Matt Chung's Site

Category: Self-Improvement

  • LIYVZ’s “lesson learned” as a female, black plus sized K-Pop singer

    Liyvz, a K-Pop singer posted the video below on her Instagram page and I love love love the message that she shared and the story she shares exemplifies bravery and willingness to “be you” despite public criticism. Her willingness to practice authenticity is an attribute that I am not only striving for, but actively working on (related blog post: stop worrying about what people think of you)

    Right out the gate, she shares a common question she gets:

    “What am I trying to achieve by being a plus sized K-Pop artist.”

    She discusses that when she first started releasing music, despite wanting perform as a solo artist, she initially joined a band.

    “Even though I just started out that way, I was like ‘let me just do things with the band’ because at that point I had gained a lot of weight. I don’t want people to make fun of me when I go up there and do this thing that’s so vulnerable and so special to me.”

    This makes so much sense and I can relate. For much of my life, I’ve feared being in the spotlight and at the same time, craved it, a deep desire to be able stand up on my own two feet and at the same time, so unsure of myself and afraid of public humiliation. And I can see how joining a band seems like the “safer” choice. Doing so provides some (potentially illusion) security: strength in numbers, right?

    However, when her and her band starting gaining traction on social media, the comments directed towards her were — by what I call keyboard warriors — predominately poking fun at her. I feel anger when I hear people trying to humiliate he; in fact, in general, I have little tolerance for public humiliation and will check somebody when they try to do so.

    Anyways, after being in a band for some time, she eventually took the leap for going solo as an artist. To her surprise, when she went out on her own, she received “a lot more positive reception” and more and more people were genuinely rooting for her.

    Her main take away?

    “No matter how much you try to like put yourself in a box or make yourself what other people want you to be, being yourself is probably gonna be the best reception that you’re gonna get…if you are going to put yourself out there, you might as well do it authentically because the people who really like and admire you in that space are gonna be admiring you for who you truly are.”

    She’s spot on here. This is similar advice I heard recently from Jo-L, when he was a guest on the London Capsule’s podcast episode, when he said:

    “You can make a choice. People are going to either love you for everything that you are and everything you want to be. Or they are going to hate you for that. Then on the other hand, they are going to be hating you for all the things you are not, that you are pretending to be. So essentially, you are going to be loved and hated anyway. So you might as well be loved for the things that you really want to be loved for.

    Ultimately, the point is this: be yourself. Liyvz’s states that you should just be you. “You can try to make yourself more palatable for other people but at the end of the day, you end up drained you end up feeling like you’re not being your true self.”

    Her statement is both wise and aligned with what Michael Gervais — PhD and sports psychologists — writes in his book The first step of mastery: stop worrying about what other people think of you.

    Michael shares that “the exhaustive need to perform will tear at the seams of well-being, relationships, and one’s own potential.”

    In sum, I absolutely admire her tenacity, vulnerability, and commitment to herself. And it’s the path that I’m walking down myself: learning to just be me and practicing how to stop worrying about what other people think of me.

  • On restarting a meditation practice, reducing anxiousness, and overcoming sensitivity to other’s opinions

    On restarting a meditation practice, reducing anxiousness, and overcoming sensitivity to other’s opinions

    Today I meditated for an entire 20 minutes. For me, that’s a long time, as someone who struggles to still.

    Here’s what went down for today. The first 10 minutes was basically a paired muscle relaxation (PMR), tensing muscles (e.g. hamstring, glute, bicep) and releasing them, silently and mentally whispering the word “relax” to myself. I have been practicing this on and off, inconsistently the last year, first learning about the effects of PMR on reducing anxiety; this practice was introduced during my dialectical behavior therapy group.

    After this paired muscle relaxation exercise, I transitioned to another “breathing” exercise, focusing on the breath and again, classically conditioning my body and training myself to relax the nervous system on command. It goes like this: inhale, hold the breath, count to 4 seconds, slowly exhale. Do this 10 times in a row, which makes up a single round. After the round, repeat a mantra, something to the effect of “Whenever I say easy easy easy, my body goes completely relaxed.”

    There’s multiple motivations to reinstate my meditation practice.

    First, “have you started a meditation practice” is more or less the first comment that you’ll receive upon joining the Stretch Therapy forum.

