Sacha Chua - category - reflection

Slowing down and figuring out my anxiety

2025-10-28T19:35:50Z

I am going through a lot. It is not much compared to what other people are going through. But it is more than what I usually go through, so it's a good idea to slow down and give myself space to learn how to handle it.

Part of handling times like these is touching base with what I know. I know that to be human is to have challenging times, so I don't find this surprising. I know that it is objectively difficult and that other people have a hard time with situations like this, so it's not a personal failure and there are no easy solutions. I know that it is temporary and that things will eventually settle into a new normal. I know there will be many such transitions ahead, and I'm getting used to the process of leaving old normals behind and focusing on the next step.

I know the way my brain tends to behave when it's overloaded. My attention hiccups. I hang up my keys on a coat hook instead of the one near the door. My fingers stutter on the piano. I can't multitask. When that starts to get in my way, it's a good reminder to get more sleep and do fewer things. There are very few firm commitments in my life, and I appreciate the flexibility that my past self planned. There's room to wobble¹ without bringing everything crashing down.

2025-09-13-05 A few of my brain's failure modes -- life

Text from sketch

Reflecting on my conscientiousness (or whatever the opposite is)

2025-03-05T18:29:21Z

Over the past few days, I've been reflecting on the personality trait of conscientiousness, which is something that can be a bit of a struggle for me. From Wikipedia:

Conscientiousness is the personality trait of being responsible, careful, or diligent. Conscientiousness implies a desire to do a task well, and to take obligations to others seriously. Conscientious people tend to be efficient and organized as opposed to easy-going and disorderly. They tend to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; they display planned rather than spontaneous behavior; and they are generally dependable. Conscientiousness manifests in characteristic behaviors such as being neat, systematic, careful, thorough, and deliberate (tending to think carefully before acting).

Conscientiousness and me

I think of myself as not very conscientious. At school, I struggled with completing homework, sometimes not even turning in assigned essays. I forgot about deadlines and accidentally left my stuff behind. I did well on standardized tests because I could read quickly and eliminate probably incorrect answers, but other types of tests were a drag. There were some subjects I liked enough to do well in (well, mostly teachers I found engaging). For the most part, though, I didn't particularly care about grades. Even as an adult, I occasionally forget to finish something I'm working on, I lose things and time due to disorganization and attentional hiccups, and I've used my "Oops" fund a number of times. (W+ is more conscientious than I am, and occasionally patiently reminds me to take care of stuff.) I tend to follow the butterflies of my interest.

Fortunately, I've figured out some things that work well for me. Coding is great because even though it needs me to be pretty exact, I can work in small chunks, write tests to help me double-check, and automate repetitive tasks that my brain tends to hiccup on. When I worked at IBM, I had a lot of fun working on projects I cared about, like building systems to help professionals transition into teaching or helping food banks distribute food. I also did well skimming pages and pages of internal discussions so that I could summarize key themes for workshops. For my consulting clients, I tend to focus on prototyping their crazy ideas. If the idea proves worthwhile, we can then turn it over to other people to get it ready for production. Org Mode helps me keep track of what I want to do and when. In the Emacs community, I tend to focus on breadth rather than depth: Emacs News instead of package maintenance or core Emacs development. (And besides, it's volunteering anyhow, so when people bump into bugs in my code, it's either an opportunity for them to help out or something they might just put up with or work around.) I like experimenting, and I don't feel stuck; I can move on from an experiment when I've gotten enough data or when things change. I've shifted my life so that most of the tasks on my to-do list are things that I want to do that aren't time-sensitive, so I can do them when I want.

