care
    • Reserve the hour before bed for self-care and relaxation
    • Go to sleep early enough to get ~8 hours of sleep
    • Meditate for at least 10 minutes
    • Journal for at least 10 minutes
    • Aim to never obligate myself to log more than ~8 hours of work a day
    • Read in Chinese for ~15 minutes
    • Clear Anki reviews
    • Add 10-20 new Chinese Anki cards each day
  • Weekly
    • Exercise at least 3 times a week
    • Always make friends, relaxation, and extracurricular activities the priority on weekends
  • Semimonthly
    • Call my sister and debrief on progress and blockers around deepening friendships
    • Attend an improve workshop
  • Monthly
    • Attend a networking event

OKRs:

  • Maintaining a healthy mind and body
    • Pick a set of dietary rules quarterly and stick to them ~80% of the time
    • Stretch: Reach ~10% body fat
  • Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom
    • Free up time to work on my own projects
      • Stop consulting full-time by February
      • Wind down consulting to the bare minimum by start of Q2
      • Don’t take on more students for The Spike Lab unless I have to
    • Launch at least 1 of my own projects to the general public this year
    • Secure at least 1 paying customer for one of my own projects
    • For inspiration and tactical advice:
      • Read Make by Peter Levels
      • Read about other peoples’ experiences doing 12 projects in 12 months
    • Stretch: Launch 12 projects in 12 months
  • Overcoming my fear of rejection, deepening friendships, and expanding my network
    • Complete any homework assignments given to me by my sister
    • Make at least 1 close friend in Taipei this year
    • Schedule some time to get to know the other The Spike Lab coaches
  • Learning Chinese
    • Reach an upper intermediate level in Chinese (B2, ~3000 words)
    • Successfully participate in an Improve activity in Chinese
  • Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for a longer period of time
    • Find an apartment of my own

Summary

On the whole, 2020 was a decent year. Did I accomplish everything I set out to do? Well, no. There were a few unexpected detours (*cough* COVID *cough*) but, to loosely quote one of my favorite books, if the journey is what really matters, not the destination, then perhaps the occasional detour should be celebrated for keeping the journey interesting.

Regardless, given the circumstances, I’ve been extremely fortunate:

  • My consulting business did very well. I worked with 3 different clients and gained valuable experience and $$$
    • I had a chance to exercise my engineering leadership skills with Karat, where I’ve been setting engineering direction for a small team
    • I earned enough money that I can now safely focus on my own projects for a good long while, regardless of what the pandemic does to the economy from here
  • I started working as a part-time innovation / entrepreneurship coach for high school students through The Spike Lab, which provides a purpose-driven way to further cushion my runway long-term
  • I volunteered as a section leader for Stanford’s Code in Place
  • I volunteered 44 hours to Vote Forward, a non-profit doing work related to the 2020 US election
  • I received a Taiwan Employment Gold Card, granting me residency in Taiwan for up to 3 years
  • I’ve been in a relationship for most of this year, making this my longest relationship since college
  • I lost 10-15 pounds and several points of body fat
    • I gained a lot of weight over the holidays though haha
  • I completed a half marathon
  • I reached an intermediate (B1) level in Chinese and am now working my way toward conversational fluency (~B2)
  • I learned a good amount of Japanese
    • I’m starting to be able to pick out words and phrases from anime, though I’m still a long way from full comprehension
  • I read 50 books, just shy of 52, but still a personal record
  • Earned my PADI Advanced Open Water and Enriched Air scuba diving certifications
  • I traveled around a lot of Taiwan! I feel like I’ve now at least briefly visited most of the major destinations on the island

Reflections

Admittedly, progress on my goals unraveled quite a bit coming into the end of the year. My big takeaway from Q4 is that I’m working too much and putting too much pressure on myself, which probably isn’t a big surprise to anyone but myself haha.

Work-life balance has always been a struggle for me. During my self-employed life, I’ve occasionally needed to institute rules to help me feel like I get enough done on a daily basis and allow myself to feel guilt-free about putting work down for the day. In the past, this had primarily been a reaction to having placed myself in such uncomfortable situations (e.g. living alone in Morocco while convalescing from a breakup and severe food poisoning) that I struggled to get myself to do anything other than employ escapist tactics (like binging video games) to avoid the discomfort. Back then, I sometimes had enough trouble staying focused that I needed to give myself a tangible daily goal, hence my trusty “6 hours a day” rule.

I now ironically have the opposite problem: I probably work too hard. This year, I had long periods where I logged an average of 10+ hours/day plus time over the weekends. I’m beginning to realize that the sheer amount of time / pressure / effort is adversely affecting my well-being. This has primarily manifested itself in two ways:

  1. A general lack of energy / motivation to do things outside of work. (And, therefore, a slump in progress towards many goals.)
  2. A sense that I don’t have time or can’t make time to spend with friends on a regular basis.

I don’t really have anything or anyone to blame but myself, however. Yes, my workload can sometimes be challenging as I continue to consult full-time for Karat and coach part-time through The Spike Lab, but on average the unbalancing factor seems to be the pressure I put on myself and a lack of good boundaries between work and life.

I expect finding new balances will be a major theme in 2021.

Zooming out, though, here are some things I felt worked well in 2020:

  • Quarterly reviews
    • It was like getting a new lease on my year every 3 months!
    • I liked that I could adjust and adapt my goals as the year played out
  • Focusing on small, chunked daily habits and routines
    • I had trouble keeping up with weekly habits, but I liked having the daily habits as a touchstone for a regular routine I was trying to establish
    • I also really like how daily habits create a quantifiable piece of data that can be used to measure success / adherence

Here are some things I think need to be improved:

  • Overload
    • While I could maintain many of the goals, it became difficult to do so sustainably over the entire year, especially as my workload increased.
    • Often there would be so little time / space left over that even a small unexpected event could easily push me behind, leaving me stressed for the whole day (or even multiple days).
  • Establishment and maintenance of routines
    • I really like the idea of having a morning and evening routine / ritual and tweaking it over time to maximize well-being
    • However, I had trouble maintaining consistent work boundaries that would allow this. Particularly around going to bed at a fairly set time and waking up at a set time since I’d often want to finish “that one last thing” before going to sleep

Upon reflection, I think that in 2021 I’m going to try to give myself more space to relax or be creative with my time. I expect that I’ll significantly reduce the number of goals I explicitly commit to, focusing instead on just the most important things. I also expect that I’ll be trying to find a reasonable cap on the number of hours I work each day to help maintain a balance.

Detailed Review

I think I’d probably give myself a D for Q4. There were a few areas where I did well, but for the most part I stagnated in Q4, and wasn’t able to continue making forward progress.

For wider-context, since this is also a year-end review, here are all of my quarterly grades for 2020:

  • Q1: B/B+
  • Q2: C/C+
  • Q3: C
  • Q4: D

Unsurprisingly, the trend is downward throughout the year haha… but on the whole, I think it balances out to earning something like a C/C+ for the year, which isn’t half bad!

More granularly, here’s how I did against 2020 Q3’s final list of goals and OKRs:

  • Launch a successful project
    • OKR: Complete The Spike Lab purpose and identity exercises for myself
    • OKR: Brainstorm at least 100 project ideas related to my purpose, identities, and interests
      • I think I ended up with something closer to 80, but feel that I accomplished the goal here.
    • OKR: Identify 2-3 projects to explore and prototype starting in 2021
      • Taiwan E-Invoice / Receipt Lottery App for Expats
      • Serenity, GTD
      • I have a few smaller ideas that I could work on but probably need a little more scoping
    • Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
      • This included client and coaching work this quarter, and I destroyed this without trying.
  • Grow my consulting business
    • OKR: Obtain a glowing review / referral from Karat
  • Improve my software engineering skills
    • OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
    • OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
    • OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
    • Ended up not making consistent progress with these books this quarter, though I did read one or two others.
  • Language learning
    • Learn Japanese
      • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
        • With the Japanese Core 10k flashcards I’ve already added, I’m pretty sure I’m just about at the bottom of this range.
      • Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
        • I added new cards to Anki only very sporadically in Q4
      • Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
        • I never ended up finishing this in Q4 :/
    • Learn Chinese
      • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
      • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
      • OKR: Reach 3000 words in Chinese
        • I didn’t add a lot of new Chinese vocabulary in Q4! Too busy with work to think about this.
      • Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
        • Added new cards only very sporadically in Q4
      • Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
    • Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
      • I was doing well with this right up until about mid-December. I’m on a long hiatus from Anki currently, and am re-strategizing around how to use it for my language studies long-term
  • Improve my health
    • Get back into shape
      • Get lean
        • Reach 10% body fat
          • Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
            • Actually stopped weighing myself consistently this quarter, too! Probably at the point at which I knew it was bad…
          • Definitely regressed a bit this quarter haha…
        • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
          • Hardly did this at all this quarter. Another thing I stopped thinking about as I got stressed with work.
      • OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
        • Started CrossFit in Q4! Really enjoying it. Still recovering from a shoulder injury from before CrossFit, though.
      • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
        • I was on the slow-carb diet for Q4, and don’t feel that I really stuck to it well this quarter.
      • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
        • For the most part, I was at CrossFit 3 days a week. There were probably a few weeks here and there where I missed a day, though.
  • Learn to talk to attractive women
    • OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
  • Read more
    • OKR: Read 52 books
      • I made it to 50 at the end of the day! Reading fell off a lot in Q4, along with everything else. I had a 3-4 book lead, and ended up with a 2 book deficit :/
    • Learn to speed read
      • OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
      • Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
      • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
      • I didn’t end up finding more time for this in Q4 as I had hoped I would
    • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
      • This didn’t really happen. Bedtime routines got wrecked by not keeping good boundaries on my work schedule
    • Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
    • Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.
  • Deepen my mindfulness practice
    • Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
      • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
        • I hardly did this at all in Q4, but I will give myself credit for doing decently on this earlier in the year
  • Improve my relationship with my immediate family
    • OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
    • Habit: Call each family member weekly
      • I was good about this for the first few quarters, but dropped off a lot by the end of the year
    • Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly
      • I do have a therapist, and we do talk approximately weekly, but we don’t always stay focused on family relationships (for better or for worse)
    • I don’t feel like I moved the needle a huge amount on this this year. My relationship with my mother is reasonably stable, but still sometimes tenuous. My relationship with my father has gotten worse, if anything, and I haven’t had the emotional energy to try and reconnect.
  • Become more politically active
    • Habit: Spend 1-4 hours each week on political activities until November 3rd
      • I actually ended up stopping this mid-October, as The Big Send event for VoteForward happened around then. I was supposed to make time to do some phone banking after that, but ended up failing to do so.
      • I still accomplished a good amount, though, and am proud of having taken steps to be more involved! The election also ultimately went well :).

This is a routine review of my progress toward my 2020 New Year’s Resolutions. I engage in this review process quarterly. You can find Q1’s review here, and Q2’s review here.

