sacha chua living an awesome life

A friend of mine is a big fan of Firepole Marketing and other blog-related marketing sites, so a lot of his advice for me has been focused on building audiences and information products. It’s been quite useful—look, I finally got around to all these little design tweaks!—but there’s something niggling at the edges of my brain, and that’s usually a sign I should slow down and reflect on it. I notice that I hesitate.

I need to sort out what I’m hesitant about just because it’s unknown or something I’m shy about, and what I’m hesitant about because I want something different.

The things I love the most about this blog are:

• Sharing all these small, varied things I’m learning about, and not worrying about sticking to one topic, making sense, or writing too often
• Having these amazing conversations spanning miles and years (Raymond Zeitler, Clair Ching, Chris League, and a few other people have been commenting for more than five years – I’m so lucky!)
• Bumping into all sorts of amazing people through chance conversations and connections
• Following the thread of our shared curiosity into new questions
• Answering people’s questions with blog posts from when I was trying to figure things out too
• Knowing that no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s something I can learn from and possibly share

There’s a lot of good advice out there for people who want to “monetize their audience” or build a business around blogging, but… maybe I have the space to explore something different. What would this blog look and feel like in another ten years? More of this, I hope, and better. Better at learning, better at sharing, better at organizing, better at connecting.

Sometimes people pay more attention to what they pay for. Hmm, maybe optional payment, or saving payment for individual help? I don’t have a mental hangup about being paid for consulting, because that’s stuff that clearly creates a lot of value for my clients and doesn’t really give me things I can widely share as a way of helping others. I don’t have a hangup about earning a little bit from affiliate sales (since it’s entirely optional, and only the stuff that I like, and I point out non-affiliate links or alternative ways to get things like borrowing books from the library). I’m sort of okay with the idea of making collections of blog posts and sketches and selling them for a nominal fee as an experiment, although I’m tempted to just make them all freely available and then perhaps add a pay-what-you-can system or a donation button.

Anyway, we’re doing well, so I have some space to focus on learning and sharing. =) I want to make the most of that opportunity. Can you help me figure out what would make this better while keeping it real?

I’ve been posting practically every day for the past 3.5 years, and I write about a variety of topics. I’ve been thinking of ways to make it easier for people to keep in touch without E-mail newsletters seem to be a Thing. Right now, the e-mail subscription form on my blog is the default provided by WordPress, so people get daily updates (which is probably a bit much). I’ve been thinking of making it easier to subscribe to weekly or monthly updates. Would you find something like that useful? I’d really appreciate it if you could answer this poll!

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(Don’t see the poll? Try viewing this post on my website.)

Aside: I was curious about just how long I’ve been keeping up with this ~1 post a day thing, so I graphed my blog posting history. It turns out that I’ve been pretty consistent, although there were days when I didn’t have anything new posted. I schedule my blog posts using Editorial Calendar and I sometimes send people sneak previews of upcoming posts using the Share a Draft plugin. This lets me smooth out the spikiness of my writing habit into a more predictable publishing schedule.

To generate this graph, I extracted the timestamps of all my published posts with the following SQL query:

SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(post_date) FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type='post' AND post_status='publish' 
INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/timestamps.txt';

… and then I graphed it with cal-heatmap, removed in-between labels in GIMP, and used Autodesk Sketchbook Pro to hand-write new labels. =)

One of the habits I’ve formed through my blog is the practice of doing a weekly review. This is where I celebrate what I accomplished and get a heads-up on what’s next. I do this almost every Saturday, which turns out to be a great day for reflecting and preparing.

I also use the weekly review to make sure I spend time on things that I want to do. It’s easy to forget that in the endless ping-pong game of responding to other people’s requests, or to scatter your attention among lots of interests and not feel like you’re making progress in any particular one. Give yourself permission to work on something you want to do, and carve out space for it in your to-do list or calendar. I divide my to-do list into three categories: work, relationships, and life. The work category is easy to fill. Relationships take a little more thought, but other people make it easy by asking. Life, on the other hand—the skills I want to develop, the hobbies I want to explore—that requires me to step up and choose to do something instead of having my time filled by things that other people have chosen for me.