Noticing when my brain likes to do the work

I recognize myself in other descriptions of conscientiousness. I like to plan and I like to take notes. I get somewhat stressed by the idea of being late, although I've learned to chill out a little about that because kids mean being flexible about time. I like considering decisions carefully and doing little experiments. I find risky behaviour stressful rather than fun. Still, I tend to think of myself as someone who doesn't do the extra work, who often doesn't pay attention to the fiddly details. A few counter-examples might help me figure out more about when my brain likes to spend the extra time on things:

In a cryptography course that I took in university, we had an assignment to break a simple monalphabetic cipher. Each student was assigned one line. I had fun crunching through all of them (puzzles! piece of cake) and I distinctly remember relishing the teachers' surprise the next day.
I signed up for more school, getting a master's degree in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. I got interested in it for two reasons:
- I enjoyed teaching computer science at my alma mater. Getting an advanced degree was strongly recommended. I experimented with a masters in education but I wasn't that interested in it.
- I was also interested in personal information management thanks to Emacs and Planner Mode, so I was curious about exploring the usage patterns of people who had highly customized their PIM tool. Several papers in that area had been written by a researcher at the University of Toronto, so I applied there for a master's. That researcher left shortly after I arrived, so we looked around for another topic. Eventually we settled on social networking platforms in organizations, which was also interesting for me because it was about how people use technology to organize collective knowledge.
I also signed up for parenting knowing that it's a ton of extra work including stress-testing my abilities, being responsible for helping an entirely separate little being figure out things I'm still figuring out myself, and handling endless problem-solving and adaptation in the face of uncertainty.
I notice that I'm getting a little better at slowing down and practising piano, singing, and drawing. I've tried all these things before, but now I can approach it differently because I'm going into it with more life experience.
- For piano, I can treat it like a moving meditation on the quirks of my monkey mind, and be amused at how my brain learns. I enjoy feeling the motions become more automatic. I also like the thoughts and memories that the pieces evoke. (As part of this beginner course I'm doing, I just practised a very simple version of "Thus Spake Zarathustra", which makes everything feel more epic.) Eventually I think it would be nice to be able to play the music that A+ and I might want to sing to. It seems to be my current hyperfocus. I enjoy spending the time practising, knowing that there's no way to skip that part (and perhaps this is even supposed to be the fun part).
- For singing, I can be mystified by all the weird movements that I have to figure out in my larynx and my diaphragm and other parts I haven't even figured out how to name yet, much less activate. It gives me some empathy for how kids are learning about things we can't easily teach them.
- For drawing, I can be amused by the gap between how things really are and how I imagine them to be, and the gap between what I imagine and what I can draw. The video tutorial assures me that taking the time to slow down and shade or add texture is worthwhile, and is even the fun part of drawing. I still get impatient occasionally (do I really want to spend all this time on one sketch?), but it's an interesting perspective. I think it might be nice to develop art into a relaxing activity. If I go through the steps, I'll probably get there. Also, I like doodling to break up the wall of text in a blog post like this one, so that's another fun way to practice.

So maybe I can be a bit more conscientious when it's something I'm curious about or care about.

Supporting my brain

For the tasks that I need to be conscientious about, there are other things that help:

I'm getting better at accepting my limits. For example, when I had a pie in the oven last night, I told A+ that I couldn't go off to play Minecraft with her because I might forget about the pie and accidentally undercook or overcook it.
Writing notes helps me keep track of where I am, what I wanted to do next, what I'm figuring out along the way, and so on. The possibility of sharing those notes (and thus having more opportunities to learn from my past self or from other people) also encourages me to get to a point where those notes can be shared. Here I really appreciate how Org Mode helps me capture, manage, and post my tasks and notes, thanks to literate programming. People occasionally tell me that they think I'm very organized, but that's probably just because I write about stuff so that when I forget, I can look them up again.
Checklists are also handy. Most of the time, I just make a checklist on my phone using Orgzly Revived, but maybe I can make these more visual. I notice that I'm not particularly influenced by the gamification strategy of a streak count and mildly influenced by XP bars.
Journal entries and blog posts also give me a record of what I've worked on, and even little bits of progress accumulate.
I'm also learning to to distract the fidgety part of my brain with music or movement, and to manage it with timers. Timers are great. Timers to get started, timers to check in with myself, timers to come back…
Automation is wonderful. Getting a computer to do the work is often more fun and less error-prone than my doing it myself. Even semi-automation is helpful.

