sacha chua living an awesome life

In September, I wrote:

What will October look like? I took a month-long break from consulting in September, so I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of things and helping my clients get ready for the next major milestones. There are quite a few events in October, so I’ll be getting lots of sketchnoting practice. In terms of skill-building, I want to focus on lettering and typography. I’d like to ramp up my delegation so that I can get more things done, too. I’m also looking forward to gathering the papers for my first business tax return and HST return, wow. =)

October and November flew by in a blur. Conference season + consulting = chaos! While helping clients prepare for a big launch and analyze more metrics, I also took the time to sketchnote dozens of talks, do a professional speaking engagement, and reach out to lots and lots of people. I hadn’t done as much deliberate practice in lettering and typography as I thought I would, but I’ve made up for it in sheer volume and an improved digital workflow. I sketchnoted the Lean Startup Day simulcast hosted by MaRS Discovery District – my first proper conference gig, hooray! That worked out really well. It was a good two months. An excellent two months.

Now it’s December and I’m taking another month-long break from consulting so that I can focus on exploring other ideas. What might December look like? I want December to be a time to:

• celebrate and share the things I’ve learned in the past year
• lay the groundwork for more awesomeness in 2013
• reach out to people and help them out

Post index for the past two months, newest on top

Sketchnotes:

1. Sketchnotes: The 5 Key Elements of a Better B2B Content Marketing Strategy–Nolin LeChasseur
2. Awesome Foundation Toronto pitch night: Kensington Mesh Network, Women and Tech, Lovecraft TO, 360 Screenings
3. Sketchnotes from #ENT101: Business Model Canvas–Mark Zimmerman
4. Made my largest sketchnote ever! Painting the MaRS Lean Startup Day banner
5. Sketchnotes: Venus Ventures Town Hall
6. Sketchnotes from #ENT101: IP Management – Creating Value by Protecting Knowledge-based Assets – Nathaniel Lipkus, Matthew Powell, Ashlee Froese
7. Capturing my sketchnotes with Camtasia Studio Pro; organizing the digital workflow
8. Sketchnotes: Girl Geeks Toronto: Vexed in the City
9. Sketchnotes from #torontob2b: Dragging an Organization into the Digital Age; 7 Steps to Social Media Success
10. MaRS ENT101: Meet the Entrepreneurs: Life Sciences & Healthcare – Peter Adams, Joel Ironstone, Trevor Van Mierlo, Alex Hodgson
11. Sketchnotes: ENT101: Value Proposition–Joe Wilson
12. Sketchnotes: #INNOTalkTO Innovatively Speaking – Joanna Track, Justin Raymond, David Nam, Brenda Rideout
13. Discovering the MaRS #startupbookclubTO: The $100 Startup
14. Sketchnotes from WordCamp Developers Toronto 2012 Day 2 #wcto
15. Coming up with a three-word life philosophy
16. Sketchnotes: WordCamp Developers Toronto 2012 Day 1 (#wcto)
17. Sketchnotes: SOHO SME Expo 2012
18. Sketchnotes: Startup Communities and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
19. Sketchnotes: TEDxToronto 2012
20. #SMref panel: Changing Nature of Influence–Moderator: Terry Foster–Panel: Matt Juniper, Patrick Thoburn, Ron Nurwisah, Eric Alper
21. Sketchnotes: AndroidTO–The Business of Mobile
22. Sketchnotes: #ENT101 Entrepreneurial Management–Jon E. Worren
23. Sketchnotes: Different Types of Entrepreneurship, Kerri Golden, Allyson Hewitt (MaRS ENT101)
24. Sketchnotes: Small Business Forum – Enterprise Toronto
25. Sketchnotes: Quantified Self Conference 2012
26. ENT101: Startup Law 101: Legal Launchpad (Arshia Tabrizi)
27. Cameron Lewis at the Toronto Small Business Network meetup
28. Sketchnotes: #torontob2b: Free trials, cold-calling, brainstorming
29. Sketchnotes: ENT101: Lived It Lecture – Bruce Poon Tip (G Adventures) on Social Enterprise

Delegation

• Tweaking my scheduling process for delegation
• Validating ideas and working with other people
• Buying time: Experimenting with scheduling

Business

• Getting ready for my Hardlines Dealer Conference talk: So You Don’t Have an Army of Online Marketers
• When your personal value proposition shifts
• Investing time–and money—to help make good things happen
• Business experience report: Filing taxes!
• Figuring out how to get better at following up with people in person
• Thinking about wild success
• Business adventures: Accounting
• Business card kaizen
• Planning how to learn about validating business ideas
• Celebrating my fiscal year end; planning how to improve
• Learning how to bring people together
• Toolmaking