    Meditation goes hand in hand with stretching and as important (and dare I say: more important) than stretching itself. The idea is to increase your awareness, allowing you to be mindful of where (throughout the day) you hold tension; in what areas, in what muscles. Only then can establish new habits, new patterns that replace the (now) unnecessary — perhaps at one point in time, the tension served a purpose — tension.

    Second, I’m currently on the path of becoming the greatest dancer I can possibly be. Not by anyone else’s measuring stick, but my own.

    And I recognize as part of this journey, one of the biggest hurdles is the mental side of dance. The psychological challenges are ones that I’ve avoided in other disciplines, including tennis. I was once a good tennis player, on that path of being a great tennis player, but I could never “perform” under stress (for reasons I won’t get into here). The same stress feelings followed me in other activities including playing guitar, singing, and now in dance.

    Furthermore, I believe that the self-induced stress predominately stems from what Michael Gervais calls FOPO: fear of other people’s opinion. I won’t go into too much detail of that here (check out my book reading progress) but I strongly believe that if I stay the course of practicing mastery, stay the course of mitigating the impact my worry thoughts about what others think of me, that something great will happen.

    What is this greatness that I am visualizing?

    I’m not sure.

    But I can feel it.

  • Book reading progress update on “The first rule of mastery: Stop worrying about what people think of you”

    Book reading progress update on “The first rule of mastery: Stop worrying about what people think of you”

    I often do not finish reading books that I started. And generally speaking, while I do value completing what I start, I also practice self-compassion and most recently in adult life, deliberately and mindfully moving away from the behavior of “forcing” (or tricking) myself to do things that I don’t feel compelled to do. Fortunately, I’m in good company and many others are like me; in fact, today there was a post published on Hacker News thread titled “It’s okay to abandon things”.

    Anyways, the book that I’m actively reading — in between reading “Sports Psyching: Playing your best game of all time” – is titled: “The first rule of mastery: Stop worrying about what other people think” by Michael Gervais

    I’m continuing to become more and more aware of my own thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and values. One attribute of mine that I’m currently VERY curious about is my high degree of acceptance:

    the desire to increase acceptance from others and reduce criticism or rejection.

    This topic fascinates me because I feel — deep in my bones — that I can live more authentically and reach my full potential (to be determined) if I spend less time worrying about what others think of me. Looking back, for much of my life, despite obtaining what some would consider external markers of success — working at a top tech company (AWS), receiving an inventor’s patent (in software networking, purchasing my first house in my mid twenties — I’ve limited myself spiritually.

    Again, I’m becoming more and more aware of my propensity to check in with what others think before arriving at a decision for myself. Though I value independence and reaching conclusions on my own, I sometimes over-index and over-value what others people think …. of me.

    For example, before I had my septum pierced, I posted a poll on Instagram, asking people what they thought was more aesthetic: nose piercing or septum piercing.

    Though that activity was fun, in retrospect, I would’ve liked for myself to make the decision regardless of the poll results. I would’ve been particularly proud if people responded negatively and I proceeded in spite of the criticisms.

    In a similar situation, just two weeks ago, I pierced my nostril. But this time: no polls. No social media posts. It’s not that I’m ashamed or embarrassed by the piercing. Not in the least. This time around, though from the outside the behavior looks the same, I arrived at the decision completely on my own.

    This second facial piercing of mine feels different internally, in my mind, in my thoughts, in my body.

    I wasn’t anxious … wasn’t worrying about what other folks thought of how I would be perceived. Caring less might be a consequence of the fact that it’s easier to do something a second time however I’d like to think that part of my recent cultivation of understanding who I am played a role.

    And now, I want to continuing building psychological tools and mental fortitude and practices and rituals that will help address the anxiousness caused by an excessive preoccupation of what other people think.

    How I stumbled on “The first rule of mastery” book

    I love learning everything and anything about self-development. And one podcast where self-development tends to be main focus is Rich Roll’s podcast. On the podcast, he typically brings on “famous” guests who demonstrate excellence in their field.

    Sometimes the guests are academics.

    Sometimes actors.

    Sometimes athletes.

    The common theme though is that they tend to be “high performers.”

    And while walking the dogs at the park a couple weeks ago, I chose a random podcast episode where Michael Gervais was the guest. The dialog between the two of them really resonated with me but the main takeaway from that episode was that high performance tends to be hindered by fear of other people’s opinion (FOPO).