Lots of things are interesting, but I try to pick one or two things to focus on during each week. For example, I’ve been focusing on planting the garden and studying Japanese. I might explore other ideas during the week, but it’s good to make slow and steady progress in my focus areas.

I make that space by managing my commitments. It’s easy to get used to a hectic, time-starved status quo, and it’s gratifying as well—busy-ness helps you feel valued. For me, “normal life” includes time to breathe and time to play. I avoid being busy. When I notice I’m starting to make mistakes because my calendar is too full, I slow down and see what I can say no to.

I add “want-to”s to my to-do list instead of just keeping it to the “must-do”s, and I remove or change other tasks until things look like they’ll fit. It makes reviewing and planning more fun, and it gives me something to look forward to during the week.

Might be something that can help you establish that habit. =) Happy to hear your thoughts and to read your weekly reviews!

Related: On the practice of a weekly review

Leo Babauta wrote about the power of writing daily, sharing what he’s learned from about five years of daily writing. It got me curious about how consistently I write.

Since I schedule my blog posts, my blogging history doesn’t give me useful data. Fortunately, I can get that data from my time-tracking. Here’s a graph showing how much time I spent writing between January 2012 and April 2013, with the greenest areas for days of about 4 hours of writing. In total, I spent 346 hours writing, for an average of 0.7 hours per day or 5 hours a week. I wrote during 254 out of 486 days (58% of the days), or roughly every other day.

My longest streak of non-writing was 8 days of not writing (September 2012, when I was on a trip with my family). My longest streak of continuous writing was 12 days of writing every day (June 2012).

I usually start writing between 7 PM to 9 PM (after dinner), but I also write at other times. With the more flexible schedule I get to have these days, I go on a writing sprint whenever I want to.

One of these days, I should put together a graph that takes into account how long I spend writing, too.

It turns out that I write a lot, although it doesn’t feel that way looking at it one day at a time. In 2012, I wrote around 133,000 words for my blog. This is slightly more than the number of words in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but nowhere near as awesome. I clocked 268 hours for writing during that year, so that works out to a really low 8 words per minute. I already know that the bottleneck is my brain, not my typing speed, though. =) The time includes writing non-blog stuff as well as discarded posts, but hey, it still gives me a good general idea.

Anyway, some quick non-data thoughts on what Leo said about the benefits of writing, and what I want to add:

• “Writing helps you reflect on your life and changes you’re making.” I do this a lot with my blog – looking backward to review decisions, looking forward to explore the possibilities. Not only is writing a good excuse to ask yourself these questions, but having a record of your reflections, reasons, assumptions, and predictions also helps you make better choices.
• “Writing clarifies your thinking.” It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you understand something if it’s just inside your head. Once you try to explain it to other people, though, you’ll quickly find gaps. Writing is one of my ways of thinking out loud. My thoughts are fuzzy and elusive until I sit down and write a blog post, a note, a list, or draw a mindmap or a sketchnote. I figured that it’s okay to be wrong in public from time to time, and it’s better than never knowing about mistakes.
• “Writing regularly makes you better at writing.” I suspect that rewriting is an even more useful technique for better writing. I don’t do as much rewriting and editing as I probably should, although I often revisit and write about old topics based on new questions or ideas. That said, writing is great for practising organizing your thoughts and figuring out how to communicate them, and regular blogging is a great way to experiment with different techniques.
• “Writing for an audience (even if the audience is just one person) helps you to think from the perspective of the audience.” I like writing for myself, and I also like writing for other people. It’s fun to answer questions or to build on other people’s thoughts.
• “Writing persuasively — to convince others of your point of view — helps you to get better at persuading people to change their minds.” I’ve mostly given up on persuading people to change their minds, having read quite a few argument/rhetoric/persuasion books that made a lot of sense to me. Now I go for the low-hanging fruit of sharing tips and ideas for people who’ve already decided, and helping illuminate the possibilities for the people who are on the fence. =) Still, practice in examining and organizing my thoughts helps a lot when it comes to making better decisions or helping other people with theirs.
• “Writing daily forces you to come up with new ideas regularly, and so that forces you to solve the very important problem of where to get ideas.” Since I write about whatever I’m learning about, writing encourages me to keep learning. I don’t promise a particular set of topics, though, so I don’t feel that pressure to keep coming up with good material. Besides, there’s so much to learn and share!
• “Writing regularly online helps you to build an audience who is interested in what you have to share, and how you can help them.” This is actually pretty darn awesome. Connecting without small talk, yay! =)