Summary

For Q3, I give myself a C:

  • Started consulting for Karat
  • Took on 2 students for The Spike Lab
  • Logged 44 hours of volunteer work for Vote Forward
  • Completed the Duolingo Chinese course
  • Learned between 450 and 500 new Chinese words and phrases, putting me now fairly solidly in the lower intermediate (B1) band of proficiency
  • Reached ~650 total Japanese words, bringing me within reach of N5 proficiency
  • Read 12 books, bringing my total up to 42 / 52 for the year
  • Mostly maintained a weight of ~145 lbs with body fat hovering between 14-15% while making gains in the gym
  • Continued exploring a relationship with my Taiwanese girlfriend
  • Obtained a Taiwan Employment Gold Card, granting me a 3-year residency visa and open work permit in Taiwan
    • I suspect I’ll stay for at least another year given the pandemic, so I am starting to consider longer-term living arrangements, but I haven’t yet committed to staying for the full 3 years.
  • Started a new herb graveyard on my roof. RIP plants :’(.
  • Did a short voice acting gig for an upcoming game related to the Slam Dunk anime series

Lessons and observations:

  • I need to be more disciplined about stopping work for the day early enough to give myself space for everything else in life, including friends, a little bit of sanctioned play time, and a more general sense of wellbeing.
  • Sometimes, when you can’t see or feel the progress you’re making, it’s because you’re examining it with too big a magnifying glass! Step back and look at the big picture on a longer timescale.

In Q4:

  • Likely staying in Taiwan for the next ~year as the world shows no signs of normalizing anytime soon.
  • I have decided to put Tribe on hold indefinitely due to the pandemic and to step back and think more about how my projects connect to my purpose.
  • I’ll be continuing to consult for Karat this quarter.
  • I’ll be continuing to coach students for The Spike Lab this quarter.
  • I’m scaling back my volunteer involvement in politics, as the 2020 US Presidential Election comes to a close on November 3.
    • My obligations to VoteForward will end by October 17.
    • I plan to do a little bit of phone banking for key political races through Swing Left.
  • Will be focusing on balance, and trying to create enough space in my life to get lots of work done while also maintaining friendships and personal wellbeing.
  • Will also be focusing on purpose, and identifying a number of projects to potentially start exploring beginning in 2021.
    • I’m dropping many of my other goals to make room for this!

Q3 Reflection

I started out this quarter telling people that my life is very full, but also very fulfilling–my way of saying that, though I have a lot on my plate with a full-time consulting client, a part-time job, and a volunteering gig, I am quite happy to be doing everything I’m doing. On the whole, I am still glad that I’m doing all of these things, but I think now, 12 weeks later, having worked part if not all of most weekends, I’m finally willing to admit that a part of me is just plain tired. Coming into this review, I feel a little like an old train just barely making it into station on momentum after running out of steam halfway through the journey.

What’s more, though it’s been a very productive quarter–I logged close to 60 hours/week many weeks, with single-day logs typically falling somewhere between 8 and 10 hours, maxing out at around 11 or 12, all excluding the ~1.5 hours of additional unlogged time I spend each day clearing my Anki reviews–I simultaneously feel a lot like I didn’t make much progress on my goals. There hasn’t been a lot of mental space to pursue many of my personal goals, so there’s been a lot of fall off, especially in the latter half of this quarter: I definitely haven’t made it to the gym regularly; progress learning Chinese has slowed to a crawl; and a lot of the things I originally hoped I’d spend time on the weekends doing, like writing, or calling my family, or honing my engineering skills through books and exercises, just have not happened.

I have also clearly not been getting enough rest this quarter, and am starting to feel like I’m not getting my social needs met. Some of this is likely my own fault, and can’t solely be blamed on my workload–I’ve historically been pretty bad at balancing work and life, and I’m pretty sure I’ve inherited some of my mother’s workaholic tendencies and habits. These days I find I tend to either over-work (when I have clients) or over-life (when I struggle to keep myself as accountable for my own work).

Over the course of the quarter, I’ve tried to resolve this by consolidating weekend work onto Sunday as much as possible so I can feel comfortable taking Saturday off. Sunday has also turned into a “lazy work day”, wherein I plan to work, but, since most of Sunday’s work is typically volunteer-related, I put less pressure on myself to avoid distractions. Over time, I’ve also gone from aiming for a full day of work on Sunday, to aiming for closer to a half day of work sheerly out of necessity. Nevertheless, since Sunday remains a “work day”, and since Saturday has mostly been reserved for my girlfriend, I haven’t made much time to make new friends here in Taipei, or deepen my existing relationships, a fact which is starting to contribute to a sense of social isolation or alienation, and a contraction of my comfort zone wrt to social engagements (i.e. I’m naturally tending to become more introverted / hermit-like, which I don’t love). If you’re a friend reading this and wondering why we haven’t hung out in awhile, this is why, and I sincerely apologize :(.

It also doesn’t help that, towards the end of this quarter, some friends convinced me to get back into League of Legends (LoL), a video game that I played a lot in high school. I sometimes say that I was addicted to this game back then, though, given that I still got into college I’m not sure it’s totally fair to say that. What I can say for sure, though, is that with the hundreds (hopefully not thousands) of hours I spent playing LoL in high school, I probably could have picked up a new skill, learned a language, or completed a fun and interesting independent project.

I largely quit the game when I got to college because of its huge suck on my time (and because I was dating someone who clearly didn’t approve). I steered clear of it for a nice long time and, since the game changes quickly, I never felt a strong desire to get back into it, knowing how much time it would take me to get back up to speed. Now that I’ve been re-introduced to LoL, and paid down much of the time to get caught-up, much of the non-work time that I might otherwise spend on my personal goals or social visits has instead been spent playing the game.

I am, however, currently more inclined to believe that LoL is a symptom than a cause–in the past, I have found that video games have been an escape / pressure release mechanism for me when I am in a state of extreme distress or discomfort (e.g. I was going through a lot when I lived in Morocco, and I experienced a similar bout of video game escapism back then, combined with a sense of stagnation wrt my goals and personal growth). I imagine this is my version of trying to find a semi-mindless escape from pain or crisis, much like the stereotypical instinct to plop down in front of the television after a long day of work…

The fatigue and a growing concern that I may be stagnating outside of work has sometimes left me feeling less than great these last few weeks. I am therefore very much relieved to be taking some time off to do this review, and to push the giant red “reset” button in time to re-strategize before the end of the year.

As usual, though, in reviewing the goals set out at the beginning of last quarter, I clearly vastly overcommitted myself. I think part of the problem here is that, while I knew I would consider taking on a new consulting client in Q3, I didn’t actually have one when I did my Q2 review. Ironically, the act of posting my Q2 review and making known that I’m open to more consulting work this year is what led to my quickly closing a consulting contract in the second week of Q3.

I had to quickly re-adjust at the beginning of Q3 after landing a new consulting contract, being accepted as a volunteer senior software engineer with Vote Forward, and being pushed into an accelerated timeline to take on my first student for The Spike Lab. My first indication that something might not be right was when, during a trip to Taichung with my girlfriend, I found myself stressing out about the time commitment the workout plans I had selected were requiring (~1-2 hours/day), and how that might affect my ability to deliver quality work. I ended up changing my exercise plan to something more manageable–~1 hour 3 times a week.

As I look through a lot of these goals, some of them seem somewhat redundant with having an active consulting client, and that’s something I should likely have tried to realize ahead of time. For example, spending time trying to join TopTal or preparing for any kind of engineering interviews is completely unnecessary while I have an active client since these are things that are geared towards improving long-term dealflow for my consulting business, and nothing improves long-term dealflow more than building my reputation through strong execution.

On the personal side, relationship-wise things have been going well! At ~6 months, my current girlfriend is now the longest relationship I’ve been in since college. That’s been coming with its own set of fears and complexities, but we’ve been working through them together, and I’ve enjoyed what feels to me like a very mature approach to our relationship and exploring whether or not we’re right for each other. I think the jury is still out on a number of things, and she and I have talked about them, but at the moment I feel pretty positively about the relationship. I also think that, given how understanding she’s been of the pressure I tend to put on myself, and the workload I’ve taken on this quarter, if anything she’s made my life better, and helped to stabilize my mood.

All-in-all, I think I left Q3 feeling like I might be failing to meet important metrics on my goals, and my initial gut feeling is that I probably earned a D+/C-, but given that some goals should have moved around to accommodate the new reality, perhaps I did better than I realized. I’m also probably falling victim to recency bias since I better remember the latter half of the quarter and how rough a ride that was, and I’ve mostly forgotten that the first half of the quarter actually mostly went OK.

Q3 Quantitative Review

Based on the below, I’m giving myself a C for the quarter.

Here’s a categorical breakdown:

  • Consulting / Productivity: A+
  • Reading: A-
  • Language Sudies: A
  • Health / Fitness: B
  • Become more politically active: B
  • Improving relationships with family: C-
  • Meditation / Mindfulness: F
  • Independent Professional Development: F
  • Writing: F

Here’s a detailed breakdown:

Launch a successful project

  • Launch a successful project
    • OKR: Earn no more profit from coaching and consulting than the annual Foreign Earned Income Tax Exclusion limit ($107,600).
      • Q2: Added this OKR.
      • Q3: On track to exceed this, and will likely only not exceed if the status of my contract with Karat changes. I’m not expecting any changes here between now and the end of the year.
    • OKR: Release a new version of Tribe with updates for COVID-19
      • Q2: Added this OKR.
      • Q3: Unlikely to accomplish this unless the status of my contract with Karat changes, and I throw the remaining time this year into Tribe. I’m not expecting the status of my contract with Karat to change between now and the end of the year.
    • Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
      • Q1: I’d give myself 50-60% compliance. I’ve had a number of days where I felt like I didn’t quite hit the 6 hour goal, and then never made-up the time. Hoping my new implementation plan will help me to stay focused and motivated.
      • Q2: I crushed this most of the time. Doing client work this quarter has helped me to realize that I can actually do close to 9 hours a day of work and still get all of my other personal goals done so long as I’m really focused about it. I still struggle a little to apply this same work ethic to my own work, but when client work is involved it’s never an issue.
      • Q3: Absolutely crushed this. I logged close to 60 hours/week many weeks, with single-day logs typically falling somewhere between 8 and 10 hours, maxing out at around 11 or 12. I expect the trend to continue for Q4, since I will be maintaining a similar workload between clients and coaching. If anything, I actually need to work less at this point haha.
  • Grow my consulting business
    • OKR: Join TopTal
      • Q2: Added this OKR.
      • Q3: I haven’t spent any time thinking about this. With an active consulting project, I probably shouldn’t have to.
    • OKR: Complete a professional project related to machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science
      • Q2: Added this OKR.
      • Q3: I haven’t spent any time thinking about this. With an active consulting project, I probably shouldn’t have to.
    • Habit: Do a practice problem on HackerRank daily
      • Q2: Added this OKR.
      • Q3: I was doing this for the first few weeks, then as work picked up I dropped this because it was requiring an hour a day and I couldn’t spare the time.
  • Improve my software engineering skills
    • OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
      • Q3: I’m about halfway through this book, but most of that progress was made long ago.
    • OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
      • Q3: Started reading this book, but haven’t gotten very far.
    • OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
      • Q3: Started reading this book, but haven’t gotten very far.
    • OKR: Master dynamic programming (DP)
      • Q3: I’ve spent 0 time on this this quarter.
    • Habit: Every weekend, spend 2-3 hours working on something that hones my software engineering skills
      • Q3: I spent 0 time on this this quarter.
  • Language learning
    • Learn Japanese
      • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
        • Q1: I haven’t started a concerted effort to take words off this list yet. So far, I’m mostly farming vocabulary from Duolingo, which I think is preferable.
        • Q2: I still haven’t purposefully started this.
        • Q3: I haven’t been doing much for this other than my Japanese Core 10k sentence flashcards, but I just did a vocabulary check based on JLPT vocabulary lists, and found that I’m hovering around ~650 Japanese words right now, with nearly 80% coverage of the N5 level (lowest recognized proficiency). My actual command of the language feels like it’s lagging, however, since I still have not done a lot of studying around grammar.
      • Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
        • Q2: Added this habit.
        • Q3: I was pretty good about this! 3 new sentences a day is a pretty small commitment, so I never felt like doing this was a big burden.
      • Habit: Add at least 5 new Japanese vocabulary Anki cards a day
        • Q2: Added this habit.
        • Q3: I didn’t do this one virtually at all. I quickly realized that doing this would push me from 50 Japanese reviews a day to 100 Japanese reviews a day, and I was nervous about making that jump because I felt it would add a lot of extra stress.
      • Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
        • Q2: Added this habit.
        • Q3: I started this, but dropped off as my workload ramped up. There are still 17/42 Duolingo lessons that haven’t been converted into flashcards. This is still do-able by the end of the year if I put in a little effort.
    • Learn Chinese
      • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
        • I’ve spent literally the entire year in Taiwan haha…
      • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
        • Q2: I haven’t been doing this at all this quarter.
        • Q2: There are about 17 “skills” left to complete on Duolingo. For Chinese, the average number of lessons per skills is ~3. This means that I should be able to easily finish this at a rate of 1 lesson per day for ~51 days.
        • Q3: Complete!
      • OKR: Reach 3000 words in Chinese
        • Q2: Added this OKR.
        • Q2: I did a self-diagnostic based on vocabulary lists published by Taiwan for the TOCFL, and I’m at about ~2000 words now, where ~8000 are required for “fluency.” (Note: A “word” is a combination of Chinese characters. One can know vastly more “words” in Chinese than one knows characters, since different combinations of the same characters can form different “words.”)
        • Q3: A similar diagnostic put me at ~2500 words and phrases in Chinese for an improvement of ~450-500 words this quarter, and this despite not always adding a full 30 new cards each day. I think I’m on track to reach in the range of 3000 words by the end of the year if the trend continues.
      • Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
        • Q2: Added this Habit.
        • Q3: I fell off on this a bit as work picked up, but was adding between 10 and 30 cards most days.
      • Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
        • Q2: Added this habit.
        • Q3: Finished Duolingo’s Chinese track!
    • Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
      • Q2: I had a week or two where I was behind due to client work, but I’ve caught back up, and I’ve gotten into a pretty good cadence for this. I’m finding doing ~100 cards in the morning when I wake up, then ~50 before lunch and ~50 after, then ~50 before dinner and ~50 after, puts me in a pretty good place where I never reach the end of my day panicked that I haven’t started studying (which usually leads to losing sleep, and is kind of a vicious cycle that leads to Anki burnout).
      • Q3: I’ve had a couple of days here and there where I was too exhausted to finish everything, but I haven’t had any long stretches where I just haven’t done my reviews. This quarter, in addition to the trick I discovered Q2 around distributing reviews throughout the day, I found that doing reviews while walking on a treadmill often keeps me focused (and allows me to get some exercise!). Doing reviews in 25-minute pomodoros also helps, since I can usually expect that it will only take ~3 pomodoros to finish my Anki cards for the day.
  • Improve my health
    • Get back into shape
      • Get lean
        • Reach 10% body fat
          • Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
            • Q1: I’ve barely missed a day of doing this.
            • Q2: Still going strong here.
            • Q3: Going a little less strong, but generally doing this 80-90% of the time.
        • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
          • Q2: I did pitifully on this, with only 2 measurements recorded this quarter. Normally I do this over the weekend, but I think I got thrown off track by working a few weekends in a row.
          • Q3: I did better on this, with 6 measurements recorded this quarter, but am still generally failing to do this consistently. I think the issue now is that Saturday is cheat day, and often kind of a weird day for me. If I don’t do this first thing in the morning on Saturday, I lose the opportunity to do it for the week because I eat so much on Saturdays that it would actually skew my data haha. I think the solution here might be to move my measurement day to Friday, when I’m less likely to get distracted.
      • OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
        • Q1: I chose this program and stuck to it pretty closely.
        • Q2: I chose a half marathon program and stuck with it closely, with the exception of one week where I went on a long vacation. I’ll be completing my half marathon “race” the weekend of this review :).
        • Q3: I started out doing the Warrior Elite Workout Program, but quickly had to switch to Stronglifts 5×5 to save time. Sustained two minor injuries this quarter, likely due to not properly warming up, and generally fell off on this toward the end of the quarter.
      • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
        • Q1: I would give myself a 60% compliance rate with my diet haha…
        • Q2: I would give myself a 70-75% compliance rate with my diet, and things seem to be working well!
        • Q3: I would give myself a 60-70% compliance rate with my diet. No significant gains this quarter, but no significant regressions, either.
      • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
        • Q1: I’m easily doing closer to 5-6 days a week.
        • Q2: I’m still doing closer to 5-6 days a week and crushing this.
        • Q3: I was aiming for closer to 3 days a week, and probably made it to the gym 3 days a week 60% of weeks this quarter. I suppose if I average this out with Q1 and Q2 I’m still doing OK?
  • Learn to talk to attractive women
    • OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
      • Q1: I’ve caught myself kind of tempted to download these once or twice, but on the whole I’m finding I’m quite happy without them.
      • Q2: I’m in a relationship right now, so this isn’t really applicable :P…
      • Q3: Still in a relationship. Still not applicable.
  • Read more
    • OKR: Read 52 books
      • Q1: 17/13 books
      • Q2: 30/26 books
      • Q3: 42/39 books
        • Highlights
          • Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
          • The Dichotomy of Leadership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
          • Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
          • Money: Master the Game by Tony Robbins
          • Start with Why by Simon Sinek
    • Learn to speed read
      • OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
      • Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
        • Q1: I had very high compliance with this for 2 months. Then dropped off.
        • Q2: I spent no time on this this quarter.
        • Q3: I spent no time on this this quarter.
      • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
    • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
      • Q1: I was good about this for about a month, then started to totally blow it off.
      • Q2: Was also pretty bad about this this quarter, though I have recently picked up the habit of reading a few pages before bed again.
      • Q3: Despite my good intentions, this barely happened this quarter.
    • Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
      • Q2: Added this habit.
      • Q3: I haven’t actually been putting it on my pillow, but rather by the side of my bed, where it’s actually much easier to forget about it.
    • Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.
      • Q2: Added this habit.
      • Q3: Definitely wasn’t disciplined about bedtime. I often worked right up until it was time to sleep. I’m not sure I can say that doing so significantly changed my work outcomes. In fact, doing so probably just contributed to my feeling more tired through the week–I was probably even less efficient / productive as a result.
  • Deepen my mindfulness practice
    • Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
      • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
        • Q1: Near 100% compliance
        • Q2: Near 0% compliance. I missed a few days early in the quarter, and then kind of abandoned the habit :/.
        • Q3: Near 0% compliance. I go through small spurts where I do this, but usually forget. Lately I’ve been feeling like I really need more practice being present and mindful–there have been times where I’ve felt deeply, deeply distracted or stressed out.
  • Write more
    • OKR: Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
      • Q1: I still owe the world a blog post about Mexico City, which I’m still drafting.
      • Q2: I still haven’t taken the time to finish up my Mexico City post :/. Perhaps I’ll try to spend some time on that this weekend if I finish my review quickly.
      • Q3: No movement on this :(.
    • OKR: Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
    • Habit: Write at least 100 words every weekend
      • Q1: I’ve done this most weekends, though again the last month of Q1 I started to fall off the cart.
      • Q2: I haven’t been intentional about doing this lately. Some of this was that I was working weekends for about a month.
      • Q3: I’ve also been working weekends this quarter. No movement here.
  • Improve my relationship with my immediate family
    • OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
    • Habit: Call each family member weekly
      • Q1: Good adherence.
      • Q2: Haven’t done this nearly as much lately… also, currently taking some time away from my father.
      • Q3: Haven’t done this a whole lot this quarter. There was a period where my sister had COVID-19 and I was calling regularly, but I’ve generally been too busy on the weekends to maintain this.
    • Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly
      • Q1: My therapy sessions have been kind of all over the place. I’ve maybe talked about my family in 2 or 3 out of nearly 10 to 12 sessions. I guess I have lots of other things to talk about :P.
      • Q2: I’ve had a lot more time with my therapist to discuss my family relationships now, and I feel like I’m really starting to examine the deeper issues. There hasn’t been a tangible change in my family relationships yet, but I’m excited to be doing the hard work.
      • Q3: No big changes… therapy sessions haven’t been super focused on this this quarter. I’ve been distant from my father for a little while now. I do think I’ve learned things about how to deal with my parents, but I haven’t had much time / opportunity to practice them lately.
  • Become more politically active
    • Habit: Spend 4-8 hours each week on political activities
      • Q2: Added this habit.
      • Q3: I did something closer to ~4, maybe a little less each week for Vote Forward. This was as much as I could manage.

Q4 Planning

How do I plan to address all of this in Q4? If I were to choose two words to serve as the theme for the rest of 2020, they would be purpose and balance. In fact, I would not be surprised if these two words ultimately become the theme of 2021, since that’s just around the corner now.

Purpose

Now that I’ve been coaching students for a few months through The Spike Lab (TSL), I’m starting to zero-in on a new theory for why I’ve had such a hard time staying focused in my own entrepreneurial pursuits.

Through TSL, much of the early work I do with my students centers around helping them understand their identities, and begin to communicate purpose. We do this because we ultimately want students’ projects to be an expression of their identity, and in service of a purpose that affects other people. Why? Because working on projects that are closely aligned with these aspects tends to be deeply meaningful, and contributes to self-motivation, excitement, and perseverance despite the challenges (and, yes, often early failures) we expect students to experience as their projects progress.

Up until now, I’ve had a loose sense of purpose, but I don’t think I’ve ever really taken the time to communicate it very clearly, or to explore other possible avenues of purpose that energize me. I think that this lack of clarity, and potentially an overly self-centric (rather than others-centric) sense of purpose could be the reason why I’ve often had so much trouble getting myself to focus in and stay self-accountable in my own entrepreneurial pursuits.

As I’ve been running my students through various exercises, it’s occurred that I, too, might benefit from going through a version of the program I’m creating for them. To that end, I’m going to make it a priority in Q4 to explore these questions, and brainstorm projects and ideas that connect to my identity and purpose in meaningful ways. I’d like to come into 2021 with a number of new interesting ideas that I’m excited to explore!