    As humans, we value social acceptance and try to reduce rejection. It’s an evolutionary trait that kept us alive in our tribes. However, the argument is that that sensitivity for acceptance has become maladaptive in today’s society.

    I learned that I have a high degree of acceptance after being evaluated by a Reiss Motivational Profile Master (fun fact: I am now also certified): I am about two standard deviations away from the norm in terms of how much I “care” about what others think of me.

    In this post, I won’t go too deep into behaviors driven by high acceptance but for now, let’s just say there’s a price to pay when how we behave or present ourselves in a ways to garner social acceptance.

    Favorite quotes from the book far

    I’m about 1/3 of the way through the book but I wanted to pause, reflect, and share some of my favorite quotes I collected from the book.

    “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves” (pg. 1)

    “Now, I had more positive opinions than negative; however, I found the negative opinions to be way more magnetic. They held more weight at the time. Being stuck on those negative words, as I see it now, reminds me of one o my favorite quotes. ‘One tree can make one thousand matches. And one match can burn one thousand trees.’ (pg. 3)

    “The sooner you fundamentally change your relationship with other people’s opinions, the sooner you become free. Totally free to be at home with yourself wherever you are.” (pg. 5)

    “Developing an awareness of our fears about the opinions of others is the first step to discharge the power they hold over us. Awareness as the starting point for change is not a novel idea…But awareness is only the first step. Awareness must be accompanied by psychological skill building.” (pg. 12)

    “We externalize our self-esteem, our sense of value. We see ourselves through the eyes of others. We look outside of ourselves to determine how we feel about ourselves.” (pg. 36)

    “They are less focused on the experience and instead perseverate on how the other person may or may not feel about them. In that interaction, the problem they are trying to solve is approval or rejection as opposed to the shared social experience.”

    “Care about what people think and you will always be their prisoner”

  • 20s for education, 30s for experience, 40s for career.

    20s for education, 30s for experience, 40s for career.

    In my mid twenties, I was blessed to receive some of the best career, and quite frankly, life advice. During that period of my life, I was working as a director of technology, leading a small group of engineers. But I was getting ready to throw in the towel. I lacked both the experience and confidence needed. So I reached out to my friend Brian, asking him if he knew anyone who could help me with “executive coaching”. Thankfully, Brian connected me with a C level executive: let’s call him Phil (that’s actually his name).

    Prod, provoke, encourage

    When I met Phil at the Jerry’s Deli located in the valley, one of the first things he flat out told me was that executive coaching is bullshit. Despite that belief, he essentially coached me and gave me some sage advice that now I get to pass on.

    Seth Godin once stated that “About six times in my life, I have met somebody, who, in the moment, prodded me, provoked me, encouraged me, and something came out on the other side”.

    Phil is one of those 6 people in my life.

    The best career and life advice

    The sage advice is simple and sounds similar to Nic Haralambous’s advice “Plan in decades. Think in years. Work in months. Live in days”. But Phil’s advice offers a different perspective, another angle:

    20s for education. 30s for experience. 40s for career

    This advice stuck with me and helps me (re) calibrate my goals and values. Of course, life takes its own twists and turns. But as the Dwight Eisenhower said “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything”

    What does that look like in practice?

    20s for education is NOT synonymous with school. It really means soaking up as much as possible. This learning might take place in school but not exclusively. Because learning can happen anywhere and everywhere.

    Fail and fail a lot.

    For us tech folks, this might be learning a new programming language, dissecting the ins and outs of your compiler, picking up marketing or public speaking skills.

    The list goes on and on.

    30s for experience. This is where the rubber meets the road. Where theory and practice intersect. This may mean you want to switch roles (like how I switched from being a systems engineer to a software developer) or switch companies so that you can apply all that hard earned knowledge that you acquired in your twenties.

    Finally, 30s will feed into your 40s, where you get to establish your career. Maybe working for a small company, where you get to wear a bunch of hats. Maybe for a large corporation, where you hone in or specialize in a particular niche. Or maybe as an entrepreneur, building your own product or service.

    Now what?

    I’m actually revisiting these words of wisdom. Right now. For the last six months or so, I’ve been overly focused on an upcoming promotion from a mid to senior level engineer at Amazon. Instead of chasing this new title — cause that’s all it really is — I’d rather redirect my focus and make mistakes, stretch myself and find opportunities that put me in a uncomfortable (but growth inducing) experiences.