Despite not thinking of myself as particularly conscientious, I'm pretty happy with what I've been figuring out about my life and the world. I can think of how I work as building on my strengths instead of just working around my weaknesses. I enjoy learning about and dabbling in lots of different interests, and the combination of ideas can be very useful (like dancer curiosity). Framing many decisions as experiments helps me get to 80%-fine quickly, and I don't spend a lot of time chasing down that last 20% that takes most of the effort. I don't fit the hustle culture of many self-help books, blogs, and videos, and that's okay.

Not far from the tree

I think my dad was not particulary conscientious either, at least not in terms of planning ahead, paying attention to details, following conventions. He was always in motion, happiest whenever he had a crazy project. Fortunately, he was really good at inspiring other people to handle the logistics. He came up with the ideas ("I want to fly across the Philippines in an ultralight") and people like my mom figured out how (fuel, landing spots, etc.). His spontaneous road trips drove me a little batty when I was a kid. But also, when it came to the things he cared about, he could spend hours, days, weeks on getting it right. I remember how he'd stay up late to figure something out, whether it was digital photography or Microsoft 3D Pinball. I've written about how he repeatedly drew variations on the same sketch in order to figure out what he wanted. He did okay. He found his way, even though it looked nothing at all like the standard paths. I'm probably doing all right, too.

My mom was more conscientious and deliberate than my dad was. She handled the business while my dad got to focus on his passions. From her, I picked up the habits of reading and writing. I think I'd like to be more of a mix between their styles rather than one or the other.

Growing

Apparently, conscientiousness tends to increase with age, so that's interesting. I feel slower when it comes to some things (probably because of adapting to all those distractions and periods of sleep deprivation, or maybe age, or simply a more realistic evaluation of my abilities), so it's easier to give myself time to do things that are slow. Maybe I'll get better at enjoying the act of practising and paying attention to the details. I'll probably benefit from more orderliness, too. I wonder how I can get my brain to enjoy decluttering and figuring out the right homes for objects. It's a little like preparing the space so that I can see what I like and it's easy to work on what I enjoy. (Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up might be relevant here, although even she has found keeping a tidy house with kids to be a challenge…)

Tangent: A quote from Marie Kondo

Questions I often ask myself

2019-05-30T00:35:45Z

Chenny asked me what kinds of things I'm concerned about, so I started reflecting on the kinds of questions I usually ask myself. Here's a rough list with some examples:

What could make things a little bit better? How can I compound those improvements? A few notes on kaizen
Which trade-offs might be worth it? Which ones do I decide against? How can I experiment?
What do I want from this stage? What has changed? How can I make the most of that? What's coming up next?

2018-07-29b What do I want from this stage #parenting #planning

,

2017-05-07a What do I want to learn at this stage #parenting #learning #plans
What could awesome look like? How can I tell if I'm on the right track? How far do I want to go? Example, other posts
What might failure look like? What are the warning signs? Example: Experiment pre-mortem, Update
What are the risks and downsides? How can I mitigate them?
How can I make things easier for future me?
How can I test and work around my current limits? Ex: squirrel brain
What do I want to remember, reflect on, and share?
What do my decisions tell me about my values? Do I agree? Do I want to change things?
What are the results of past decisions and experiments? What can I learn from those? A few notes on decisions
How do I want to grow?
What do I want to learn? How can I learn it? What do I know now?
How can I get better at seeing, noticing, asking, reflecting, organizing, sharing, improving?
Where can I take advantage of leverage or comparative advantage? Where is it good to not optimize along obvious dimensions?
What would I do if I were starting from scratch? Which sunk costs should I ignore?
What can I break down, connect, or transform?
How am I different from alternate universe mes? How can I make the most of that? Example
What happens if I look closely at my discomfort or fear? Where am I shying away from something, and why? Example: uncertainty, working on my own things, the experiment
Where does it make sense to take on more difficulty or do things worse so that I can do things even better later on?
What have I forgotten or neglected? What do I want to reclaim, and what do I want to let go? Some thoughts
What do I not know to look for? How can I bump into stuff like that?