Balance

From reflection on this quarter, I think the need for balance is obvious. I likely need to either: 1) come to terms with the sacrifices I’m making, grit my teeth, and just hold out until November 3 (i.e. Election Day, when I can finally, in good conscience, drop my volunteering gig and fully reclaim my weekend) or 2) potentially drop some commitments and make some tangible changes to my schedule, habits, and mindset to promote a more holistic sense of wellbeing.

Since option 1 doesn’t really require any change (just suffering haha), I’ll instead examine option 2. If I’m thinking about what (if anything) to drop, I think it’s important that I list things out in order of priority:

  1. Maintaining existing learning through Anki
    1. Non-negotiable. There’s just too much sunk cost here to give this up. Though I gripe about it sometimes, and even joke that I’m a “slave to Anki”, it has definitely accelerated my learning and improved my retention.
    2. Time commitment: ~1 hour/day
  2. Maintaining health and fitness through exercise
    1. Non-negotiable. Nothing else really matters if I’m not healthy or fit enough to enjoy my life and hobbies.
    2. Time commitment: at least ~3-4 hours/week (~3 1-hour sessions)
  3. Maintaining enough space in my life to build new friendships, and honor and strengthen existing ones.
    1. Non-negotiable (?). This is something that probably should be non-negotiable, since failing to honor this tends to have an outsized negative impact on my wellbeing. However, this is often the first thing that falls off when I get busy, and usually gets prioritized far below work, sometimes for extended periods of time. Being too busy to see people for a couple weeks at a time? Probably acceptable. Being too busy to see people for most of a quarter? Not so much.
    2. Time commitment: ~2-3 hours/week
  4. Coaching for The Spike Lab
    1. This work connects very tightly to my sense of purpose, is extremely fulfilling, and is giving me an awesome practice ground to learn more about what it means to discover purpose and express authenticity. It’s also giving me an awesome new avenue for honing my entrepreneurial skills (i.e. by providing advice to students on how to unblock / validate their ideas)
    2. Time commitment: 4-5 hours/week with a caseload of 2 students, though I know TSL wants me to take on closer to 3 or 4 in an ideal world. I have some control over this, however.
  5. Ongoing consulting work for Karat
    1. Karat is dealing with some very interesting engineering problems around architecture and team scaling. I’m finding I’m really enjoying finding solutions to these kinds of problems, and am learning a lot in the process!
    2. Time commitment: ~40 hours/week.
  6. Learning Chinese
    1. This tends to be an important goal for me, and is especially important because I live in a country where the native language is not English.
    2. Time commitment: at least ~30 minutes/day
  7. Volunteering ahead of the 2020 election
    1. Time commitment: ~4 hours/week
  8. Other 2020 personal goals

I think things are really coming down to a trade-off between volunteering and having just a little more time/space to work on my other goals and priorities. While I continue to volunteer, I think I can reasonably expect that I won’t have time for the following goals:

  • Improve my software engineering skills:
    • Habit: Every weekend, spend 2-3 hours working on something that hones my software engineering skills
  • Improve my relationship with my immediate family
    • Habit: Call each family member weekly

Continuing to consult for Karat also comes with some trade-offs:

  • Launch a successful project
    • OKR: Release a new version of Tribe with updates for COVID-19
  • Grow my consulting business
    • OKR: Join TopTal
    • OKR: Complete a professional project related to machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science
    • Habit: Do a practice problem on HackerRank daily

Though it should be noted that likely the single best thing I can do to grow my consulting business at any point is to knock the ball out of the park for any existing clients. Many of the other things I had wanted to do here are only relevant when I don’t already have an existing client.

Both my volunteering work and my consulting work are also incurring a trade-off against having more time and space to be social. Volunteering work has an outsized impact here, since it takes an obvious chunk out of my weekend that would otherwise be spent on relaxation, friends, or personal goals. Nevertheless, it is worth considering that I also haven’t entirely figured out how best to balance my needs during the week with a demanding job, either (this was true at Palantir as well).

In planning for Q4, both my volunteering work and my consulting work present major decision points. Bringing either to a close would free up time for important goals or personal projects respectively.

Volunteering

For the last quarter, I’ve been contributing time to Vote Forward as a volunteer senior software engineer. I’ve appreciated the opportunity to apply my professional skills to an issue that’s important to me. It’s also been interesting to work with Vote Forward’s codebase–as an organization that’s built up its code through the patchwork contribution of many volunteers and a few core full-time staff, their codebase faces some unique and interesting challenges.

However, as I’ve increasingly been finding, I don’t have as much energy and bandwidth to contribute here as I had hoped. Vote Forward’s big election-related event is their Big Send on October 17, at which time all handwritten letters that volunteers have been writing will be sent out to voters around the country. Since I’ve only ever really been able to contribute to Vote Forward on Sundays, I think that this leaves me with one more Sunday with which I can contribute to their cause before this major date. After that, if I’d like to continue volunteering to support 2020 election outcomes, I’ll need to do so through a different avenue.

I’ve decided that starting the weekend of October 17 I’ll switch from volunteering for Vote Forward to making calls for campaigns in Super States through Swing Left. There are a couple of factors involved in this decision:

  1. I’ve already sacrificed to put time into finding ways to help with this election cycle. Even if I haven’t been able to put in as much time as I initially thought I could, and even if I can’t put that much more time into this going forward, I still think I should see the election through in some capacity.
  2. Relatively speaking, writing software requires larger and less predictable chunks of time to make meaningful contributions than I imagine making calls (or other similar forms of volunteer) will.
  3. I am somewhat curious to just experience what it’s like to make calls for an election.

I think I’ll leave the actual amount of time I contribute after October 17 flexible, however. It is my hope that I can start reclaiming some time and energy to begin recovering some semblance of balance in other areas.

Consulting

Last quarter I opened myself up to more consulting work, with the idea that I’d potentially build a larger safety net to weather the pandemic and any economic fallout it may bring. At the same time, I set myself a financial limit on the amount of money I’d allow myself to earn in service of that goal. I also told myself that I’d find time to finish a version of Tribe, my previous personal project.

Right now, I’m set to exceed my stated limit significantly in the coming quarter, so long as the status of my current contract doesn’t change. I’ve decided to let that happen for a few reasons:

  1. I’ve decided to put Tribe down indefinitely.
    1. Based on the way the pandemic has been going, I don’t foresee travel fully re-opening anytime soon, and the effort required to adapt Tribe to today’s world would be colossal, given that the pandemic essentially wiped out Tribe’s original reason for existing. (Most digital nomads are hunkered down somewhere, and aren’t considering large or frequent moves.)
    2. I think I’ve identified that my desire to finish Tribe was really more me falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy than me making a sound business decision.
    3. If I ever do pick Tribe up again, I’d like to make sure I have a good handle on how it relates to my purpose! I have some ideas here, but I think I need to clarify my purpose statements first.
  2. Based on where Karat’s technology and technology team are right now, I think it makes sense for me to stay for a little while longer. At the very least, I’d like to get them to a relatively stable place where they can thrive without my help, or potentially help them hire someone to replace me.
    1. In the meantime, there are lots of opportunities to learn and grow in my role with Karat!
  3. My previous employer, Palantir, just went public. I still have some stock options that I’m deciding what to do with… if I choose to exercise, I may require some additional liquidity to do so.
  4. If I do end up with extra income this year, I can still reduce my taxable income by making some large and soon-necessary business purchases like upgrading my technology.

This is subject to change, but my plan for now is to continue to work with Karat through the end of the year, provided they continue to need me that long. At the same time, I’m hoping to spend time thinking more about purpose and brainstorming ideas. The goal will be to be ready to return to my own work by the beginning of 2021, though exactly when I transition from consulting to my own work will depend a lot on the situation on the ground.

Since I struggle with balance, it’s worth my reflecting a little bit here on how I’m going to be more intentional about this in conjunction with my continued consulting work. My approach this quarter is going to focus on a few ideas:

  1. Stronger boundaries around when I start and stop working on a given day.
    1. This is intended to ensure that I don’t miss my bedtime in order to push to complete something that isn’t urgent. Missing my bedtime to get more work done in a day, tends to just leave less time or energy available to work the next day. It’s usually a net negative, even if it feels like outcomes are produced more quickly.
    2. I’ve elaborated more on this in the Risk Mitigations section, below.
  2. Feeling more comfortable stopping after a certain number of hours, rather than pushing to maximize hours each day.
    1. This is the opposite of a problem I once had in keeping myself focused to do personal work, where I needed to impose a lower limit on how much work I needed to do to feel OK about what I accomplished in a day.
    2. Now, I need to impose an upper limit on how much work I need to do to feel OK about putting things down until tomorrow.
    3. I think something in the realm of 8-10 hours of logged time each day feels OK to me. I probably shouldn’t be logging 11-12 hour days without good reason to–working this much is probably incurring latent costs to future productivity, and overall sense of balance and well-being.
  3. Giving myself the freedom to spend a few hours a week on social visits during the week without feeling guilty.
    1. E.g. Getting coffee or lunch with a friend, or catching up with someone over video chat. Normally doing these things makes me feel “behind” because I sacrificed work time to do it. In the interest of balance, I think I should flip this, and consider time not spent doing these things in a given week as bonus work time rather than sacrificed work time.

Changes to 2020 Goals

Here’s how my goals are affected by changing conditions in Q4:

  • Launch a successful project / Grow my consulting business
    • Given that I plan to continue work for Karat through Q4, I’m reasonably going to expect that I won’t have time or need to work on my own projects or to do any kind of outside professional development geared towards improving consulting dealflow. (e.g. TopTal and HackerRank)
  • Become more politically active
    • Vote Forward’s Big Send happens on October 17.
    • The election will be over by November 3rd.
    • I plan to scale down my political activity past these dates to return to focusing on other things.
  • Purpose-driven focus
    • To give myself time and space to think about purpose and identity, I will be pairing down or dropping goals that don’t support this, and adding a few goals / OKRs to track this.
  • Exercise
    • I’ve sustained a few minor injuries in the gym. I think it’s time that I considered getting some real coaching for weight training.

Here’s how I’m adjusting my goals to compensate (items in green are being added, items in red are being removed):

  • Launch a successful project
    • OKR: Complete The Spike Lab purpose and identity exercises for myself
    • OKR: Brainstorm at least 100 project ideas related to my purpose, identities, and interests
    • OKR: Identify 2-3 projects to explore and prototype starting in 2021
    • OKR: Earn no more profit from coaching and consulting than the annual Foreign Earned Income Tax Exclusion limit ($107,600).
    • OKR: Release a new version of Tribe with updates for COVID-19
    • Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
  • Grow my consulting business
    • OKR: Obtain a glowing review / referral from Karat, my current client
    • OKR: Join TopTal
    • OKR: Complete a professional project related to machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science
    • Habit: Do a practice problem on HackerRank daily
  • Improve my software engineering skills
    • OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
    • OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
    • OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
    • OKR: Master dynamic programming (DP)
    • Habit: Every weekend, spend 2-3 hours working on something that hones my software engineering skills
  • Language learning
    • Learn Japanese
      • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
      • Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
      • Habit: Add at least 5 new Japanese vocabulary Anki cards a day
      • Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
    • Learn Chinese
      • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
      • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
      • OKR: Reach 3000 words in Chinese
      • Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
      • Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
    • Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
  • Improve my health
    • Get back into shape
      • Get lean
        • Reach 10% body fat
          • Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
        • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
      • OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
      • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
      • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
  • Learn to talk to attractive women
    • OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
  • Read more
    • OKR: Read 52 books
    • Learn to speed read
      • OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
      • Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
      • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
    • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
    • Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
    • Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.
  • Deepen my mindfulness practice
    • Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
      • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
  • Write more
    • OKR: Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
    • OKR: Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
    • Habit: Write at least 100 words every weekend
  • Improve my relationship with my immediate family
    • OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
    • Habit: Call each family member weekly
    • Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly
  • Become more politically active
    • Habit: Spend 4-8 hours each week on political activities
    • Habit: Spend 1-4 hours each week on political activities until November 3rd

Risk Mitigations

Of my remaining habits and OKRs, the following have been identified as at risk in this quarter’s quantitative review:

  • Improve my software engineering skills
    • OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
    • OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
    • OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
  • Deepen my mindfulness practice
    • Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
      • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
  • Improve my relationship with my immediate family
    • Habit: Call each family member weekly
  • Read more
    • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
    • Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
    • Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.

