sacha chua living an awesome life

Every so often, I make a list of things I would like to learn or work on. Not only does thinking about what I want to learn help me decide how to spend my time, it also makes it easier for me to ask for help. I don’t refer to the previous lists while making a new one, because the differences between the lists gives me valuable information. If my new list is missing some things that were on my previous list, that tells me that my priorities and interests have changed. I can decide whether I want to go back to those old priorities, or if it’s okay to shelve those ideas for later.

Here’s my current list:

My parents were having problems with their company’s recent web hosting migration. No e-mail was getting forwarded to the e-mail accounts that they had set up previously, and the two blogs that were separate from the main site didn’t get transferred either. My mom asked me to help restore the blogs. They needed someone to sort out the email and other system administration issues, so I suggested that she find a local system administrator who can also take care of upgrading WordPress and other sites as needed.

I don’t particularly enjoy system administration. I feel terrible when I make a mistake on my own server, and I don’t want to be on the hook for anyone else’s. I’ve done some system administration work as part of web development, since I was usually the person with the most Linux experience in my teams. Setting up is easy, but maintenance could be fiddly, and keeping up with security updates can be no fun. (I’m looking at you, Rails.) Add to that the time zone differences and the inability to just lean over and fix things, and, well…

So I was feeling conflicted and unfilial about wanting to help my mom but not wanting to commit to being the company sysadmin. The problem needed to be fixed, though, and they probably wouldn’t find a good system administrator in time.

As an experiment, I tried imagining an alternate universe in which I would be comfortable making those changes and being The IT Guy (or Gal, in this case). If I lived near my parents, I would help them, of course. I do that for friends and family here. If I had the routines for managing many sites, then it would be easy to maintain another site and another company. I can imagine that for Alternate Universe Sacha, this kind of work might even be easy and enjoyable.

Having imagined this Alternate Universe Sacha, I tried “stepping sideways” into that role. Sure, I was half a world away, but I could mentally move the house to my hometown. Time zone differences and distance can make it difficult to communicate because it’s hard to tell how busy someone is and when you get the information you need, but it actually worked out well because I worked on it in the evening while people were at work back home. If I stopped worrying about the possibilities of messing things up worse and instead took the same methodical approach that I would use if I had a lot of experience in this (and I guess I do, compared to many people), then it would actually be pretty straightforward. Besides, I reassured myself, everything will turn out all right. Even if I messed things up, family’s still family. For gaining experience, it’s hard to find a more forgiving client.

It turned out to be straightforward, although it did involve a lot of clicking around. E-mail works again, and the blogs are both back up. Not only that, I now have an alternate universe Sacha whom I can think of myself as if I need to do more system administration work. I’m using that idea to make it easier for me set up proper maintenance for my personal sites as well. If I was an experienced and constantly improving system administrator who enjoyed doing this, how would I do this? It’s no substitute for actual experience–I’ll still miss things people learned the hard way–but it helps me reach that point of learning what I need to learn the hard way.

I wonder what alternate universe selves I might play with in the future. Do you use any?

High Park has a lot of cherry trees. They bloom for such a short time and it’s hard to predict when peak bloom will be, so it can be difficult to organize a get-together with friends. The park is just a few minutes away by bike, though, so it would be a shame to miss it. This year I guiltlessly went on my own to see the cherry blossoms, enjoy the brief spectacle, and marvel at how busy the park is during those few days.

I like the delicacy of watercolours, but have never quite gotten the hang of doing them with actual water. I fuss about with water and paints, and then I end up with this brownish-grey mess that doesn’t look anywhere near what I wanted. Drawing on my tablet PC is helping me learn to enjoy drawing, so maybe my tablet PC can also help me learn to enjoy painting.

Here’s the rest of what I drew/painted:

I used Artrage 4 because it can mimic brushes and other cool things. I don’t have the level of real-life watercolour experience that would make me frustrated with the tool’s limitations, so I’m learning by trial and error. I want to make etagami – picture letters! Here are some examples:

• etagami-inbox
• kiirakirsi’s pinterest
• Dosankodebbie’s etagami notebook
• Maybe I can send my friends and family digital hand-painted letters, and then eventually move to doing them on paper… Or as print-outs, but that would be cheating, wouldn’t it?