At the moment, I'm focused on time and attention. I think about what's worth giving up sleep for, and how sleeping more might help with some things like thinking. I think about time with W- and A-. I think about week-to-week changes and how I can adapt. I think about how we can use little bits of time to improve things in order to more effectively use time. There's definitely a lot to figure out!

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Book reflection: Raising a Secure Child

2018-07-22T05:38:44Z

Raising a Secure Child (Guilford Publications, 2017) is about reflecting on and working with the Circle of Security: how kids go out to explore and come back for comfort, and how we can support them both going and coming back. It reminds us to be bigger, stronger, wiser, and kind, and that children can't figure out how to manage their emotions by themselves – they need us to help them.

Me, I'm working on helping A- feel that I delight in who she is, not just what she does. It's easy to have fun paying attention to every little thing she learns, keeping track of them in my journal, but she's more than the sum of those moments.

I also noticed that some of my internal pressure to get A- outside might come more from my need to be a good parent than what she needs at the moment. Being aware of that helped me slow down and appreciate what she wanted from time at home.

The book talks a lot about shark music, the fears and insecurities that get in our way as parents. I notice that I exert a little effort when supporting A-‘s exploration so that I don't let my worries interfere with her, and I want to be careful not to make her feel I'm crowding her.

I'm definitely safety-sensitive in terms of relationships, and I can see why that's the case. Knowing that, I can try to correct for my biases and work on connecting better. I might not be as comfortable with anger as I could be, and that's worth working on too. I'm okay handling A-‘s anger, although she rarely gets angry too.

I like the way the Being-With concept gives me more ways of thinking about supporting A- through challenging emotions. The sample dialogues were interesting.

I think I need to try the ideas from Raising a Secure Child for a while before I can get a sense of whom I might recommend the book to. It's good food for thought, though.

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Thinking about more reflection and sharing

2018-06-16T02:46:37Z

Okay. I've gotten basic recording sorted out, I think. I can capture quick notes, photos, and videos to document our lives and serve as placeholders for further reflection. I can organize them into rough categories. Babysitting gives me enough brainspace for both consulting and self-improvement. My sleep is still a bit messy, but that's probably at least half because of me. I'm confident about spending time with A- and helping her learn stuff. Time to think of the next steps.

I think there are three big areas for me:

planning and experimenting with potential improvements: needs attention, creativity, and implementation time
sharing tweaks and things I've figured out: good for backing up and for conversation
making sense of facts, asking questions, synthesizing, reflecting

Our continuous improvement capabilities are okay, although of course there's room to grow. Physical stuff (reorganization, trying stuff, decluttering) can happen throughout the day. Reading fits in late at night or in snippets throughout the day, although I'm still skimming for things to think about instead of being able to take notes or think about things in depth. Coding tiny little tools fits in late at night or during babysitting sessions – not big projects yet, but shell scripts and short Emacs Lisp functions are quite doable.

I'd like to get better at circling back and posting source code and experiment notes. Maybe I'll start by including just a paragraph or two describing key motivation and intended result, then jump straight into the code or description. I'm not sure if it will help anyone else, but who knows? Besides, it's good to have stuff like that in my own archive.

It seems like such a splurge to use babysitting time for thinking, drawing, and writing. I don't know if I can write a post worth $120+ to myself or other people, and besides, I want to write more personally relevant things before I get back into sketchnoting books or putting together, say, Emacs guides. But if I think of the babysitting as primarily paying for A- to practise independence and social interaction with someone one-on-one, I do some consulting every week, and I make an effort to pick up one or two new activity ideas each time we have someone over, I can think of the discretionary time as a bonus instead of trying to optimize my use of that time.