  • Learning how to build a personal brand (two books I picked up)

    Learning how to build a personal brand (two books I picked up)

    I want to learn how to better market myself and what it means to create my own personal brand and how I might be able to apply these marketing skills in my career (as a software developer and computer scientist) and as a writer. Because I do wonder what sort of impact and influence I would have if I applied even an ounce of marketing or branding.

    I’m planning on sinking my teeth into two different marketing books. My guitar instructor had recommended Seth Godin’s This is Marketing and a hacker news user recommended an e-book titled Authority by (someone I’ve never heard of) named Nathan Barry. I’ll take a crack at these two books and report back on the main takeaways and whether or not I recommend you reading them.

    At this moment in time, I have no clue what it means to build a personal brand (in all honestly I don’t even know what a personal brand means). Nonetheless, I do think learning about a little marketing and branding (really what’s the difference between the two) will be a worthwhile, non-technical skill to develop since I’d like down the line to become a full time writer and teacher and think marketing and branding will play a key role in making that happen.

  • Losing 2 hours searching for a website bookmark & Weekly Review: week ending in 2020/09/06

    Losing 2 hours searching for a website bookmark & Weekly Review: week ending in 2020/09/06

    My weekly review that normally takes place first thing in the morning on Sundays was completely derailed this time around, all because I could find the URL to a website that I had sworn I bookmarked for my wife’s birthday present. I ended up coughing up two hours of searching: searching directly on Reddit’s website (where I was 100% confident I stumbled upon the post), searching through 6 months of my Firefox browser history, and searching through 20 or so pages of Google Results.

    I ultimately found the page after some bizarre combination of keywords using Google, the result popping up on the 6th page of Google (I would share the URL with you but I want to keep it tucked away for the next two week until my wife’s birthday or at least until her present arrives and I gift it to her).

    How about you — when you stumble on something interesting on the internet, what steps do you take to make sure that you can successful retrieve the page again in the future? Do you simply bookmark the page using your browser’s built in bookmark feature? Do you tag that the entry with some unique or common label? Or do you store it away in some third party bookmarking service like pinboard? Or maybe you archive the entire contents of the page offline to your computer using DevonThink? Or something else?

    So many options.

    Ultimately, I don’t think the tool itself really matters: I just need to save the URL in a consistent fashion.

    Writing

    Family and Friends

    [fvplayer id=”3″]

    • Got around to finally calling my Grandma and video chatting with her so that she could see Elliott, who has grown exponentially over the last couple months
    • Signed off on tons of paper work for the new house and pulled the trigger on selling a butt load of my Amazon stocks that will cover the down payment and the escrow costs that we’re going to get hit with on September 30th (my wife’s birthday)
    • Packed about 5 more boxes worth of our belongings (e.g. books, clothing, kitchen goods)

    Music

    • Recorded about 5 different melodies and harmonies using the voice memo app on my iPhone, moving the recordings off my phone and sending them to my MacBook using AirDrop)
    • Attended my (zoom) bi-weekly guitar lesson with Jared, the lessons focusing on three areas: song writing (creative aspect), jamming (connecting with other musicians, mainly my little brother), developing a deeper understanding of the guitar (mastery).

    Mental and Physical Health

    Graduate School

    • I’d estimate I put in roughly 15 hours into graduate school in order to read research papers, write code for project 1 (i.e. writing a virtual CPU scheduler and memory coordinator) and of course watch the Udacity lectures.
    • For the development project, majority of time gets eaten up trying to grok the API documentation to libvrt. In second place would be debugging crashes in my code (which is why I always riddle my code with assert statements, a practice I picked up working at Amazon).
    • I really enjoyed watching and taking notes for this past week’s lectures. I’m taking the class at the perfect time in my career and in my graduate studies, after taking graduate operating systems and after taking high performance computing architecture. Both these courses prepared me well and provided me the foundation necessary to more meaningfully engage with the lectures. What I mean by this is that instead of passively watching and scribbling down notes, I tend to frequently click on the video to pause the stream and try to anticipate what the professor is about to say or try to answer the questions he raises. This active engagement helps the material stick better.