Writing is well worth the time for me. I wonder what would happen if I doubled the time I spent on writing, maybe splitting the extra time between research and editing… Hmm.

Is writing worth it for you, too? What’s your experience like? How would you increase its benefits?

zenhabits: Why You Should Write Daily

I write down things I’m puzzling out, and I write down hints of things I might be good at. It’s useful to do both. Writing about my challenges helps me understand them better, and I often hear from people who identify with me, learn from me, and even share their own tips. Writing about my little successes seems a little more self-serving and egotistic, but it helps me pay attention to clues life gives me, celebrate the small stuff, and remember the good things. I’m looking for ways to make the most of this five-year experiment, so I’m on the lookout for strengths that I can build on.

At the last Visual Thinkers Toronto meetup, someone told me that how I share on my blog is working. People in the Emacs IRC channel tell me that they enjoy reading my posts. I often find myself sending people links to posts, sometimes posts that are years old.

So this writing thing… Hmm. Might be something there. What are some of the things I do in a way that might be different from others? If I can name those characteristics, I can then improve or at least retain them. =)

• I write a lot. People boggle at this because they struggle to write once a week or even once a month. I write a lot because it’s my default way of thinking. There are a few things I think about privately, in sketchbooks and in text files on my computer. I share as much as I can on the Internet, though. It makes sense to do so – I can help other people along the way, and it’s easier for me to remember something if I can either Google it or ask someone to help me remember what I called it.
• I write with happiness and enthusiasm. I’m naturally happy, I guess (happiness set point and all), and I consciously develop my ability to be happy. Not necessarily bouncing-up-and-down happy, more like… at peace with life. Besides, I have a pretty awesome life, so it’s easy to be happy about it. =)
• I follow my curiosity. Can Emacs do …? How do I …? There’s no end to the questions I can ask, and therefore no end to the things I can learn and write about. It’s a privilege to have the space to be curious about things, so I try to justify that privilege by sharing as much as I can.
• I’m good at analysis. I enjoy picking my thoughts and feelings apart in order to explain them. I like reading and I’m growing to enjoy listening to people, and that’s how I learn to recognize patterns and name them. I’m not super-awesome at it – lots of cognitive biases to work around! – but there’s hope for me yet. =)
• What if I could get even better at this? What would better look like, if I built this up over decades?

Imagining the future:

Writing gives me an excuse to be curious. I write about useful and interesting topics in a positive, straightforward, well-reasoned, and creative way.

On occasion, I sit down and develop a topic much further, taking a comprehensive look at something instead of the scattershot approach of spur-of-the-moment blog posts. I review and summarize things I write about a lot, compiling them into blog posts and books.

Lots of conversations grow out of my writing, and my writing grows out of conversations. It’s an excellent way to hack around introversion, because people talk to me.

Even tough situations in life – deaths and other inevitable losses – become fodder for writing, as I try to understand and grow.

Because I write a lot, people can filter the topics to focus on what they’re most interested in, but still stumble across my other interests from time to time. I remember how to find things and can send people links quickly. I maintain an index to help people find things again, and I periodically browse random posts to jog my memory.

