sacha chua living an awesome life

Joel wanted to know if I could share any tips on kickstarting and continuing sketching practice, so I thought about my process for getting better at drawing. Here it is!

Collect inspiration: With the growing popularity of sketchnotes and visual communication, there are plenty of great examples on the Net. I like checking out Sketchnote Army and Ogilvy Notes for inspiration. I often search for sketchnotes using Google Blog Search or Google Image search. I use Evernote to clip the ones I like so that I can search for them using text.

I look for inspiration elsewhere, too. Shop displays sometimes have interesting colour combinations, and paintings and photos are also great for colour and composition. Cartoons and comics give me visual metaphors and humour. I pick up ideas from books and presentations, looking for good things to share and interesting ways to share them.

Compile a notebook: I use Microsoft OneNote to collect parts of the different images that inspire me: title treatments, visual metaphors, colour combinations, techniques, and so on. I like using OneNote for this because the keyboard shortcut (Win+S) is an easy way to capture part of the screen, and because OneNote makes it easy to organize elements on pages within sections of a notebook. Text labels make it easy for me to search the notebook for the keywords I’ve added to each of the images. Organizing the elements like this means that I can quickly find a specific element or browse around for quick inspiration.

Build a library: Background templates, reference photos, and reusable elements (parts of  past drawings, for example) help me work more quickly. I can paste them in from my OneNote notebook, image searches, or my photos and files. I can also use Add Image to add a file as a new layer. I can then adjust the opacity, scale and rotate things a little, and trace the image or use it as the basis for a different drawing. I sometimes use a light grid as the background when I draw, as my lines and text tend to skew upwards if I don’t. I’m planning to collect stick figure and cartoon poses so that I can draw people with more detail and flair.

Because Autodesk Sketchbook Pro is a raster program, I lose some detail when I scale images up and down. Still, the library is great to use for guides or templates, and it’ll grow in usefulness as I draw and save more.

Colour combinations are good to save, too. I like seeing how other people use colour to highlight their work, and I’m gradually getting the hang of it. Autodesk makes it easy to save the colours I like, and there are some colours I find myself returning to often.

I’m also working on creating my own brushes for certain effects. For example, I liked the way some sketchnotes used dotted lines to connect ideas, so I experimented with Autodesk to see if I could make my own. My brush is somewhat translucent instead of fully opaque, but it will do for now. =)

Experiment: There’s so much to experiment with and learn. I’m trying out different ways of hand-lettering, playing around with the letter forms and what feel they evoke. I’m experimenting with colour, line widths, layouts, whitespace, and flourishes. I’m playing around with different ways to learn and summarize information.

I’m a long way off from settling into one style. Who knows, I may end up experimenting with this throughout my life. This is a good thing.

Learn how to use your tools: I also invest time into learning and experimenting with tools. Over the past few days, I’ve been going through the trial versions of Autodesk Sketchbook Designer, Adobe Illustrator, and Manga Studio EX. In terms of pen-friendly computing, I still prefer Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, although I wish I had some of the capabilities I saw in the other tools! I like reading the documentation and watching other people’s videos because I often learn how to work more effectively.

Practice deliberately: And of course, there’s practice. The more I draw, the more comfortable I’ll be at drawing, and (probably) the better I’ll be, too. It’s not just about drawing new things. Deliberate practice – going over and over small things – helps a lot, too. For example, I often fill a page with freehand circles. Then I add eyes, nose, and mouth to each of the faces, playing around with different expressions or trying to get the same expression each time. I also draw lines, as I find those hard to do (my hands are a little shaky). Tracing helps me learn more about drawing, too.

Those are six ways I’m working on learning how to draw better. How are you learning?

I was going to write stories from my five years at IBM (one year as a graduate student, four as an IBM consultant) while they were still fresh in my memory. Then I realized I was on page 8 of a single-spaced document and I was still covering the first year. Instead of writing my way through it, I’ll share the five key things I learned during my adventure with IBM.

Happiness, meaning, and career growth are your responsibilities.

Don’t count on people to tell you why your work is meaningful or to arrange your career so that you’re happy. Do that yourself. Make your own vision and set yourself up for your own happiness and success. There will always be plenty of reasons to feel stressed or unhappy about work. Why not focus on what you could do to improve things instead?

As the financial crisis unfolded in 2008, the mood was decidedly down. Clients were tightening their budgets. Layoffs meant seeing friends scrambling for work despite their talents and skills.

I figured things would happen however they happened. I could either be demoralized by it, or I could focus on the things I could control. I learned more about consulting and development, and I had a wonderful year. (Okay, after I got through my disappointment about great people getting laid off…)

Work sustainably.

Fatigue and sleep deprivation lead to mistakes and lower productivity, and the personal sacrifices are too high. Work at a sustainable pace. If your work requires intense sprints, make sure you don’t forget to rest.

From the beginning, I knew I didn’t want to burn myself out working 80-hour weeks. Although the occasional business trip involved longer hours, for the most part, I kept to the time I budgeted for work. This forced me to focus when I was at work, and to find ways to work more effectively. It also meant I gave feedback on estimates early, so that we could avoid having projects run behind schedule because of unrealistic planning. Result: less stress and more happiness.

Ask for help.

One of the best things about working with a large company is being able to work with people who are great at what they do. Sometimes you have to find creative ways to compensate or thank people for the time they invest in helping you. A thank-you note that includes their manager is an excellent way to start.

I was working on a client project when I ran into a problem that I didn’t know how to solve. It involved Microsoft SQL Server 2000, something I had never administered before. I tried searching the Internet for tips, but I knew I was missing things I didn’t even know to look for. After some delay, we eventually found an expert who could review my work, we brought him into the project, and he billed much less time than it would have taken me to learn things from scratch.

Practise relentless improvement.

Always look for small ways you can work more effectively. Invest time into learning your tools. If you can improve by 0.25% every day, you’ll double your productivity in less than a year.

Working with other people in an IBM location is an excellent way to learn by watching how other people do things. Attending community conference calls is another way to do that, too. Experiment with techniques yourself, and share what you learn.

Look for scalable ways to make a difference. Intrapreneurship is worth it.

Find yourself doing something repetitive? Solving problems other people might run into? Save yourself time, and save other people time as well. If you write about what you’re doing – or better yet, build a tool that does it for you – then you can share that with other people and create lots of value.

I started playing around with intrapreneurship through blogging and presentations. I was learning a lot, so I took notes and proposed presentations to conferences. Many of my proposals got accepted. This is how I got to go to the IBM Technical Leadership Exchange as a presenter in my first year as an IBM employee. Presenting helped me share what I’d learned with dozens of people at the same time, and uploading the presentations helped me share with hundreds and even thousands over the years.

I like building tools, too. I wrote something to make it easier for me to export data from Lotus Connections communities. This grew into the Community Toolkit that many people use to create newsletters or measure activity in their communities. I wrote a script for doing mail merge in Lotus Notes, and that became popular as well. This resulted in a steady stream of thank-you notes from people across IBM (and even outside the company), which came in really handy during annual performance reviews.

What have you been learning at work?

We’re working on helping J- learn new words. The more words she learns, the more she can think about and communicate. Yesterday, we tried an informal spelling bee at home, and she seemed to enjoy it. J- chose words out of the Collins English Dictionary, and W- picked words out of the Stoddart Visual Dictionary. You can guess who had to spell words like “articulating”, and who had to spell words like “leontopodium.” I refereed, which mainly consisted of helping J- pronounce the words and giving hints as needed.

That was fun. W- and I developed our vocabularies through, coincidentally, the same geeky habit of reading pocket dictionaries in childhood. If the opportunity to stump her dad gets J- into reading the dictionary, then awesome!

You know, it would be great to have a manga series that used all sorts of obscure words. That might lure J-’s interest in. Hmm. =)

We’re also reading stories together as a way to help her build her vocabulary. By reading together, we can ask her questions to test her comprehension and help her learn new words. Our bedtime story? Animal Farm. We read a chapter a day, and she has no problems with the material. I love the way Orwell characterized the animals, and we all laughed at the cat’s antics. We’re on chapter 4 at the moment, and looking forward to the rest of the slim book.

How do students learn how to research information for school: how to ask questions, find resources, take notes, paraphrase, organize, and summarize?

I’m curious about this because we’ve been running a study group for J- and her classmates, and the kids have such different skill levels when it comes to research. They’re in Grade 8 and are working on history projects about the settlement of Western Canada. In terms of research skills, J- seems to doing okay. She’s reasonably self-motivated, knows that she needs to go beyond just the textbook or the Wikipedia page, decent at paraphrasing, organizing and presenting what she’s learned. She needs more nudging to take notes, though, instead of browsing through lots of pages and relying on her memory. Another classmate of hers turned up with what looked like a copy of a few paragraphs out of a textbook, but hadn’t paraphrased it or reorganized it yet according to the inquiry questions, didn’t seem to have drawn from other sources, and couldn’t answer some of my questions about the material.

When we volunteered to accompany the students on a field trip to the Ontario Science Centre, we saw an even wider range of study skills among the students. Some focused on the assignment they were given, quickly completing the sketches. Others were unprepared. They didn’t bring pencils despite knowing they would need to sketch, and they misunderstood the instructions and needed help getting back on track. I can imagine how it might be difficult to give individual feedback and attention in order to help people develop the skills they need, even with only twenty students in the class.

I try to think back to when I was their age. I don’t remember my research skills – probably middling, at best. I wasn’t particularly academically-inclined, although I loved reading. I remember that some of my classmates were much awesomer. They turned in cogent and comprehensive reports on something or another. How did they learn? How can we help J- so that she learns these skills, too?

W- has been challenging J- to take more notes and to read the resources at a deeper level. I try to nudge her to check the library for books; not everything has to come from the Internet. We help her with mindmapping, organizing, editing. We model constant learning through conversations and the never-ending parade of library books through the house. Homework help takes up much of our evenings during the weeks that J- spends with us. Recognizing that this takes time and confidence that many parents don’t have, we help her friends out with homework when they drop by, too.

I have a lot to learn about research myself. I’ve had the benefit of additional learning, a master’s degree manifested in the slim volume of my thesis. There’s still so much I want to figure out – how to ask my own questions, draw on other people’s experiences as well as my own, organize my research and thoughts, and present them clearly through blog posts, books, and other forms. Maybe J- and I will learn more about research together.

J- is taking Red Cross lifeguard lessons. She told us that she sometimes has a hard time understanding and remembering the concepts, so I shared a tip that worked for me and that might work for you.

Like J-, I’m a visual learner–perhaps way more than she is. I learn a lot from books and blogs, and I enjoy writing.

I’m not much of an audio learner. I used to fall asleep in classroom lectures. I get impatient when I listen to nonfiction audiobooks, podcasts, or webinars. I hardly even listen to music.

After struggling through some lecture-heavy university classes, I finally figured out how I could use my visual learning strengths to make up for my audio learning weaknesses. The trick is to read ahead whenever I can. Seeing the words gives me a visual “hook” to hang the ideas on when people talk about them. It gives me an outline that I can use to organize what I hear. If I read ahead, I understand what people say better, and it’s easier for me to stay engaged.

There are many situations where I can’t read ahead, such as meetings or presentations. In those situations, I keep my visual brain occupied by writing or drawing my notes. By turning important parts into words that I can see, I can remember things better. I can see the structure of a talk instead of trying to follow a linear narrative. Ideas don’t disappear into the foggy recesses of my brain.

Taking notes also has other benefits. Because I know I can share my notes afterwards, I pay more attention and look for more ideas that could be useful to other people. I’ve had lots of conversations because of my notes, and the conversations often lead to other discoveries.

As J- heads into high school, she’s going to need better learning strategies. W- and I are figuring out how we learned what we learned, and we hope to help her and other people learn things more effectively too. How do you use your learning strengths to deal with your learning weaknesses, and how do you build on those strengths for even more awesomeness?

Nudged by @catehstn‘s recommendation of my blog to @Tending2Entropy as an example of goal planning in personal life, I updated my learning plan with the things I’m planning to learn next year.

It was easy to come up with a quick outline. There are so many interesting things I want to learn. The tough part, however, was thinking about what I might actually get to do.

What does my cognitive surplus look like? I wanted to get a sense of how much discretionary time I actually had on a regular basis. I have about 20 weeks of data since I resumed time-tracking near the end of July. So that my numbers wouldn’t be thrown off by the vacation we took, I focused on the last eight weeks (graph: 2011-10-16 to 2011-12-11).

Over the eight-week period, I got an average of 3.5 hours of discretionary time per weekday and 7 hours of discretionary time per weekend day. I can simplify that to an average of 4.5 hours per day, which comes out to 1642 hours for 2012 (not including vacations, which include more discretionary time).

Around 40% of discretionary time was used for social activities. Let’s say that another 30% is a buffer for breaks and other things that come up, leaving 30% for focused learning. That gives me a time budget of around 500 hours. I want to do more than 1,000. Hmm.

Prioritization is important. I can focus on the things I want the most, then see how the rest of the year shakes out. Plans will change anyway, and estimates are flexible. My first few priorities for personal learning:

• Android development, so that I can save time syncing and get more of the data I want
• Goal tracking (handy for keeping the rest of my time in line)
• Behavioural change (trying small experiments)

Another way to deal with the gap is to shift more time. Over those eight weeks, tidying took about 0.7 hours / day, and cooking took about that much time too. Let’s say half of future tidying and all of future cooking is outsourceable at $20/hour. That’s an additional 384 hours for a trade-off of $7,680 after tax, which is a large chunk of money. I’d rather save the money and let it compound for later use, especially if I time chores so that they take advantage of low energy. Besides, cooking and other chores are partly social time too.

I can shift time in other ways. For example, I can use commuting time to learn more about Emacs, Org, and Rails, so that will help too. I can also use walking time to record life stories if I can figure out a workflow for dealing with audio or short notes.

Good to know what the size of the box is, and how much I want to pack into it! Let’s see how it all works out…

We’d like to learn more about 3D modeling, so W- checked out Beginning Google SketchUp for 3D Printing (Sandeep Singh, Apress.

Here’s the model I made following the first tutorial in the book and 2.8 hours of learning with W-. It’s fun!

Google SketchUp has a Ruby interface. I wonder if I can use that to visualize my data…