I’ve intentionally tried to prune many of my goals to make more space for these things, and to clear some space for purpose work:

  • I’m scaling down my commitment to political activity between now and November 3
  • I’m putting writing down entirely for the rest of the year. (With the understanding that the purpose work will likely involve a lot of writing, however.)
  • I’m going to stop expecting that I’ll have 2-3 hours each weekend to work on a growth-related engineering project.
  • I’m taking myself off the hook for adding even more Japanese cards each day, since my current method seems to mostly be getting me where I want (i.e. an increasingly large vocabulary in Japanese so that I can hopefully start to have a contextual net for understanding basic conversations)

As I begin to reclaim my weekends, I’m hoping that time to call my family and time to read software-related books also begins to return.

Otherwise, I think getting back on track for meditation and reading physical books is going to require that I get much more disciplined about building a consistent morning and evening routine.

So far this year, I’ve kept my routine pretty flexible, and especially since I’ve stayed up late working, I’ve also tended to start waking up later and later. Together, these two trends mean that I don’t consistently end up having time in the morning to do self-care habits like meditation, and I also don’t end up consistently having time in the evening for reading.

This probably isn’t the first time I’ve said it, but I think I need to get to a point where a set of habits in the morning and a set of habits in the evening become near-automatic. I also need to be disciplined about not letting work (or play, but more often work) bleed into bedtime, since allowing this to happen is almost always a trap that just leaves me feeling more tired and less productive the next day, even if it does lead to my wrapping something up “sooner”.

Here’s a concrete sample of what my ideal morning routine looks like, assuming that I need to start work around 7:30am:

  1. Wake up at 6:30am semi-naturally after 7.5 – 8 hours of sleep
  2. [10 min] Meditate for 10 minutes
  3. [15 min] Use the bathroom, brush my teeth, wash my face
  4. [5 min] Weigh myself and take my morning vitamins
    1. [10 min] Friday only: take body circumference measurements
  5. [5 min] Make my bed, get dressed
  6. [5 min] Grab tea and water before sitting down at my desk
  7. [10 min] Time-boxed journaling with a particular focus on:
    1. Anything I remember about my dreams
    2. Gratitude
    3. Any particularly complicated thoughts or emotions that need deeper exploration
  8. Start clearing inboxes and catching up on any potentially urgent messages or requests

To match that, my minimal evening routine should generally look something like this, assuming I need to be in bed by 10:30pm and asleep by 11:00pm:

  1. [10 min] By 10pm at the latest, review the day and plan for tomorrow
  2. Shut down my laptop
  3. [5 min] Brush my teeth and wash my face, put on pajamas
  4. Get in bed
  5. [10 min] Read in bed

Here’s an outline of what a typical work day might look like for me this quarter:

  1. 6:30am: Wake up
  2. 6:30am – 7:30am: Complete morning routine
  3. 7:30am – 11:00am: Morning work session
  4. 11:00am – 11:30am: Daily Anki review session (1 of 3)
  5. 11:30am – 12:00pm: Lunch
  6. 12:00pm – 12:30pm: Daily Anki review session (2 of 3)
  7. 12:30pm – 4:30pm: Afternoon work session
  8. MWF:
    1. 4:30pm – 6:30pm: Exercise + Shower (Potentially a 5pm CrossFit class)
  9. TTh:
    1. 4:30pm – 6:15pm: Extended Afternoon work session OR use this time for lunch / coffee with a friend or to catch-up with someone via video chat.
    2. 6:15pm – 6:30pm: Shower
  10. 6:30pm – 7:00pm: Daily Anki review session (3 of 3)
  11. 7:00pm – 7:45pm: Dinner
  12. 7:45pm – 9:00pm: Evening work session
  13. 9:00pm – 10:00pm: Free time, or extended evening work session as needed
    1. I suspect I will sometimes swap this up into the afternoon, to play a round or two of games with a friend during evening PST before he goes to bed.
  14. 10:00pm – 10:30pm: Complete evening routine
  15. 10:30pm: Get in bed
  16. 11:00pm: Sleep

Outside of the morning and evening routines, this is more meant to be a guideline than a strict schedule, so I at least have a sense of how my day should generally fit together.

This gives me a total of ~8.5 hours of work on days with exercise, and ~10.25 hours of work on days without exercise for an average daily load of 9.2 hours, which feels more than reasonable, and should leave me with enough time during a typical week to satisfy my consulting obligations and my coaching obligations. When work is busier, I can use the ~hour of free time each day to get a little more productive time for an average daily load of 10.2 hours, but for sanity’s sake, and so that this entire schedule has some buffer most days, I should aim to avoid that in the general case.

Adjusted Method: Exercise and Diet

Last quarter I stuck to the Slow-Carb Diet and was doing StrongLifts 5×5 ~3 times/week. I also started regular supplementation with vitamins (multi-vitamin, fish oil, magnesium, vitamin C) and creatine.

So far, SCD is still generally working well for me, and I think I’ll plan to keep it around for at least the next quarter. I’m super used to this, and I think it provides me a generally good, and generally healthy balance that doesn’t leave me feeling deprived.

I did, however, not make a lot of gains wrt my weight and body fat this quarter. I suspect the real difference here is going from burning a huge amount of calories in cardio virtually every day while training for a half marathon to being relatively sedentary, and just lifting heavy 3 days a week.

I’m also concerned that I’m getting injured in the gym a lot more lately. I haven’t had any major injuries, but this quarter, I had a brief issue with my knee, and twice strained one of my shoulders. I’m 95% sure that the issue here has been that I’ve been too lazy to properly stretch and warm-up before lifting heavier, but I think it would be good to have some form of coaching to help me ensure I’m lifting with proper form.

To solve both problems, I’m thinking I may finally spring for CrossFit this quarter, and give that a try for a few months. In the past I’ve been a little stingy about jumping for this, since it is a little on the expensive side–$300+ for coaching before I can join group classes at a rate of ~$200/mo.

Since I’m generally spending $60/mo or less on the gym, this is a pretty big price hike… but my previous experience with CrossFit in Colombia was very positive, and I do feel like CrossFit offers a good mix of weightlifting, HIIT, and endurance cardio, which is exactly what I’m looking for. The workouts are also super time efficient–done in an hour and I never feel anything other than super accomplished for finishing the workout.

Summarized Q4 Goals

  • Launch a successful project
    • OKR: Complete The Spike Lab purpose and identity exercises for myself
    • OKR: Brainstorm at least 100 project ideas related to my purpose, identities, and interests
    • OKR: Identify 2-3 projects to explore and prototype starting in 2021
    • Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
  • Grow my consulting business
    • OKR: Obtain a glowing review / referral from Karat
  • Improve my software engineering skills
    • OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
    • OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
    • OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
  • Language learning
    • Learn Japanese
      • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
      • Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
      • Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
    • Learn Chinese
      • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
      • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
      • OKR: Reach 3000 words in Chinese
      • Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
      • Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
    • Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
  • Improve my health
    • Get back into shape
      • Get lean
        • Reach 10% body fat
          • Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
        • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
      • OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
      • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
      • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
  • Learn to talk to attractive women
    • OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
  • Read more
    • OKR: Read 52 books
    • Learn to speed read
      • OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
      • Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
      • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
    • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
    • Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
    • Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.
  • Deepen my mindfulness practice
    • Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
      • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
  • Improve my relationship with my immediate family
    • OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
    • Habit: Call each family member weekly
    • Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly
  • Become more politically active
    • Habit: Spend 1-4 hours each week on political activities until November 3rd

Summarized Q4 Habits and OKRs

Habits:

  • Daily
    • Work on projects 6 hours a day
    • Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
    • Anki
      • Complete Anki reviews
      • Add 30 new Chinese Anki cards
      • Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences
    • Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
    • Make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo Japanese lesson
    • Read 2 pages a day
    • After I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow
    • Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages
    • For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed training software
    • Measure body composition
  • Weekly
    • Exercise at least 3 days a week
    • Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week on Friday
    • Call each family member
    • Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist
    • Spend 1-4 hours on political activities

OKRs:

  • Launch a successful project
    • Complete The Spike Lab purpose and identity exercises
    • Brainstorm at least 100 project ideas related to my purpose, identities, and interests
    • Identify 2-3 projects to explore and prototype starting in 2021
  • Grow my consulting business
    • Obtain a glowing review / referral from Karat
  • Improve my software engineering skills
    • Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
    • Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
    • Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
  • Learn Chinese
    • Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
    • Reach 3000 words in Chinese
    • Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
  • Learn Japanese
    • Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese
  • Get back into shape
    • Reach 10% body fat
    • Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
    • Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
  • Learn to talk to attractive women
    • Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
  • Read more
    • Read 52 books
    • Eliminate subvocalization while reading
  • Improve my relationship with my immediate family
    • Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues

Scuba diving in Kenting

This is a routine review of my progress toward my 2020 New Year’s Resolutions. I engage in this review process quarterly. You can find Q1’s review here.

Summary

For Q2, I give myself a C/C+:

  • Not a huge amount of progress on my own projects
  • Completed consulting projects for AVID Center
  • Served as a volunteer section leader for Stanford’s Code in Place
  • Received an offer for a part-time innovation / entrepreneurship coaching position with The Spike Lab
  • Completed a half marathon, despite the heat and humidity of Taiwan’s summer
  • Lost ~4.6% body fat, and about ~20 pounds since the start of the year
  • Started dating someone in Taiwan
  • Earned my PADI Advanced Open Water and PADI Enriched Air scuba diving certifications

Other lessons and observations:

  • Now that I’ve been in Taiwan for 6 months, this is actually the longest I’ve spent in one place since college. So far I’m enjoying the ability to focus that this stability has been providing.
  • It’s possible that dating someone affects my goals less when there’s no hard time limit on how long I’ll be in a particular place. There’s less of a feeling of “we only have so much time to spend together, so we’d better do everything we can as quickly as we can.”