I keep my life simple so that I have the freedom to write about what interests me (no corporate shush policy) and to spend time pursuing what makes me curious. It might not be a glamorous life, but it’s a fun one. I save people time and open up new possibilities. I constrain my lifestyle to my budget, so people’s purchases or donations are icing on the cake – money that I use to learn even more, to connect with more people, to experiment with other ideas and tools, and to make strategic differences in other people’s lives. That way, I can always be surprised and happy when people give me some of their time (both in terms of attention and in terms of money, because money is time after all).

I manage to escape the nastiness that the Internet can sometimes have, or I survive it.

I live an awesome and well-documented life, and I make it easier for thousands of people to build on what I’m learning.

People want to avoid boasting, so it’s easy to downplay ourselves and brush off people who are giving us clues about what we might be good at. Knowing that tendency in myself, I’m learning to say “Thank you!” and examine these things with the same curiosity I want to bring to the rest of life. I ask the universe, “Why is that? And how wonderful can it be?” I can also ask myself.

a snippet from my 2006 annual letter

I’m tremendously lucky to have family and friends who humour me by writing letters. On several occasions, I’ve asked for letters as presents, and they’ve obliged: before my trip to Japan, before my trip to Canada, on various birthdays. Letters from my mom and dad sustained me through my bouts of homesickness, and letters from friends in far-off places have given me glimpses of other people’s lives.

I’ve kept almost all those letters in binders. I lugged that first small collection through Yokohama and Tokyo during my six-month internship there. Then back to the Philippines, then (bolstered with more letters and wishes from friends) tucked in one of the three suitcases that I brought to Canada, anxious and hopeful and ready to start my master’s degree. The long-distance relationship I was in grew, then dissipated. I kept the letters, although I didn’t look at them for a while. Through other relationships and friendships, more letters arrived.

I have many letters, but not all. I don’t have the ones from high school. I remember prolifically writing letters then, with a boyfriend who was also epistolarily-minded and who often slipped letters into my locker in addition to writing me e-mail. (We ran into Eudora’s per-message size limit, that’s how much we wrote.) I don’t have all the quickly-dashed-off greeting cards. I don’t have the letters I’ve sent. If I had thought about keeping a copy of my correspondence, it’s lost on forgotten hard disks, the way my private notes often become fragmented while my public blog survives.

It’s okay to have gaps in the record; I’m amazed that I have this history at all. My mom has a point when she urges me to print photos. The physical presence of an item nudges memory. A binder of letters can be rediscovered. A folder on a hard disk is easier to overlook. E-mail is not designed for printing, while a letter is written to stand by itself.

But a physical copy is limited to one place at a time. Whether the letters are in a binder in a basement cabinet or a box on a shelf above my desk, they’re still inaccessible unless I am there, unsearchable unless I flip through them. So I scanned in my collection over several hours during the New Year holidays – ringing in the new by celebrating the old, planning the way forward by remembering the path before.

Filed in Evernote, tagged by sender and by subject, these letters are reminders that people have taken time out of their day to share something. I’ve come a long way from home. I’ve gained much, but I’ve also lost some things along the way, and this might be one of those things I want to relearn. The rhythm of correspondence was broken for a while, and I’m curious: is it the shift towards Facebook, Twitter, and blogs? the cocooning effects of marriage? links made too tenuous by the dwindling of shared experiences? Or are these conversations that I can return to?

And other questions: Who was I that my friends took the time to write to me? What can I write to other people? What kind of a good friend was I then, and how do I build that again with those friends and with new ones?

I’m not precisely certain. I do know this: I remember in public because that’s the most reliable way that I can remember, but other people hold their stories closer to their heart. I have friends who are decidedly not on Facebook and who hardly have an online footprint. If I want to know what’s going on in other people’s lives, I need to ask. That could be why I’ve been having a hard time writing, the same way I prefer the indirection of blogging compared to the directness of e-mail. It seems presumptuous: “Please take the time to tell me about your life.” But the world is full of interesting people and I want to get to know them, so I can try.