Quantified Self

• New: Quantified Self Meetup Map!
• Quantified Awesome: Grocery update – Oct 2012
• Pub nights and thinking about networking at events

Life

• Growing into an artist
• Planning for retirement when you don’t know where you’ll be
• A long reflection on getting more out of each hour
• Packing review: Things I used and didn’t use on my trip

Reviews

• Weekly review: Week ending November 23, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending November 16, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending November 9, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending November 3, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending October 26, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending October 19, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending October 12, 2012
• Monthly review: September 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending October 5, 2012

• Weekly review: Week ending September 28, 2012

Last month, I wrote:

In September, I’m looking forward to spending time with
my parents, sister, and brother-in-law; sharing lots of sketchnotes
from the Quantified Self Conference; putting together an annual
review; and learning more about mobile development.

It was such a busy month thanks to the trip. I haven’t even gotten around to doing that annual review or organizing the pictures from the trip. I’m already halfway through October!

What will October look like? I took a month-long break from consulting in September, so I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of things and helping my clients get ready for the next major milestones. There are quite a few events in October, so I’ll be getting lots of sketchnoting practice. In terms of skill-building, I want to focus on lettering and typography. I’d like to ramp up my delegation so that I can get more things done, too. I’m also looking forward to gathering the papers for my first business tax return and HST return, wow. =)

Blog index

Sketchnotes:

• Sketchnotes: ENT101: Finding and Validating Your Idea, Keri Damen
• Sketchnotes from WordCamp Toronto Day 1: Marketing, giving back, multilingual sites, security, SEO & analytics, e-commerce
• Sketchnotes from WordCamp Toronto 2012 Day 2: Case studies
• Visual book review: Help Your Kids Get Better Grades
• Paper, Tablet, and Tablet PC: Comparing tools for sketchnoting

Quantified:

• Answering questions about the Quantified Self
• Thinking about a Quantified Self directory

Travel:

• Raiding San Francisco’s Japantown for bento accessories and pens
• Quick braindump after Quantified Self 2012
• Notes from the Quantified Self 2012 conference (Palo Alto)
• International cooking
• Tech report: Living on the T-Mobile 2G network

Misc:

• Having fun with code

Reviews:

• Weekly review: Week ending August 31, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending September 7, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending September 14, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending September 21, 2012
• Monthly review: August 2012

Last month, I wrote:

I’ll be celebrating my 29th birthday this August. I’m looking forward
to getting together with friends, writing and illustrating my yearly
review, preparing for the conference in September, and winding down my
consulting engagement.

August was definitely a month for life tweaks. I’ve been getting used to the Asus Infinity TF700 tablet, and I’m starting to get the hang of drawing on it. I moved to a new phone and a new mobile provider – the Samsung Galaxy S3 on WIND Mobile – so now I’m all kitted out in terms of connectivity. Android development is fun and interesting, and I’m looking forward to digging deeper over the next year or so. W- and I painted our new shed, and now there’s plenty of space for our bicycles and other stuff.

We’ve been enjoying plenty of watermelons and other fresh fruits. I hosted a small get-together to celebrate my birthday, and instead of baking, I just cut up lots and lots of fruit to share. That was fun.

Many of my friends are looking for their next job opportunity, so I’ve been spending more time with them and thinking about ways to help out. As for me, consulting was great. I picked up an exciting new skill: animating my sketches. Now I’m taking a short break so that I can spend time with my family and participate in a conference in the Bay Area. I’ll be consulting for two days a week in October and November, and then I’m going to commit to figuring out other non-consulting business models. Onward!

In September, I’m looking forward to spending time with my parents, sister, and brother-in-law; sharing lots of sketchnotes from the Quantified Self Conference; putting together an annual review; and learning more about mobile development.

Getting the hang of my new devices

• Learning how to tweak my Android devices to fit me
• More gadget changes
• Learning more about Android development
• How to build MobileOrgNG for Android
• Building MobileOrg for Android
• zomg Evernote and Emacs

Life

• Paint-the-shed weekend
• Backyard updates: New shed, garden happiness
• Submitted my application for Canadian citizenship!
• Twenty-nine; life as a 28-year-old
• Thinking about what wild success at 29 looks like
• Getting together
• No longer worried about flat tires

Reviews

• Weekly review: Week ending August 24, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending August 17, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending August 10, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending August 3, 2012
• Monthly review: July 2012

Business

• Discovery: I like making sketched animations
• Thinking about ways to help people who are in between
• Coverage-mapping business models, or thinking of this like a business tasting menu
• Thinking about how to learn how to manage others
• Making myself create space
• Taking a month off from consulting

Sketchnotes

• Sketchnotes: Girl Geeks Toronto – Adventures in Arduino
• Centre for Social Innovation – Small Business Network meetup at the Toronto Reference Library
• Sketchnotes from #torontob2b (antispam, mobile websites, marketing programs)
• Thinking about a visual process library
• Process: Reading nonfiction books