Let me think about sense-making. I've been focusing on just capturing what was going on because it was hard to think more deeply. I'm a little less preoccupied now, so I have some brainspace for thinking. Some questions to ponder:

What is A- interested in learning? What does she think? Why does she do what she does? How can I grow so that I can support her even more effectively?
What else can I experiment with? How can I reduce waste or costs (including intangibles), and how can I increase benefits?
How can I make learning visible for both A- and me?
What do I want from all of this? How do I want this to shape me?

Writing this on a bench in the park, arms around a sleeping A-, I'm somewhat challenged by the small window I'm writing in (there's room for a couple of paragraphs and that's it), the inability to refer to other things side by side, and the possibility of interruption. But maybe I can think and write in medium-sized chunks: a little bigger than the quick notes I've been taking, but small enough that I don't need an outline or the ability to easily rearrange my text. I can write more stream-of-consciousness stuff instead of worrying about editing. I can give myself permission to cover ground relatedly instead of worrying whether I'd written about something before, or if I'd just dreamed it.

Let's warm up those thinking muscles. :)

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Scribe and tinker

2018-02-22T20:01:01Z

I've been figuring out more about what tickles my brain and what I want to do with my life.

On one hand, I'm a scribe. I like extracting, organizing, and connecting ideas. I like getting stuff out of my head and into a form that I can work with or share with other people. I often like helping get stuff out of other people's heads too. This explains my fascination with blogging, sketchnoting, personal knowledge management, and processes. To get better at this, I can focus on skills like:

Asking questions
Finding resources
Making sense
Connecting and building on ideas
Organizing
Communicating
Archiving

On the other hand, I'm a tinker. I like tweaking things to make them better. It's not about big inventions, but small, continuous improvements. This explains my fascination with Emacs, Quantified Self, open source, and general geeking around. To get better at this, I can focus on skills like:

Seeing problems and possibilities
Estimating, prioritizing, and evaluating
Setting up experiments
Connecting ideas
Learning techniques
Coding
Tweaking physical things

If I look at the intersection of being a scribe and being a tinker, that explains my interest in:

Building/tweaking systems to help me capture, organize, connect, and share knowledge
Writing about experiments and lessons learned

What would it look like to be very, very good at these things? It's quite convenient that I'm into knowledge work, since I can learn from millennia of people passionate about that. Tinkering shows up in entrepreneurship and invention, so I have plenty of role models there, too. I could probably spend a lifetime learning as much as I can from Benjamin Franklin and similar people.

How does parenting influence this? What can I gain from being the primary caregiver of a young child?

I've taken advantage of my push towards externalizing memory to work out a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly journaling workflow that works for me, and a way to think about questions in the scattered moments I have for myself. It took a bit of figuring out and there are things I still want to improve about my process. Chances are that there are other similarly-inclined people who could benefit. I wonder what things could be like if we could get better at thinking, capturing, and sharing at this stage. I don't expect that I'll come up with some brilliant insights. Most of my notes are about everyday life or my own questions. Still, I notice that this process seems to be good for my mental health, and it's okay for me to explore ideas slowly especially if I get better at building on ideas instead of going around in circles. I can let the tough meaning-making be handled by people like Pulitzer-prize journalists (surely there must be quite a few who have also been or will become primary caregivers) and people who have different life arrangements (like part-time daycare), and I can focus on the questions I'm particularly curious about or the things that are uncommon about our experiments.

As for tinkering, there are tons of improvement opportunities exposed by the demands of parenting. If I keep track of the pain points/opportunities and work on improving my skills, I'll probably grow at just the right pace. It would be interesting to improve my quick-experiment rate. Reading and thinking give me lots of things to try in terms of parenting, and talking to other people might help a lot too. W- is a good mentor for quick DIY and household things. It's a little harder to do quick programming tweaks at the moment, but that can wait until I can concentrate more. I've set up my phone so that I can do some things through it, so I can consider the tradeoff between coding on my phone versus using the time to write.

I think I can make this work so that the time and energy I'll devote to A- over the next couple of years can count for other goals, too. The more clearly I understand myself, the more effectively I can use my time and attention. I'm looking forward to seeing where writing more can take me, since I can do that while A-‘s nursing. During the day, it could be good to explore improvements to our physical environment and our processes, since A- can appreciate those too. There'll be time for other things later, as A- becomes more capable and more independent. Onward!

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Thinking about impact

2018-02-20T20:36:42Z

In preparation for possibly making it to a conversation tomorrow about quantified impact, I've been thinking about the impact I want my experiments to have and how I might be able to observe and measure them.

I realized that I'm less interested in looking at my impact on the wider world and more interested in looking at the impact on myself. I'm also interested in the impact on my family. This is partly due to the influence of Stoicism's focus on the things that I can control, partly the freedom of not having external performance reviews, and partly an experimental belief that if I take care of my own life and share what I'm learning with others, wider impact will follow. I don't need to seek it prematurely. I can focus instead on having a solid foundation to build on.

If I evaluated impact based on the outcomes for A-, I would leave that too vulnerable to chance (what if A- died unexpectedly?) or conflict (what if A- wanted a different path?). It feels more right to focus on doing my part well, and to evaluate myself accordingly. If other things work out well, that's a nice bonus, and keeping an eye on how those things are going can help me check if I'm on track or drifting.

With that in mind, what kind of impact do l want for my experiments, big and small?

Deeper appreciation of life, meaning: My biggest experiment at the moment is parenting. Based on research, parenting is likely to increase feelings of satisfaction and purpose, and will probably be worth the reduced autonomy and increased vulnerability. It's not so much about pleasure as it is about eudaimonia.

Deeper appreciation of W- and other people: Research is pessimistic on the effect of parenting on marital satisfaction and social connection, but I might be able to counter those effects by paying attention thoughtfully. I've certainly developed a deeper appreciation of W- over the past few years, and I feel like I'm getting to know Toronto better too. Parenting lets me see my family and my in-laws in a new light. I like being able to remember that everyone was a baby once, too, and I like being able to appreciate other people more.

Practice in equanimity: Parenting brings plenty of opportunities to apply philosophy to life. I like wasting less energy on frustration and directing more energy towards paying attention and moving forward. I've been able to keep my cool in varied situations, and now I'm working on being able to respond thoughtfully and creatively in the moment.

Push to learn and grow: I'm taking advantage of my desire to help A- by learning more about child development, early childhood education, health, science, and other things. I'm sure I'll learn about lots of random topics along the way. I'm trading a bit of self-direction for motivation and pushes out of my comfort zone. I could start tracking this by writing down what I'm learning about.

Experiences, empathy: Not only with W- and A-, but with other people too.

Immersion into children's worlds, playfulness, wonder, creativity: Good stuff.

Reduced friction, increased capabilities, increased effects: It's good to deal with constraints like sleep disruption and limited attention, since I can find the rough spots and figure out ways to improve them.

Good boundaries, assertiveness, deliberation: I'm learning more about making decisions, asserting myself, and changing my mind as needed.

Shared notes, possible business ideas, credibility: Other people might benefit from what I'm learning or doing.

Increased Emacs community, learning from each other: I'm glad I can do Emacs News. Looking forward to having more brain space so that I can contribute tweaks too, since playing with Emacs improves my capabilities and tickles my brain.

The book All Joy and No Fun promises to be an interesting summary of the research into the effects of parenting on parents.

If I can be more thoughtful about the effects I want (or need to watch out for) from the various choices I can make, then I might be able to make better decisions or invest a little effort and get even better results. It's fun thinking about these things!

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.