I refilled my fountain pen and dusted off the prettiest stationery I could find, this Carta di Firenze set with a beautiful peacock-and-flowers pattern with powder-gold spots – another gift from my mom, to whom I wrote the first note. Then I wrote another note to a friend, and another, and another, and another, and another, until the creamy notepaper was used up. To make it easy to enjoy the pattern on the inside flap of the envelopes, I used stickers to seal the letters closed instead of sealing the flap all the way. Well, the letters may be mundane – I’m still re-learning how to write a letter – but at least the paper is pretty. I looked up the postage (it’s gone up quite a bit!), stuck on an assortment of stamps (another dusty collection I should get through), and put the letters in my bag. I tucked the surplus of envelopes into my newly-labeled “Envelopes” drawer, also quite full of the odds and ends of collections. (Why is it that there’s always this mismatch?) No more buying stationery until these cabinets are empty, and emptied in the best way possible.

Time to revisit books like A Woman of Independent Means (Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, not the no-nonsense financial guide by Gail Vaz-Oxlade), Daddy Long Legs, and Yours, Isaac Asimov. Can you recommend any good epistolary novels?

Do you write letters? E-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com and let’s swap mailing addresses. I can’t promise that I’ll write regularly, but I think it would be great to learn this again: the art of letter-writing, and the art of being the kind of friend who writes.

Writing is a great way to share what I’m learning with lots of people, and I’d like to make that a large part of my life. To test the idea, I wanted to learn how to edit, format, and self-publish an e-book. E-books are handy because I don’t have to worry about inventory, distribution, or shipping. I also have more freedom when it comes to layout and colour, and I don’t have to worry about getting things wrong for an expensive print run. It was a great first step.

Instead of writing a whole new book, I decided to collect my favourite blog posts from my archive. This meant that I could focus on learning the new part – preparing and publishing an e-book – instead of getting bogged down in writing new content. I spent a few weeks re-reading everything and selecting a fraction of the posts. I exported these to HTML files, combined them, and imported them into Microsoft Word so that I could edit and format the posts. I picked Microsoft Word because I wanted to play around with ink annotations in addition to creating a simple layout for the text.

I like using a landscape orientation for easier reading on horizontal screens, so I formatted it with two columns. I added pictures and a few sketches. Instead of one big table of contents, I broke it up into several chapters and added chapter-level tables of contents. This led me to learn about Microsoft Word’s table of contents field and the ability to set up TOCs for a specific section. I wanted the page header to reflect the current chapter title, too, so I learned how to include the chapter as a field.

When I was happy with the document, I exported it to PDF and uploaded it to Lulu. I chose Lulu because I didn’t want to bother with calculating and collecting sales tax for all the different countries. I also didn’t want to spend time building an e-commerce site. I picked $2.99 as the price – low-profit, but also low-risk. Lulu didn’t offer a way to send people updates afterwards, so I asked people to send me their receipts so that I could send them updates if I released a new version. I was delighted to find that a few people bought the book even with very little promotion on my end. (Thank you for your vote of confidence!)

A PDF is great for controlling layout, but it doesn’t display well on many e-reader devices. I exported the Microsoft Word document back to HTML, then used Emacs and Sigil to clean up the HTML markup and convert it to EPUB format. Calibre helped me convert the EPUB to the MOBI format that the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing program requires. I filled in the Amazon KDP forms and created another cover image.

I looked into using Smashwords for distribution, but it used Microsoft Word documents for input, so I went back to Lulu and uploaded the EPUB for distribution to iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble Nook store. We’ll see how that goes.

Putting together an e-book turned out to not be a scary process at all. That means I can start working on other books without worrying about getting stuck at the end of the process. Next book might be 101 Things You Can Do with Emacs! =)