    Organization

    Brother label maker

    • Tossed out the cheap $25.00 label marker from Target and instead invested in a high quality Brother PTD600V label maker. Well worth the investment.
    • Culled my e-mail inbox, dropping the unread count from hundreds down to zero (will need to perform same activity this week)

    Work

    • Wrapped up my design for a new feature long, getting sign off from the technical leadership team at work. Only open action item will be to benchmark the underlying Intel DPDK’s library against IPv6 look ups (which I think I already have data for)
  • Quotes from “My life story” by Veritasium

    Quotes from “My life story” by Veritasium

    During some down time this evening, I watched the below YouTube video clip filmed and produced by Veritasium and I absolutely loved hearing about his journey, especially about how becoming a father has fundamentally changed the way he views his time. Because I’m in a similar boat: My life looks nothing like it did a little less than a year ago, when my daughter (Elliott) was born. She’s a handful but worth all the sleep the deprivation.  I’m so thankful to have such a wonderful wife who thrives as a mother (seriously: mother of the year award) and has more patience than a meditating monk.

    Anyways, the video “My Life Story” spoke to me and here are some quotes that really resonated:

     I was looking for that well defined path toward a creative career

    I’ve searched for that linear path towards a rewarding and meaningful career and I think to some degree, I’m still searching. Ideally, I could blend my work as a software developer (my dream job just a few years ago) with creative writing.

    “I reached a breaking point .. I was 28 years old and I had spent my whole life up until then building up back up plans, and doing the things that were most likely to succeed …”

    I love learning and love challenging myself and love learning more about the craft of computer science: these are all things that motivate me to pursue my master’s in computer science. But on some level, I know deep down that I want to write and read and teach and mentor: the things that spark joy in my life.

    “Sometimes I think its a blessing not to know how bad you are. If I had known I would have quit. But I didn’t. So I kept working at it

    Working at Amazon for the last 4.5 years, I now realize what it feels like to work side by side with top talent. And had I been fully aware of the gaping holes in my skills and knowledge, I don’t think I would’ve applied to work where I do now.

    I’m all too aware of the survivor bias, that is if you look at the subset of people who are successful at a particular thing, well your kinda ignoring all the experience of the many more people who did not manage to succeed

    Yes yes yes. We often look at all the people who “succeed” and listen to their sage advice of “follow your passion”, overlooking the fact that many many people “follow their passion” and fail to see their dreams manifest.

    Having kids has also made me reevaluate the types of videos I want to be making .. and what I want to be doing with my time

    Although I don’t make videos but as a father, I’m constantly evaluating how I spend my time because I know, deep down, what’s going to matter 10 years or 20 years or 30 years is this: my friends and family. Not fortune or fame (although those things are nice as well).

     

     

  • Weekly Review – Week ending in 2020/09/06

    Weekly Review – Week ending in 2020/09/06

    Writing

    I’m getting much more comfortable with publishing blog posts that are not completely polished. The fear of letting the world see less my less the perfect propose is utter non-sense. In fact, writing and publishing frequently offers two benefits. The first is that the sheer act of writing and setting words on (digital) paper improve my craft. The second benefit of producing words on a regular cadence allows me to track my writing progression, allowing me to critique my writing over time.

    Music

    The trio hanging out at magnuson park

     

    Although I didn’t put in much deliberate practice for neither singing or guitar (apart from practicing a singing the minor scale), I did sing for Elliott almost every night while bathing her, singing “What a wonderful world”. That’s the good stuff, the whole point of developing music skills, right ?

    Graduate School

    Graduate school eats up a good majority of my free time. My studies take place before work, early in the morning, around 04:30 to 05:00 AM, and after work (around 06:00 pm). In total, I get about 2 hours a day, sometimes 3 if I am lucky.

    And when it comes to the advanced operating systems course I am taking right now, there’s never a moment of rest, almost some task to make forward progress on: from reading papers (e.g. “OS Structure – SPIN”), to watching lectures (e.g. “memory virtualization”) to writing code (i.e. a scheduler and memory coordinator).

    But I’m doing my best with the limited amount of time I have and even tracking my progress by publishing my notes from lectures and publishing questions I face and publishing technical problems that I am facing while writing code my project. All of these posts, I hope, will allow me to look back at the end of the semester (about three and a half months away) and feel proud of work I put in and the knowledge I gained.

    Organization

    Current system for organization and time management broke down. The fact that a few items slipped reinforces the fact that the tools (e.g. excel, OmniFocus) do not guarantee organization: it’s the habits and processes. The tools are only a piece of the puzzle, not the solution.