Blog posts

• Weekly review: Week ending May 3, 2013
• Thinking about movies
• Sketchnoting: Finding a balance of details and diagrams, and calibrating your writing to time
• Hacking my motivation for workouts
• Quantifying my habit of writing, and things I’ve learned along the way
• Use the weekly review to give yourself permission to do things you want to do
• Monthly review: April 2013

Accomplished this week

• Business
  • Earn
    • Earn: Consulting – E1 – Tuesday
    • Earn: Consulting – E1 – Do some consulting this Wednesday
    • Earn: Consulting – E1 – Thursday
    • Discuss curriculum sketches and workshops with M
    • Start drafting a curriculum sketch for M
    • Send invoice
  • Connect
    • Help Cena Mayo with Emacs
    • Join ALU Lisp meeting
    • Attend Toronto Agile Support Group
  • Build
    • Accounting
      • Set up accounting thing
      • Ask accountant about QST
      • Send Interac transfer to accountant
      • Check out and send accountant’s copy of my Quickbooks records
      • Apply accounting changes
      • [#A] Call Revenu Quebec – Waiting for call back
    • System administration
      • Copy my home directory
      • Copy all the files for my website
      • Copy ~/all_dbs.sql
• Relationships
  • Family
    • Upload database
    • Recreate basic WordPress
    • Synchronize e-mails
  • Go to HackLab open house
  • Host tea party
• Life
  • Japanese
    • Register for a Japan Foundation library card
    • Study a Japanese song
    • Learn new Japanese song
    • Read a volume of manga
  • Gardening
    • Buy tomato plants from corner store
    • Plant tomatoes and other vegetables
    • Add compost and topsoil to grass and backyard
  • Set up dentist appointment
  • Game: Make progress toward endgame
  • See cherry blossoms
  • Draw for the fun of it
  • Declutter
  • Fill up my TFSA and RRSP

Plans for next week

• Business
  • Earn
    • [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Tuesday
    • [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Thursday
    • [ ] Talk to Shawn about sketchnoting FITC
    • [ ] Sketchnote GIST tech conference
  • Build
    • [ ] Practise drawing for two hours
    • [ ] Sketchnote a book
    • [ ] Interface for goals
    • [ ] Figure out org2blog publishing using Org 8
    • [ ] Set up virtual box
  • Connect
    • [ ] Talk to Matt about what he can help me with
• Relationships
  • [ ] Get together with W-’s family
• Life
  • [ ] Collect 50 sentences for my Japanese-English deck
  • [ ] Take notes on “Strategies for Reading Japanese”
  • [ ] Plant lavender
  • [ ] Have dental new patient exam

Time review

• Business: 35.8 hours (Earn: 18.2, E1: 18.2, Connect: 3.1, Build: 14.5)
• Discretionary: 43.6 hours (Social: 8.6, Productive: 15.5, Writing: 3.7, Emacs: 2.6, Play: 3.4)
• Personal: 20.9 hours (Routines: 11.3)
• Sleep: 54.1 hours – average of 7.7 hours per day
• Unpaid work: 13.7 hours (Commuting: 1.5, Cook: 4.6, Tidy: 1.9)

Last month, I wrote:

April will be more about slowing down and following up, I think. But this is good.

It took me a while to sort out a good workflow for processing the videos from the Emacs Conference, but I was glad I did so, even though there were a few miscommunications along the way. I got back into the swing of consulting and sketchnoting too, so that was great. =)

It’s almost a third of the way through May already! I’m looking forward to more consulting, sketchnoting, and illustrating. The weather’s warmed up, so friends are starting to organize more get-togethers. Then there’s planting the front and back garden, studying Japanese (my goal for May: 500 lines in my spaced-repetition deck), and drawing some more… May’s shaping up to be terrific.

• Emacs
  • Brainstorming ways to help build the Emacs community
  • Emacs Conference 2013 Sketchnotes (also, PDF!)
  • Emacs Conference 2013 videos
  • Emacs chat intro
  • How to present using Org-mode in Emacs
• Improvement
  • Analyzing my London trip decisions: What worked well? What can I improve?
  • Understanding my procrastination
  • Things I’m learning about sharing other people’s knowledge, or why you should show me what you’ve been meaning to teach others
  • Things I learned from sketchnoting the FITC design conference
  • Practice Perfect: Calling your shots
• Drawing
  • Visual book review: The Culture Blueprint (Robert Richman)
  • How I read books and do visual book reviews
  • How I use Evernote to support my sketchnoting practice
• Life
  • Time enough for friends
  • Towards wonderful new normals
  • Building bridges to geekiness
  • Weekend cooking
  • Impatient for spring
  • Crossing worlds
  • Squishing my excuses: idea edition
  • Why and how I’m (re)learning Japanese
  • Sunday
  • How I got started in investing
• Quantified Self
  • Quantified Self: a year of grocery data
• Reviews
  • Weekly review: Week ending March 29, 2013
  • Weekly review: Week ending April 5, 2013
  • Weekly review: Week ending April 12, 2013
  • Weekly review: Week ending April 19, 2013
  • Weekly review: Week ending April 26, 2013
  • Monthly review: March 2013

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