In Q3:

  • Travel plan is still to stay in Taiwan through the pandemic. I’m currently applying for longer-term visas so that I don’t get kicked out in September.
  • I’ll be taking on a few students for The Spike Lab
  • I’m making it a priority to get involved in politics in advance of the 2020 US Presidential Election
    • I have applied to be a Volunteer Senior Software Developer for VoteForward, and if selected plan to spend ~8 hours a week on this until November
    • If I don’t get the VoteForward position, I plan to spend ~4-8 hours a week making phone calls and sending text messages for key political campaigns
  • When available, I am going to prioritize taking on new client work over working on my own work this quarter so that I have more than enough liquidity to weather the COVID-19 economic recession
  • When time allows, I will be working on Tribe, and am aiming to get a new version released with trip recommendations, third-party travel information, and some kind of update to address COVID-19
  • I’m going to slowly prepare to qualify for TopTal to improve lead generation for my consulting business
  • I’m planning to set aside time every weekend to improve my software engineering skills, with a particular focus on architectural patterns, algorithms, and machine learning / AI

Q2 Reflection

Qualitatively, I feel pretty good about how 2020 Q2 went. Did I hit everything I had hoped to? No, not quite. For example, I barely touched the ukulele at all this quarter, despite having asked myself to practice for at least 10 minutes a day, and I lost the habit of meditating every day this quarter. I also can’t say that I made a huge amount of progress on my own projects.

I did have other professional breakthroughs this quarter, however. In particular, I completed the interview process and received an offer for a coaching position with The Spike Lab, a service which provides innovation coaching to high school students, helping them to explore their strengths and passions, ultimately culminating in a self-directed project that they can use as a focal point for college applications (and, hopefully, life direction in general). Since helping people self-actualize is a major drive for me, I’m very excited about the culture and mission alignment. This position will be part-time, and I’m hoping to take on a few students starting in August.

I also took on a couple of new clients this quarter. Specifically, I worked with AVID Center, a non-profit focused on closing the privilege and achievement gap in education, to produce AVID Open Access and AVID Discover. I also briefly served as a security consultant for My Dental Key, a startup out of Harvard Dental School aimed at disrupting online dental education, and I retained my position with I’m With Them, a non-profit focused on reducing work-related sexual misconduct.

My current personal project, Tribe, was on hold for much of this quarter. Since the product focuses on helping Digital Nomads figure out where to go next, and since it isn’t clear when international travel will really pick up again, it’s been hard to predict if and when testing new product features will be possible. Financially, this initially made me a little worried–I had been following standard financial advice to keep about ~6 months liquid, with the rest of my assets in longer-term investments like ETFs and Mutual Funds. With the advent of COVID-19, and the downturn of the stock market, I watched ~15% of my wealth evaporate in a matter of weeks, all while my current personal project looked unlikely to be able to produce revenue for a year, possibly longer. The desire not to realize stock market losses is what ultimately drove me to take on consulting work this quarter.

Though the future of Tribe remains uncertain, I started to pick things back up at the end of Q2. Ultimately, I think COVID-19 presents an opportunity: now that employees across several industries have been 100% remote for some time (with some larger tech players like Twitter and Square declaring that they are now permanently completely remote organizations), I expect that the trends of remote working and, in turn, nomadism will continue to rise in the eventual wake of COVID-19. Additionally, in the same way that COVID-19 seemed to spread at alarming and unexpected rates, I think that travel will actually thaw a lot more quickly than we expect. Many economies and businesses rely on travel and tourism, which means that, realistically, it is a priority for some governments and corporations to find safe and creative interim solutions that allow travel to re-open in some capacity.

Things probably won’t look the same for a while, and I expect COVID-19 will continue to affect travel for quite some time (likely the next 1-2 years at least), but this added complexity also creates new gaps in information resources. For example, there aren’t a whole lot of reliable sources that can help you understand based on 1) your recent travel history and 2) your passports where you can evenly potentially travel to, and with what kinds of limitations and restrictions. I’m hoping to finish up a version of Tribe this year that can start to address some of these needs.

On the personal side, it’s been interesting being in Taiwan this long. I was thinking about it recently, and I realized that this is actually the longest I’ve stayed in one place anywhere since college. Even when I worked at Palantir, I traveled so often that the longest uninterrupted period I had at home was probably about 6 months. So far, I’ve been enjoying the longer time horizon quite a bit. I like that I don’t have to worry about where I’ll go next, and it’s nice not to have to spend energy thinking about how I’m going to establish myself in a new place (i.e. where am I going to live, how am I going to make friends, etc.). I quite like how I’m able to think longer-term about my goals, and really have time to just focus on getting things done. I do miss traveling, though, and I’m starting to worry my Spanish will languish the way my French did… TBD as to whether or not this means I’m done traveling for good, but for now I’m hunkering down with the expectation of staying in Taiwan until at least the end of the year, if not longer. Most of the Taiwanese visas I’ve recently applied for are valid for between one and three years.

The stability of staying in Taiwan this quarter has contributed to successfully completing a half marathon training program, staying on track to hit my reading goal of 52 books this year, and doing a good job of sticking to my Anki flashcards habit, which powers my language studies (and, increasingly, my review of concepts from math and ML, and long-term maintenance of skills like scuba diving). I also made good progress toward my body fat goals, dropping as low as 11.9% on my scale, down 4.6% from my starting point of 16.5% in January. (Note: my actual body fat as reported by an InBody machine is closer to ~14.8% right now–I mostly use my own scale to help me measure the trend so I know whether or not my diet and exercise plan is working.) I now weigh the least I’ve weighed since high school at around 145 pounds!

Further down the personal side, I started dating someone this quarter. Ordinarily and historically, I’d have expected a new relationship to have an outsized negative effect on my goals. However, that hasn’t been the case with this relationship, which has been a pleasant surprise. I’m pretty happy with how much time, freedom, and independence I still have to pursue my own things, and how supportive she’s been. Given that COVID-19 has essentially forced me to settle in Taipei for the foreseeable future, this is the first time in a long while that I’ve had a relationship with no time constraints. It’s hard to say how much of my success in balancing the relationship with my personal goals is a function of her, a function of not feeling like we have to frantically every moment together because time is short, or both. Recently we took a trip together down to Kenting, in Southern Taiwan, where she received her PADI Open Water and I was able to finish my PADI Advanced Open Water and PADI Enriched Air scuba diving certifications, which, though it wasn’t something I had expected to do this year, is something I’m proud of :).

Where my goal around improving my family relationships is concerned, I feel I’m making progress, but in terms of actual outcomes I’ve potentially stepped backward rather than forward. My father and I had a bit of a falling out this quarter, and I’ve decided to take some time away from that relationship to regroup, heal, and strategize around how to try reconnecting with him again. My conversations with my therapist are finally focusing on my family relationships, and even though things haven’t improved yet I feel satisfied that I’m doing the hard introspection work on my end.

All-in-all, I feel like I accomplished a lot this quarter, even though I haven’t made much progress on my own projects.

Q2 Quantitative Review

Quantitatively, based on the data below, I’d give myself a C/C+ this quarter.

  • Language learning
    • Learn Japanese
      • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
        • Q1: I haven’t started a concerted effort to take words off this list yet. So far, I’m mostly farming vocabulary from Duolingo, which I think is preferable.
        • Q2: I still haven’t purposefully started this.
      • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Japanese program
        • Q2: I’ve been completing 1 lesson a day. I have about 90 “skills” left to complete on Duolingo. If we assume each skill has an average of 5 lessons… I’d need to complete 2.5 lessons a day for the rest of the year to finish this. I’m pretty far off track on this one.
    • Learn Chinese
      • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
      • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
        • Q2: I haven’t been doing this at all this quarter.
        • Q2: There are about 17 “skills” left to complete on Duolingo. For Chinese, the average number of lessons per skill is ~3. This means that I should be able to easily finish this at a rate of 1 lesson per day for ~51 days.
      • Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
        • Q2: Doing OK on this. I won’t add new cards on days/weeks where I’m feeling behind, or where I have extra reviews to do, and there were a fair number of those this quarter.
      • Q2: My girlfriend essentially only speaks to me in Chinese, which has been helping a lot :).
      • Q2: I did a self-diagnostic based on vocabulary lists published by Taiwan for the TOCFL, and I’m at about ~2000 words now, where ~8000 are required for “fluency.” (Note: A “word” is a combination of Chinese characters. One can know vastly more “words” in Chinese than one knows characters, since different combinations of the same characters can form different “words.”)
    • Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
      • Q2: I had a week or two where I was behind due to client work, but I’ve caught back up, and I’ve gotten into a pretty good cadence for this. I’m finding doing ~100 cards in the morning when I wake up, then ~50 before lunch and ~50 after, then ~50 before dinner and ~50 after, puts me in a pretty good place where I never reach the end of my day panicked that I haven’t started studying (which usually leads to losing sleep, and is kind of a vicious cycle that leads to Anki burnout).
  • Improve my health
    • Get back into shape
      • Get lean
        • Reach 10% body fat
          • Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
            • Q1: I’ve barely missed a day of doing this.
            • Q2: Still going strong here.
          • Habit: Track the foods I eat every day so I can correlate diet to fat loss
            • Q1: I started out strong doing this, but then fell off the cart toward the end of the quarter.
            • Q2: I didn’t do this at all this quarter, in large part because I’ve been following the Slow-Carb Diet, one of the main advantages of which is that I don’t have to track calories or macros.
      • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
        • Q2: I did pitifully on this, with only 2 measurements recorded this quarter. Normally I do this over the weekend, but I think I got thrown off track by working a few weekends in a row.
      • OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
        • Q1: I chose this program and stuck to it pretty closely.
        • Q2: I chose a half marathon program and stuck with it closely, with the exception of one week where I went on a long vacation. I’ll be completing my half marathon “race” the weekend of this review :).
      • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
        • Q1: I would give myself a 60% compliance rate with my diet haha…
        • Q2: I would give myself a 70-75% compliance rate with my diet, and things seem to be working well!
      • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
        • Q1: I’m easily doing closer to 5-6 days a week.
        • Q2: I’m still doing closer to 5-6 days a week and crushing this.
  • Learn to talk to attractive women
    • OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
      • Q1: I’ve caught myself kind of tempted to download these once or twice, but on the whole I’m finding I’m quite happy without them.
      • Q2: I’m in a relationship right now, so this isn’t really applicable :P…
  • Launch a successful project
    • OKR: Launch at least 2 projects of my own this year.
      • Q1: Presently, potentially a little off-track to hit this.
      • Q2: This goal is currently at risk, and given other commitments I’m expecting to make, along with an increased priority given to client work due to COVID-19 economic recession, I’m not sure if I’m in a position to bring this one back on track.
    • OKR: Take on no more than 3 months of consulting work this year.
      • Q1: It helps that I haven’t had any leads this year yet.
      • Q2: I spent probably ~2 months of this quarter working on consulting work, though I suspect that I will take on more than 3 months of consulting work this year.
    • Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
      • Q1: I’d give myself 50-60% compliance. I’ve had a number of days where I felt like I didn’t quite hit the 6 hour goal, and then never made-up the time. Hoping my new implementation plan will help me to stay focused and motivated.
      • Q2: I crushed this most of the time. Doing client work this quarter has helped me to realize that I can actually do close to 9 hours a day of work and still get all of my other personal goals done so long as I’m really focused about it. I still struggle a little to apply this same work ethic to my own work, but when client work is involved it’s never an issue.
  • Read more
    • OKR: Read 52 books
      • Q1: 17/13 books
      • Q2: 30/26 books
        • Highlights
          • Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
            • I especially appreciated the parts where he challenges traditional economic theory by comparing actual human behavior to model “econ” behavior and the parts where he discusses using statistics to better understand the happiness and success of societies.
          • Atomic Habits by James Clear
          • Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
          • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
    • Learn to speed read
      • OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
      • Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
        • Q1: I had very high compliance with this for 2 months. Then dropped off.
        • Q2: I spent no time on this this quarter.
      • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
    • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
      • Q1: I was good about this for about a month, then started to totally blow it off.
      • Q2: Was also pretty bad about this this quarter, though I have recently picked up the habit of reading a few pages before bed again.
  • Deepen my mindfulness practice
    • Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
      • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
        • Q1: Near 100% compliance
        • Q2: Near 0% compliance. I missed a few days early in the quarter, and then kind of abandoned the habit :/.
  • Write more
    • OKR: Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
      • Q1: I still owe the world a blog post about Mexico City, which I’m still drafting.
      • Q2: I still haven’t taken the time to finish up my Mexico City post :/. Perhaps I’ll try to spend some time on that this weekend if I finish my review quickly.
    • OKR: Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
    • Habit: Write at least 100 words every weekend
      • Q1: I’ve done this most weekends, though again the last month of Q1 I started to fall off the cart.
      • Q2: I haven’t been intentional about doing this lately. Some of this was that I was working weekends for about a month.
  • Improve my relationship with my immediate family
    • OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
    • Habit: Call each family member weekly
      • Q1: Good adherence.
      • Q2: Haven’t done this nearly as much lately… also, currently taking some time away from my father.
    • Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly
      • Q1: My therapy sessions have been kind of all over the place. I’ve maybe talked about my family in 2 or 3 out of nearly 10 to 12 sessions. I guess I have lots of other things to talk about :P.
      • Q2: I’ve had a lot more time with my therapist to discuss my family relationships now, and I feel like I’m really starting to examine the deeper issues. There hasn’t been a tangible change in my family relationships yet, but I’m excited to be doing the hard work.
  • Learn to play the ukulele
    • Habit: Practice at least 10 minutes a day for at least 3 months
      • Added Q2
      • Q2: Basically 0% compliance.