• Process: Keeping notes of conversations

Today I turned twenty-nine years old! This is fantastic. I’m making good progress towards my goal of becoming a little old lady living an awesome life. =) Here’s the bird’s-eye view, with links to annual reviews whenever I remembered to write them:

• 19 years old: Finished university, got into open source development
  20 years old: Enjoyed teaching
• 21 years old: Getting started with graduate school in Canada
• 22 years old: Settling into Toronto, dealing with homesickness
• 23 years old: Thesis, writing
• 24 years old: Moved from the academe into the industry, started a relationship with W-, decided to be in Canada for a while
• 25 years old: Settling in, developing skills, taking small steps
• 26 years old: Flourishing
• 27 years old: Getting married, improving our household routines, preparing for the next step

Life as a 27-year-old was about preparing, and life as a 28-year-old was about taking more risks based on those preparations. With the stability of a warm and loving marriage to support me, the savings from a job I excelled at, and a deeper understanding of how I invest my time and money thanks to the self-tracking I’d been doing, I felt ready to take on the risk of starting a new business in order to explore the possibilities of more family-friendly work. That’s been going tremendously well, and I think we’re in as good a place as anyone could be for the next step.

I invested some of my earnings into new tools, and I’ve been teaching myself more about drawing and Android development. I have a tidy collection of sketchnotes, and people sometimes talk to me about my notes during meetups. I’ve also learned more about electronics, building myself a handy USB foot pedal using the Arduino and then converting it to a Teensy. I’m learning new ways to create value, and it’s great. Sometimes I’m intimidated by the skills of people who’ve been practising these things for much longer, but all things come with time and experience, so I keep practising and learning.

I’ve been working on being more social, and it’s getting easier and easier. We helped J- and her friends with math study groups, and we spent some time volunteering at Free Geek Toronto as well. We celebrated my sister’s wedding in the Philippines, and it was great to see everyone again. She and her husband are expecting their firstborn a few months from now – my parents’ first grandchild, so we’re all excited. I’ve also been reaching out to friends, going to picnics, and just spending time hanging out. This is good.

The more I experiment, the less I know what the next year might look like, and the more confident I am that things will be wonderful anyway.

Last month, I wrote:

In July, I’d like to deliver a talk, sketchnote three more events,
learn more about EPUBs, and put together a small graphical ad for my
book. I’m also looking forward to learning more about accounting.
Whee!

… and I did! I gave a well-received talk on Quantified Self at the Toronto Girl Geeks meetup. I took sketchnotes of four events. I experimented with converting my e-book into EPUB and MOBI, and I released it for sale in the Amazon Kindle store. I’ve also been learning more about Quickbooks, and I think I’m starting to get the hang of it.

Summer is definitely in full swing. Aside from a few non-biking days because of weather or flat tires, I’ve been pedaling to work and around town. The garden is growing well, too; neat clusters of cherry tomatoes, bulging cucumbers dangling from the vines, and a profusion of basil that’s just waiting to be turned into pesto.

After a ton of consideration, I bought an Android tablet and have started integrating it into my life. It opens up a few interesting possibilities that I’d like to explore. With the new cellphone and data plan I’d bought in early August, I’ve got plenty of incentives to learn more about mobile development.

I’ll be celebrating my 29th birthday this August. I’m looking forward to getting together with friends, writing and illustrating my yearly review, preparing for the conference in September, and winding down my consulting engagement.

Business notes

• Building my skills and getting ready for the next steps
• “So what do you do?”
• Business notes: Working with a virtual accountant
• Helping startups
• Learning from the basics
• Thinking about pricing and consulting
• Experience report: Editing, formatting, and publishing an e-book
• Trusting myself with making time
• It’s okay if you don’t do everything
• Things I would like to see fixed
• 80% and tweaking
• Breaking down something that’s intimidating to learn

Quantified Self

• Quantified Awesome: Grocery update!
• Quantified Awesome: Tracking clothes, groceries, and other everyday things
• Quantified Self Toronto: July 11, 2012

Sketchnotes

• Sketchnotes: Christine Steiger, Christine’s Fitness and Personal Training @ Small Business Network, Toronto Public Library
• Sketchnotes: Custom Post Types & Custom Fields (Wes Bos, #wpto)
• Sketchnotes: Marketing in the Round, Gini Dietrich
• Sketchnotes from MobileDevTO: Android development, social apps

Family life

• A day of gardening
• Building the foundation for a shed
• Work is love made visible
• 524 wontons

Tablet

• Tablet adventures: Using my TF700 as a second monitor with AirDisplay
• Waiting for technology
• Slowly figuring out how to use my tablet

Emacs

• Transcript: Emacs chat with John Wiegley

Reviews

• Weekly review: Week ending July 6, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending July 13, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending July 20, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending July 27, 2012

• Monthly review: June 2012

Business: What a month for business and learning! I took my first foray into the wonderful world of e-publishing, compiling my favourite posts from the last ten years into a PDF called “Stories from My Twenties”. And people voted with their dollars! Wow. I have to explore this further. Along the way, I discovered that I enjoy writing, editing, and formatting e-books. I’m looking forward to learning even more as I work on an EPUB version, and perhaps even learn how to build an index and other useful tools for reading.

I started up my delegation experiments again, and I’ve been having lots of success with data entry and accounting. I’m looking forward to working with a developer, too. Expanding my capabilities!

Drawing: I haven’t been drawing nearly as much, but I did make it out to three meetups at which I took sketchnotes. I like sketching meetups. I learn, connect with people, and help other people learn. I don’t have to worry as much about copyright issues compared to, say, summarizing a book. I did pick up Camtasia Studio 8, though, so I might use that to start experimenting with sketchcasts.

Plans for next month: In July, I’d like to deliver a talk, sketchnote three more events, learn more about EPUBs, and put together a small graphical ad for my book. I’m also looking forward to learning more about accounting. Whee!

Business:

• The Shy Connector: Thinking about the difficulties people encounter
• Working on getting better at calendars
• Making lists of things I do so that I can learn more about delegation
• Experiment! Stories from My Twenties PDF
• Numbers from rereading more than ten years of my blog
• Making progress on my book of highlights!
• Business update: Four months in!
• Not getting overwhelmed by learning, no siree
• Still working on that shift from services to products

Quantified:

• Quantified Awesome: Back to buying our own fruits and vegetables
• How I track my time, and how I’d like to
• Quantified Awesome: Analyzing my cellphone data

Emacs:

• Emacs: Chatting with John Wiegley about the cool things he does with Emacs
• Making GNU Emacs play well on Microsoft Windows 7
• Emacs braindump from John Wiegley =)
• Using Emacs Org for grocery lists and batch cooking
• Things that I’ve used Emacs for
• Literate programming and my Emacs configuration file

Sketchnotes:

• Sketchnotes: Sandra Emilia Calderaro, Multilingual Kids; Andres D’Imperio, Creative Design (Small Business Network @ Toronto Reference Library)
• #torontob2b: Sean O’Donovan on managing content for lead generation + Q&A with Ben Harrison and Scott Armstrong
• The Virtual Self: Nora Young at Third Tuesday Toronto

Miscellaneous:

• Relearning QWERTY
• Tips for making the most of the Toronto Public Library
• The weekends are just packed

Reviews:

• Weekly review: Week ending June 1, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending June 8, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending June 15, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending June 22, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending June 29, 2012

• Monthly review: May 2012

Many small improvements this week! I installed a drip irrigation system in the garden to help with watering. I think I may need to replace some of the hoses or tweak the configuration a bit, but it’s a good start, and it’ll mean that the tomatoes, peas, and bitter melon plants will get watered reliably. The garden is starting to do interesting things. The bok choy plants we bought and planted are now enormous, the first strawberries are reddening, the tomato plants are flowering, the peas are climbing away, and the bitter melon is flourishing. We’ve been cheering on some birds-eye pepper seedlings, too – let’s see how far they get!

I upgraded my laptop to a solid-state drive (SSD) last night, and I’m looking forward to enjoying much snappier performance. It’s almost like having a new laptop.

It’s been wonderful having so many different types of desserts in the house. Brownies, lemon squares, polvoron… Hooray for freezable goodies that can be spread out over weeks.

Business-wise, this week was another sprint – 45.7 hours spent consulting. It’s been okay so far, although I was glad to take Friday to learn Quickbooks and upgrade my drive. I want to learn Quickbooks because even if I outsource bookkeeping and accounting, I want to know what’s going on, and I want to be able to have better conversations about it. It’s a bit expensive, but I’d rather do that kind of tracking throughout the year instead of waiting until tax-filing time or leaving it entirely in someone else’s hands. I might look for a bookkeeper on Odesk to help me review my setup and keep the files up to date.

I’ve got a lot of data to analyze. My virtual assistant has typed in all the details from our grocery receipts, so I can crunch the numbers in time for the Quantified Self Toronto meetup on Thursday. I’ve reviewed the three notebooks I scanned in, and am looking forward to scanning in more. I’m most of the way through my blog archive – now looking at 2009 and moving forward – and I’ve been rating posts from 1 to 5. I’ve hired a WordPress developer to make a plugin for filtering the rated posts so that it’s easy to see highlights. Tapping other people’s time and skills turns out to be lots of fun.