    I had missed a couple appointments and missed a couple important tasks — I hate that feeling. One reason for forgetting about these events is because I failed to book the appointment in my calendar. Another reason is that although some of the events were in my calendar, I didn’t review my calendar and didn’t receive notifications of the event.  Looking back, I can think of a couple ways to fix this. The first is to make sure that for any time sensitive tasks (or tasks with due dates), I need to plug that into my calendar right away. That’s step one. The second step is to enable notifications by configuring the event to notify my phone in advance: 1 week in advanced, 1 day in advanced and then 1 hour in advanced.

    House Organization

    Even though we’re moving into a larger home with more space, I fear that our abysmal home cleaning and organizational skills will follow us (which they will). I’m doing my best to view the dirty home as an opportunity but it’s hard not to feel like my life is spinning out of control when our kitchen looks like this:

    Messy Kitchen (2020-09-05)

    Granted, our lives changed dramatically when our daughter was born … but that was almost a year ago. So that grace period, I think, has passed. The sad reality is that we’re … extremely messy and disorganized. What is it going to take to keep the house in order?

    And as I mentioned in “I’m a messy person: it’s time for a change” post, I’m sick and tired of not my items buried underneath one or another and just overall mountains of junk piling up everywhere throughout the house; this is not the environment in which I want my children to grow up in.

    Physical and Mental Health

    Physical health has taken a back seat and I definitely want to carve out time (even if it is 5 minutes a day) to get my heart pumping. Working from home in the midst of COVID-19 has definitely contributed to lack of exercise for me — some folks have gotten into tip top shape during the lockdowns.

    But I did attend my weekly therapy session and I hope that I can somehow continue seeing my therapist (same person I’ve seen for over four years on a weekly basis) even though I’m moving to Renton, making the commute to his office unsustainable. Let’s see how this all plays out in the about 3 weeks, once my wife and I move.

  • Weekly Review – Week ending in 2020/08/30

    Weekly Review – Week ending in 2020/08/30

    • Writing
      • Developed a manageable cadence of blogging a single blog post every day, most of them daily reviews or notes taken during advanced operating systems
      • Writing the daily reviews (each entry eats up about 15 minutes of my morning) help me not only plant my two feet in the ground and settle for the day, but provide the necessary content for my weekly review / reflections. Will likely continue this new habit (assuming I still wake up between 04:30 and 05:00 AM)
    • Music
      • Recorded a short little melody and harmony on my iPhone while playing guitar for Elliott and Jess during lunch. Super simple melody and chorus lyrics go “It’s a sad song, it’s a love song”
    • Graduate School
      • Felt proud of myself for being able to connect the dots between theory and practice, catching the relationship between C code I write at work and what I read in the textbook (revolving around virtual private numbers using a bit mask and SHIFT operations)
      • Glad I was able to keep up with all the lectures, although I could’ve finished them much earlier in the week. But I spent an hour on deep diving into virtually indexed physically tagged cache, a topic I could’ve just glossed over but I just couldn’t let go of not understanding the topic
      • Completed writing up the homework assignment, typing it all up took much longer than anticipated due to formatting issues when copying between OmniOutliner and Microsoft Word
    • Organization
      • Ripped apart three books and scanned them using my ScanSnap. Again, I’ve nailed down the process since on average, it takes about 8 minutes from running the knife down the spine of the book to the moment the last (200+ page) book scans to my DevonThink system
    • Physical and Mental Health
      • Cancelled my weekly psychotherapy session, a session I often look forward to since I’ve been attending just about every week for close to 5 years now
    • Family
      • Lots of administrative duties this week, including replacing the punctures front left tire at Discount Tires, chopping up all the freshly bought vegetables and storing them away in reusable Stasher bags, driving from Seattle to Renton to visit my mom who is visiting from California for a few days

    Misses

    • Not a single day of exercise. This habit fell off the wagon about 2 months  ago (or was it 3 or 4) when I injured the sole of my left foot. I was unable to shift any weight to my foot without wincing in pain. But the food healed about 2 months ago and I need to re-establish a habit of exercising: even if it is running for 10 minutes or stretching for 5.
    • Being on call really zapped the joy  out of my week. For starters, I was unable to break away from the laptop while my mom was in town, not getting to spend much quality time with her. This event, along with waking up at 12:00AM and 3:00 AM throughout the week makes me re-evaluate the team I am on and wonder a team with less operational burden might make sense for my health

    Photos of the week

    Jess, Matt, Elliott with sun in the background, three of us walking dogs at the park early in the morning

     

    Llttle Elliott at carcreek park, who is starting to not look so little anymore

    Reflections

    Jess pointed out that when I am on call, I’m a little more edgy, a little less patient. She’s probably right because during the week, I’m constantly getting interrupted with operational issues, requiring me to drop whatever I’m doing — studying, hanging out with my wolf pack — and turn my attention towards work.

    Although tiring, the early morning reflections and study sessions are proving to be valuable. I’m able to crank out a ton of work, crossing off graduate school and personal writing before anyone in the house hold wakes up. Being a productive in the morning, even if its just a little, really sets me in a better mood thorughout the day, my mind free to concentrate on the present moment instead of thoughts of “should’ve done this … and this” occupying CPU cycles in my brain.

    Graduate school is tough but rewarding and such a privilege. I happened to stumble upon my blog post from 2018, almost 2 years ago to date, when I just got admitted into the graduate program: I was ecstatic to learn about computer science. I still am. And need to continue with my balancing the following: learning deeply (the main point of returning back to graduate school) and just getting things done (I have a family now, so time is very precious).

    Realized that checking my work laptop first thing in the morning for just that one little thing doesn’t work: I get sucked in and begin tackling other items, including checking my e-mail inbox, or slack messages, or whatever. So my rule of thumb is to not flip open the lid of my work laptop until I am ready to fully work

    My noise wrinkles every time I see the photo of Elliott crawling in the back seat of the Ford Escape. The picture zooms in on face. I only see pure joy and beauty in her. It really is such an honor to be a father, to be in a position to see her develop and witness her mom basically perform mom magic every day.

  • My time management tip #1 – Pomodoro Technique

    My time management tip #1 – Pomodoro Technique

    Since the pandemic hit the states back in February this year, I’ve been working remotely from home (such a blessing and a serious privilege). Working from home underscores the importance of time management, especially for someone like me who can either deeply fall into work mode for hours and hours (never breaking eyes away from screen) or scroll mindlessly on websites like Hacker News or Reddit.  The former melts my mental health and the latter kills my productivity.

    So to avoid either scenario — working too long or not working at all — I employ a Pomodoro technique1. The pomorodoro technique, which I picked up years ago when taking Learning How to Learn Course on Coursera, was invented in the early 1990s by Franscesco Cirillo. The basic premise is this: you set a timer for 25 minutes and work deeply for those 25 minutes. Once the alarm sounds, you break. The idea is that the technique improves your focus and promotes giving your brain some time off to relax.

    So how do I use the Pomorodo technique in practice? What does it look like?

    I use a kitchen timer, the TIMER YS-390 to be specific. This model hits all of my own personal requirements. The device has a dual count timer. I set the top timer to 50 minutes (my personal period of deep focus) and the bottom for 10 minutes; the 10 minutes is my grace period, allowing me to ease into my work (basically I cut myself some slack here). In addition to the dual timers, the alarm’s volume can be adjusted: no sound, low, high. I typically set the volume knob on low as to not frighten my daughter awake when she’s sleeping (my dentist’s rule: never wake a sleeping baby). And finally, the third feature I love is the physical cue. When either of the timers hit zero, the little button begins flashing red like a cop car. This makes it difficult to ignore and I find it really forces my eyes to break away from the screen.

    So what happens when the timer sounds the alarm? I start by silencing it, hitting the silicone start/stop button, stepping away from the computer and if I’m lucky enough, take a 5-10 minute break with either my baby daughter (who is growing up way too fast) or wife or dogs (or if I’m really lucky, all four of them). This break, is also no exception, but instead of using my TIMER YS-390, I set a countdown alarm on my G-Shock watch.

    Do I always break at the very moment the alarm sounds?

    No. Sometimes I find that I’m really in the flow (for work or for graduate school or for writing on this blog) so what I do instead is quickly press the bottom right button, resetting the 10 minute timer. This allows me another grace period of deep work. It’s okay to not be so rigid and cut yourself some slack.

     

    References

    1. Pomorodo Technique
    2. Learning how to learn course by Barbara Oakley
    3. Amazon – Timer YS-390 (I stripped off the unnecessary query string parameters to limit tracking)