Q3 Planning

Risk Mitigations

As identified above, the following OKRs and habits are at risk:

  • Launch a successful project
    • OKR: Launch at least 2 projects of my own this year.
  • Language learning
    • Learn Japanese
      • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese
      • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Japanese program
  • Improve my health
    • Get back into shape
      • Get lean
        • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
  • Read more
    • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
  • Deepen my mindfulness practice
    • Meditate more
      • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
  • Write more
    • OKR: Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
    • OKR: Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
    • Habit: Write at least 100 words every weekend
  • Learn to play the ukulele
    • Habit: Practice at least 10 minutes a day for at least 3 months

I’m going to address most of these in the “Changes to 2020 Goals” section, but I’ll discuss a few of them here. Particularly, I want to strategize around how I’m going to recover a few of the habits listed above, specifically body circumference measurements, reading, meditating, and writing.

For body circumference measurements, the issue is really just remembering. I’m adding a weekly repeating task in my task management system, as well as a weekly morning reminder to my Google assistant. Ideally, I’ll take care of this each week as one of the first things I do on cheat day (before the debauchery begins ;).

For reading, I’ve been having a lot of trouble establishing the habit of reading a few pages before bed each night. The issue here is mostly that I haven’t been disciplined and consistent about bedtime so sometimes I get to bed and it’s already so late that I don’t feel like I have time to read. I also sometimes forget to keep my Kindle charged and ready to go. I’m going to try to establish two adjacent, supporting habits:

  1. Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
  2. Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.

I think I fell off the cart on meditation because I shifted my sleep schedule for a California-based client for a couple months this quarter. I went from being an early morning riser to waking up around 9 or 10am and sleeping around 1 or 2am. When I wake up as late as 9 or 10am, I often don’t start working until 11 or 11:30am, which already feels quite late to me. As a result, I fall into the trap of feeling like I can’t spare the 10 minutes required to meditate in the morning. I think staying on an early morning routine and making sure I get plenty of sleep each night will help to rectify this. I’m already back on an earlier schedule after coming back from diving in Kenting, and I think a 7 or 7:30am wake-up time will leave me feeling like I have enough time to take care of this.

Writing is a tougher habit to crack… this really requires that I set aside some time when I know I’ll be high energy and able to do creative work, which is usually the morning after a nice, full sleep. Normally I set aside some time on the weekends, usually first thing Sunday morning. This quarter, I think I struggled to do this for a few reasons:

  1. Half marathon training this quarter usually left me with a really, really long run to do on Sundays, which tended to leave me feeling like I didn’t have time and energy for much else on Sunday.
  2. My client project this quarter was pretty urgent, and I worked a fair number of weekends in a row
  3. Initially, my new relationship messed with my weekend schedule and routine a bit, since when I did actually have time on the weekend, I felt like I needed to carve out some time to make up for my relative absence during the week.

Fortunately, half marathon training and urgent client work are both over. My girlfriend and I have also settled into our relationship a little more, and are able to keep a fairly good routine. Lately, she and I have actually also been setting aside ~2-3 hours on the weekend to go to a cafe for a work session. I’m planning to use this work session for a new goal I’m adding, explained below, but I think it could be feasible to spend the first ~30 minutes on writing.

Changes to 2020 Goals

Here’s how my goals are affected by changing conditions in Q3:

  • Exercise
    • Since I currently live in Taiwan, it should be fairly safe to return to regular weight lifting at a gym.
  • Become more politically active
    • The 2020 US presidential election is coming up fast. If I’m going to get involved, now is the time.
  • Launch a successful project
    • As COVID-19 continues to push signs of global recession, now is a good time to double-down on opportunities that will give me more liquidity to weather a bear economy, and potentially even give me extra cash to invest into the down market so I can see greater return as things eventually recover.

Nothing too surprising here.

Here’s how I’m adjusting my goals to compensate (items in green are being added, items in red are being removed):

  • Launch a successful project
    • OKR: Launch at least 2 projects of my own this year
    • OKR: Take on no more than 3 months of consulting work this year.
    • OKR: Earn no more profit from coaching and consulting than the annual Foreign Earned Income Tax Exclusion limit ($107,600).
    • OKR: Release a new version of Tribe with updates for COVID-19
    • Habit: Work on projects at least 6 hours a day
  • Grow my consulting business
    • OKR: Join TopTal
      • This will make it easier for me to find leads for high-end consulting work with prestigious clients
    • OKR: Complete a professional project related to machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science
      • I have these skills from my Machine Learning / AI Master’s degree, but haven’t used them much since college. I’d like to brush up on them and start offering these services to clients, and incorporate them into my own projects.
    • Habit: Do a practice problem on HackerRank daily
      • This will help me improve my algorithms skills and prepare me for TopTal’s engineering interview process
  • Improve my software engineering skills
    • OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
    • OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
    • OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
    • OKR: Master dynamic programming (DP)
      • I don’t generally have a need for DP in my day-to-day engineering work, but this is an area that I always felt weak at, and which used to scare me a little. I’d like to push past that fear and master DP.
    • Habit: Every weekend, spend 2-3 hours working on something that hones my software engineering skills
      • This can be reading one of the books I’ve listed above, or doing extra problems on HackerRank, or playing with machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science projects on Kaggle.
  • Language Learning
    • Learn Japanese
      • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese
      • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Japanese program
      • Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
      • Habit: Add at least 5 new Japanese vocabulary Anki cards a day
      • Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
    • Learn Chinese
      • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
      • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
      • OKR: Reach 3000 words in Chinese.
        • This will roughly correspond to slightly exceeding the “B1” level outlined by TOCFL, and is also commonly the number of words people say you need to know in order to be able to read a newspaper. (I’m still skeptical, but for context, 8000 is supposed to be ~fluent.)
        • At a pace of 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day, I should be able to accomplish this with the 6 months I have remaining in the year
      • Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
      • Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
  • Improve my health
    • Get back into shape
      • Get lean
        • Reach 10% body fat
          • Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
          • Habit: Track the foods I eat every day so I can correlate diet to fat loss
            • I’ll consider re-adding this in a limited capacity as a supporting habit, if necessary, but for now the current diet plan doesn’t really require this.
        • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
      • OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
      • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results
      • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
  • Read More
    • OKR: Read 52 books
    • Learn to speed read
      • OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
      • Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
      • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
    • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
    • Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
    • Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.
  • Become more politically active
    • Habit: Spend 4-8 hours each week on political activities
  • Learn to play the ukulele
    • Habit: Practice at least 10 minutes a day for at least 3 months

Trade-off: Launching a Successful Project vs Growing My Consulting Business

Very notably here: I’m laxing the restriction on client work this year. I’ve been debating this, especially since coaching for The Spike Lab promises to bring a fairly steady part-time income, but I think that given the state of the economy right now, if I can get people to pay my consulting fee, I should take the opportunity.

Each consulting project tangibly contributes greatly to my longer-term financial security, not just because of the infusion of cash it brings in, but also because each project helps me to build up my portfolio and allows me to collect positive testimonials that make it easier to passively catch leads for new clients.

Since time is finite, removing my 3-month maximum on consulting projects this year and adding ~half a day to a day of politically-oriented volunteer work means that I can’t commit to launching a second product this year. I do still hope to find time to finish out the next phase of Tribe, however.

Explaining the new dollar limit imposed on my coaching and consulting work requires a quick note on taxes: as an expat, I am able to exclude my earnings from US federal income taxes (but not CA state income tax and self-employment tax) each year up to a specified maximum. The relevant tax exclusion is the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, and the annual exclusion limit for 2020 is $107,600. This means that I will pay a disproportionately large amount of taxes for every dollar I earn above that amount, which makes spending time away from my own work significantly less attractive.

New Goal: Improve My Software Engineering Skills

This goal is newly appearing here, so I’m going to write out my motivation for pursuing it.

Personally, I’ve always seen software as a means to an end. At times, I’ve cringed at being referred to as an “engineer” or a “programmer” because I hated how those labels sometimes felt like pigeon holes for my identity. I see myself as more of a problem solver or an entrepreneur who happens to have software in his toolbox.

That said, I do love writing software. I’ve always found the process enjoyable and interesting, and by now, having earned my 10,000 hours and then some, I think I’d be doing myself an injustice if I failed to recognize that software engineering is an important part of who I am.

So that said, I’d like to improve my software engineering skills for a couple of reasons:

  1. Boost my confidence in engineering decisions I make on independent projects, or for client projects where I’m in a leadership or architectural position.
  2. Gain experience in new and adjacent skills which I can then apply to my own projects or offer as services to clients.

Regarding the first point, I think every software engineer probably experiences some amount of self-doubt around certain design decisions we make in larger projects. Sometimes that self-doubt manifests in the form of severe tech debt. Worse, sometimes it manifests as an immediate need to entirely rewrite or re-design a piece of code (at the cost of days or weeks of time). Other times, it just creates a gnawing sensation at the back of our minds, that decreases confidence and, in turn, productivity going forward. I think reading more about how others think through some of these decisions and building more recognition around common patterns will help give me more perspective so that I can both make better decisions, and feel more confident in my decisions.

Regarding the second point, there are a couple of skills that I’m technically qualified in, but haven’t had much experience with since college. Chief among these is probably machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science. I actually have an AI and Machine Learning Master’s degree from Stanford, which should make me qualified to do work in these areas. However, since I don’t use these skills a whole lot these days, I can’t say I have a huge amount of recent experience or confidence in them. Developing these skills will make it easier for me to apply them to my own projects, or to offer them as services to clients. In this sense, improving my software engineering skills supports both launching my own businesses and growing my consulting business.

I’m also recently realizing that there’s actually a decent amount of fear holding me back in some of these areas. For example, with ML / AI, a lot of the theory is built upon some very complicated math (linear algebra + calculus). If I’m being honest, I think I’m a bit insecure about my math abilities. In reality, I’m probably decent at math. In fact, I’m probably well above average in terms of proficiency. However, growing up in the gifted and talented crowd and then going to Stanford where there were always a bunch of people who were naturally way better than me at math or who possessed a more intuitive understanding of some of the concepts, I’ve grown to become a little intimidated by math. This fear also exists for certain other areas of computer science like algorithms and dynamic programming in which I didn’t feel terribly proficient in comparison to my college peers.

Now that I’m more “mature” and I’m outside of the pressures of a traditional learning environment, I find that I have a desire to face those fears and prove to myself that I really can get better at these things. Throughout Q2, I’ve found myself beginning to experiment with reviewing these concepts on my own using tools like YouTube and HackerRank. Adding this to Q3, is really more formalizing how I spend that time than anything else. I’m excited to see where I can go now learning at my own pace!

New Goal: Become More Politically Active

I talked about this last quarter, so this isn’t exactly new, but since November’s presidential election is coming up fast, I think it’s time to formalize my desire to get involved.

I recently applied for a Volunteer Senior Software Developer position with Vote Forward, and am waiting to hear back. If they select me, I think the opportunity to apply my professional skills to a cause I’m passionate about is a perfect outlet for this goal.

If not, my plan is to use Swing Left to choose a few key races and start making phone calls or sending text messages, probably a few each day before I start working or in the evening before I go to bed (for optimal time zone overlap).

Adjusted Method: Exercise and Diet

Now that things have returned to normal in Taiwan, I plan to start visiting a gym regularly again.  I had a lot of success with weight loss and fat burning in Q2, but in the process I do feel I’ve lost some muscle mass. I’m beginning to realize that endurance running may not be something I want to focus on too much going forward. Yes, I have challenged myself with running in the past, but ultimately I’m not excited about having a distance runner’s physique. I’d like something more well-rounded with good amounts of lean muscle everywhere, but with a focus on function over aesthetics (though aesthetics are still important).

I’d like a more balanced routine that incorporates weight training, HIIT, and endurance cardio. The goals remain to:

  1. Maintain a level of fitness that promotes a healthy body and mind
  2. Create a functional fitness that I can apply to more physical activities and hobbies
  3. Reach my body aesthetic goals

Though I don’t want to look like a distance runner, I also don’t want to be one of those muscle bodies at the gym who look huge, but then can’t run 3 miles to save their lives…

I’m finding that the training plans that fit me best are often oriented towards the military. Most other programs I find interesting are heavily weight-lifting-oriented, and I’d need to incorporate cardio on my own during off days.

Right now, I’m thinking I’ll get a membership at a real gym here in Taiwan, and then execute some combination of these 3 programs:

  • Warrior Elite Workout Program
    • Probably do this one for the first 4 weeks, then switch to one of the other programs.
    • I like that this is 5 days a week so I can take the weekend off.
    • I like the combination of lifting with cardio.
    • I like that this looks challenging, so I can feel like I accomplished something if I get through it
  • Chris Evans Workout Program
    • Chris Evans is a decent aesthetic role model for me ;).
    • I’d have to incorporate an extra day of cardio each week, probably 4-6 miles on Wednesdays or Sundays?
  • Phase 1 Special Forces Prep
    • I did this one for a while while I was in Mexico. It really maxes out on “functional” and pushes the limit on strength, intensity, and multi-disciplinary endurance (running, swimming, and biking!).
    • Not sure I’ll have all the equipment needed to do this, but I can probably fudge it.
    • I’d likely substitute long-distance running for rucking.
    • This is the highest time commitment option of the 3… I’ll have to see how I feel time-wise after the Warrior Elite Workout Program.

Diet-wise, I’ve decided to stick to the Slow-Carb Diet, since I’m used to it by now and it’s working well. I really like the cheat day aspect of this diet, as it leaves me feeling non-deprived–I can have anything I want one day a week–and doesn’t seem to hamper long-term progress much. My only complaint is that, when combined with hard running, it tends to leave me feeling tired during workouts, so I’ve observed that my running performance isn’t great. I’ve solved this somewhat by allowing myself to cheat a little and eat some simple carbs (e.g. noodles or rice) on days with especially long or especially hard workouts.

I’m likely to combine SCD with tracking a daily protein goal of ~145 grams per day (~1 gram per pound of body weight), to help support my weightlifting efforts. Additionally, I plan to continue casually cutting with this diet until my body fat percentage dips below at least 13%, though more ideally something closer to 10%. Once I reach that point, I’ll start consciously increasing calorie intake to lean bulk and try to add more muscle.

Adjusted Method: Learning Japanese

I did the math, and it looks like I’d need to do about ~3 Japanese lessons on Duolingo each day to make this OKR. In abstract, 3 lessons on Duolingo isn’t a huge deal–on average, that takes probably 15-20 minutes. However, I have found recently that I don’t have the bandwidth to add a whole lot of new Anki cards for Japanese, at least not without sacrificing bandwidth to add new cards for Chinese, or risking being unable to get through my cards daily long-term.

I’ve also noticed, as I’ve noticed in the past with other Duolingo language programs, that my actual competence in Japanese is not tracking well against the perception of progress that Duolingo’s gamification leaves me with. Have I been exposed to a lot of new words and sentence patterns? Yes. Have I really internalized virtually any of them? No. In order to internalize these new concepts, they need to find their way into Anki… and if I can’t keep up with 3-lessons-a-day worth of Anki Japanese cards, it’s unlikely that going through the wrote task of completing the Duolingo Japanese program is going to help me much on its own.

I think the solution is, instead, to drop the Duolingo Japanese program OKR, and instead focus my efforts on:

  1. Getting Duolingo grammar points and sentence examples from my existing Japanese lessons into Anki
  2. Catching up on my already collected Duolingo Anki vocabulary
  3. Memorizing my first ~600 words based on frequency with the assistance of the Core 10k Anki deck I already have loaded.

The new habits I’ve added are aimed at accomplishing all of the above:

  • Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
    • Core 10k is a deck of 10,000 sentences where each sentence introduces a new high frequency Japanese word. If I get through the first ~600 sentences, I’ll have been exposed to my goal of the first ~600 most frequent Japanese words. 3 new sentences a day for the rest of the year should put me on track to hit this target.
  • Habit: Add at least 5 new Japanese vocabulary Anki cards a day
    • This number has been chosen strategically to keep Japanese reviews at about 50 or less so that they stay manageable and don’t cut into bandwidth reserved for Chinese.
  • Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
    • There are about ~26 Japanese skills that have grammar tips that I’ve completed, which means I only need to spend ~26 days doing this at a pace of one skill per day.

Dropped Goal: Learn to Play the Ukulele

I added this for Q2, but then hardly followed-through on it. I think I’ve discovered that my motivation to learn the ukulele is likely either not strong enough or not clear enough to myself. Given that I expect to add a load of new commitments in Q3, it seems natural to cut this, or at least put it on hold. Right now, this doesn’t feel more important than anything else on the list, and also doesn’t feel more important than even just giving myself 10 extra precious minutes of downtime per day.

Summarized Q3 Goals

  • Launch a successful project
    • OKR: Earn no more profit from coaching and consulting than the annual Foreign Earned Income Tax Exclusion limit ($107,600).
    • OKR: Release a new version of Tribe with updates for COVID-19
    • Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
  • Grow my consulting business
    • OKR: Join TopTal
    • OKR: Complete a professional project related to machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science
    • Habit: Do a practice problem on HackerRank daily
  • Improve my software engineering skills
    • OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
    • OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
    • OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
    • OKR: Master dynamic programming (DP)
    • Habit: Every weekend, spend 2-3 hours working on something that hones my software engineering skills
  • Language learning
    • Learn Japanese
      • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
      • Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
      • Habit: Add at least 5 new Japanese vocabulary Anki cards a day
      • Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
    • Learn Chinese
      • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
      • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
      • OKR: Reach 3000 words in Chinese
      • Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
      • Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
    • Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
  • Improve my health
    • Get back into shape
      • Get lean
        • Reach 10% body fat
          • Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
        • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
      • OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
      • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
      • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
  • Learn to talk to attractive women
    • OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
  • Read more
    • OKR: Read 52 books
    • Learn to speed read
      • OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
      • Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
      • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
    • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
    • Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
    • Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.
  • Deepen my mindfulness practice
    • Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
      • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
  • Write more
    • OKR: Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
    • OKR: Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
    • Habit: Write at least 100 words every weekend
  • Improve my relationship with my immediate family
    • OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
    • Habit: Call each family member weekly
    • Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly
  • Become more politically active
    • Habit: Spend 4-8 hours each week on political activities

Summarized Q3 Habits and OKRs

Habits:

  • Daily
    • Work on projects 6 hours a day
    • Do a practice problem on HackerRank
    • Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
    • Complete Anki reviews
    • Add 30 new Chinese Anki cards
    • Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson
    • Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences
    • Add at least 5 new Japanese vocabulary Anki cards
    • Make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
    • Read 2 pages a day
    • After I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow
    • Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages
    • For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed training software
    • Measure body composition
  • Weekly
    • Exercise at least 3 days a week
    • Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
    • Every weekend, spend 2-3 hours working on something that hones my software engineering skills
    • Every weekend, write at least 100 words
    • Call each family member
    • Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist
    • Spend 4-8 hours on political activities

OKRs:

  • Launch a successful project
    • Release a new version of Tribe with updates for COVID-19
    • Earn no more profit from coaching and consulting than the annual Foreign Earned Income Tax Exclusion limit ($107,600)
  • Grow my consulting business
    • Complete a professional project related to machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science
    • Join TopTal
  • Improve my software engineering skills
    • Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
    • Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
    • Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
    • Master dynamic programming (DP)
  • Learn Chinese
    • Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
    • Reach 3000 words in Chinese
    • Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
  • Learn Japanese
  • Get back into shape
    • Reach 10% body fat
    • Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
    • Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
  • Learn to talk to attractive women
    • Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
  • Read more
    • Read 52 books
    • Eliminate subvocalization while reading
  • Write more
    • Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
    • Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
  • Improve my relationship with my immediate family
    • Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues