2021 End of Year Review

I earned a C/C+ in 2021, closing out the year with a reasonably strong Q4 to make up for Q3. Overall, I feel like I had a good year. I could have been more consistent, and velocity could improve, but I’m happy to report that things feel directionally correct and it feels like I’m on my way to larger breakthroughs.

Some highlights from this year:

• 🏠 I moved into my first independently-leased apartment here in Taipei. It’s been fun having my own space to host for things like dinner parties, board games, LAN parties, holidays, and more!
• 🚀 I started working on Midana, and made enough progress to start feeling some product-market fit with it! Nearly 700 users now, with a NPS of ~25.
• 💸 I exercised my Palantir stock options, bringing financial independence into arm’s reach for the first time.
• 😷 I went through lockdown for the first time when COVID-19 outbreaks in Taiwan caused some panic back in May.
• 🎮 I played a lot of video games this year, owing to lockdown and getting back into League of Legends.
• 👊 I experimented with a gamified quantified self platform called Strive, which I suspect will make a return in some form in 2022.
• 💉 I got vaccinated for COVID-19 during a very long trip to the US, which gave me a lot of time to reflect.
• 🏝️ My grandma turned 90 and the whole family went to Hawaii to celebrate for a few weeks despite COVID-19.
• 🍟 I gained a lot of weight, and have been working to get back on track.
• 🏃🏻‍♂️ I participated in my first race events in a very long time, a 9k and a 5k trail run. I’m very excited to do more of these in 2022!

Here’s what happened in Q4:

• 🏁 Midana is now available to anyone who wants to try it. Though it isn’t technically fully listed in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, as I’m still running in a public testing mode that I’ve branded “early access”. This is, nevertheless, a fairly big shift in operating mode.
• 🚀 Midana has grown to ~700 users with a recent NPS of ~25. Growth has been steady, though I’ve been controlling it as I iterate. Feedback has been positive, but also points to some clear areas of improvement that could help bring NPS above 30 (loosely my goal before declaring the product “stable” and pushing for a real public launch).
• 📉 Midana monetization still needs testing. While I have gotten a decent number of users to agree to 10% of lottery earnings in return for services, only a fraction of those users are using the features that would generate qualifying receipts. I remain overall optimistic that monetization will eventually prove fruitful given the rich dataset that receipt and purchase data provides.
• 🏗️ Productivity started strong, but fell off as the quarter dragged on. In the beginning I was averaging ~14-16 pomodoros per day relatively easily. By the end, I was reaching ~12 on average.
• 🤕 I injured my leg doing squats at CrossFit on my first day doing squats in many, many months. This injury continues to keep me away from running and has deterred some of my exercise habits in Q4, though I can still hike and have been trying to get out to bike more often.
• 🏃🏻‍♂️ I participated in two races, a 9k and a 5k trail run. I completed the 9k in 43:11 at an 8:05/mi average pace, but with a few sub-8:00 miles despite rolling my ankle around the 6k marker. I had to walk the trail run due to my leg injury, unfortunately.
• ⛰️ I went on a decent number of adventurous hiking trips, including at least one 6+ hour hike, making good on my promise to myself to get out of the house a bit more on weekends.
• 🦃 I hosted my first Thanksgiving dinner in my new apartment. It was a little cramped, and the turkey barely fit in the oven, but it was a good time :)!
• 🍔 I lost some weight, but not quite as much as I had hoped. I’ve been waylaid by my reduced activity due to injury and a bit of excessive eating over the holidays. At my lowest this quarter, I got back down to ~165 lbs, but ended probably closer to ~172, down from ~180 when I started.
• 🎮 I bought a Nintendo Switch OLED to reward myself for an incredibly productive quarantine period and the launch of Midana v2.0.0.
• 🚴🏻‍♂️ I am closing in on a bike purchase after having spent this quarter learning about bikes, reflecting on what I want out of a bike, and browsing listings. It’s been tough finding the exact combination of things I want in my size and in my original price range, but with a little bit of luck and a bit of budget-fudging, I’ll hopefully make a purchase 2nd week of January 2022.
• 🌛 I spent a few days in Sun Moon Lake to celebrate the New Year. It was a chill vacation full of hiking, biking, and eating.

Annual Reflection 🤔

2021 was the second year of the global pandemic. It was the year I moved into my first independently-leased apartment. It was the year I started putting down real (literal and metaphorical) roots in Taipei. It was the year I started working on Midana. It was the year I exercised my Palantir stock options, bringing financial independence into arm’s reach for the first time. It was the year I finally experienced lockdown. It was the year I started playing League of Legends again. It was the year I got vaccinated. It was the year my grandmother turned 90, and the whole family flew out to Hawaii to celebrate despite COVID-19. It was the year I bought a Nintendo Switch. It was the year I emotionally committed to a breakthrough. It was the year I first experienced product-market fit for myself.

On the whole, I feel good about 2021. This year represents one of the longest, continuous periods of time that I’ve worked independently. I’ve established a relatively stable and sustainable lifestyle in Taipei that I’m happy with. I’ve gotten enough done to feel and see some progress, and to begin identifying areas for improvement.

I am excited that my first independent product, Midana, has finally reached a stage where I’m getting relatively constant feedback, both positive and constructive, from real users. I am still beta testing the product and still have not pushed it out to a general release, but the product has grown enough (~700 users!) for me to play with real fear of failure and fear of rejection on a regular basis. It’s starting to help me see that there isn’t that much to fear after all. There are always going to be product and engineering problems to solve (and always more than you or your team have time to solve). Some users are always going to be unhappy. Most things are solvable. Most users just want to feel heard.

In reflecting on 2021, my growth (and the product’s!) is perhaps best illustrated by how my emotions have shifted as the product has moved forward. My fears for Midana have moved away from “What if people hate it?” and “Will anyone even use this? Am I wasting my time?” and instead toward “How can I get more people to love this?” and “Can I make this project worth the effort and time I’ve put into it?” To me, this is a clear sign that I’ve reached early product-market fit—I’ve clearly created something that my target market wants, and which has the potential for raving fans. The question now is whether or not that market was monetize-able in the first place.

Regardless of whether or not it ever makes money, Midana already feels like it’s been more than worth it for everything I’ve learned along the way. I’ve learned what it feels like to run a successful marketing campaign. I’ve found some great tools for drafting landing pages to quickly validate my value proposition. I’ve learned the value of both going fast and going slow at different points in the process. I’ve learned that good products take time, patience, and perseverance. I’ve found a comfortable iterative rhythm that allows me to grow the product one cohort at a time while responding to feedback. I’ve gotten a handle on the idiosyncratic difficulties of creating a mobile app from both a product and engineering perspective. I’ve experienced engineering scaling problems in one of my own projects for the first time (I already have millions of records in my database and am preparing to process thousands of receipts per day), more and more making architectural strategies I’ve learned for resolving these practical needs instead of theoretical possibilities. I’ve been at times amazed, at times humbled by the amount I can achieve as a one-man team. I’m already scheming about how I’ll apply all these learnings to future projects.

Growth, or at least change, can also be seen in how my relationship with money has been slowly evolving this year and, perhaps by proxy, how much more of a sense of abundance I experience on average. I’ve found that it’s tough to feel comfortable spending money without relatively stable income, no matter how much I have in the bank. Financial uncertainty can be scary and has tended to drive me into a scarcity mindset. Historically, some of that fear has also been driven by a scarcity mindset around job and income opportunities—a part of me worried for a long time that I’d somehow made myself less hirable by choosing not to define my career by a sequence of stable, full-time jobs.

I can remember very clearly how nervous I felt at the beginning of the year when I was searching for apartments, and how torn I was when I came to the conclusion that the kind of apartment I wanted to live in was going to cost me more than I had budgeted. I was wrapping up my contract with Karat around that time and I knew I’d soon stop having regular income. In that context, I remember how I agonized about spending an extra $50-100 to buy a nice mattress top so that I could sleep in relative luxury.

By the end of 2021, despite not taking any additional consulting gigs, I feel tangibly more comfortable spending my wealth. Maybe it’s because Palantir going public was a decent windfall. Maybe it’s finally leaning more into the idea of having roots and allowing myself to accumulate a few more things here in Taipei. Maybe it’s because I’ve started to have deeper faith in my own ability, and in the idea that income opportunities will arise if and when I need them.

However it’s happened, I’m starting to realize that certain things are worth spending for. I’m also starting to recognize that wealth exists not to be hoarded, but to make my life and the lives of people around me better. This can be observed in my finally getting myself a triathlon watch I’ve wanted for years, in deciding that I could afford a Nintendo Switch OLED, in choosing to be generous with gifts for friends and family over the holidays, and in my upcoming purchase of a nice (second-hand) road bike. While I do remain vigilant for overall lifestyle creep—I want to be abundant, not wasteful—I have, thus far, not regretted any of these expenditures after the fact.

Still, despite all the goods, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that 2021 had its fair share of struggles, as evidenced by recurring themes in my quarterly reviews. I had trouble staying consistently productive while working for myself. I picked up some bad habits through the pandemic. I gained a lot of weight. I played a lot of video games. I did not always live up to my disciplined and courageous self-image. I spent a lot of time and energy, consciously and subconsciously, finding ways to stay in my comfort zone.

Though I certainly struggled against myself, I feel strongly that the problems I had in 2021 were problems I chose for myself and were, in fact, the problems I wanted to have. I’m grateful that, by sticking to my guns and pressing on with independent work, I’ve had opportunities to test myself, to fail a bit, and to grow and learn from the experiences.

While 2021 could have been a more productive year, I am nevertheless content that things feels directionally correct. I am careful to remember that sometimes I have to go slow before I can go fast—we all learn to walk before we learn to run. For someone as impatient and ambitious as I can be, this is often a hard lesson to internalize.

Now that I have my legs under me, and am starting to gain confidence, I suspect that 2022 will be about picking up the pace while continuing to challenge myself and explore the concepts of balance and living a well-rounded life. More on that to come in my 2022 New Year Resolutions.

Q4 Reflection 🪞

Q4, specifically was an alright quarter. Here’s what happened:

• 🏁 Midana is now available to anyone who wants to try it. Though it isn’t technically fully listed in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, as I’m still running in a public testing mode that I’ve branded “early access”. This is, nevertheless, a fairly big shift in operating mode.
• 🚀 Midana has grown to ~700 users with a recent NPS of ~25. Growth has been steady, though I’ve been controlling it as I iterate. Feedback has been positive, but also points to some clear areas of improvement that could help bring NPS above 30 (loosely my goal before declaring the product “stable” and pushing for a real public launch).
• 📉 Midana monetization still needs testing. While I have gotten a decent number of users to agree to 10% of lottery earnings in return for services, only a fraction of those users are using the features that would generate qualifying receipts. I remain overall optimistic that monetization will eventually prove fruitful given the rich dataset that receipt and purchase data provides.
• 🏗️ Productivity started strong, but fell off as the quarter dragged on. In the beginning I was averaging ~14-16 pomodoros per day relatively easily. By the end, I was reaching ~12 on average.
• 🤕 I injured my leg doing squats at CrossFit on my first day doing squats in many, many months. This injury continues to keep me away from running and has deterred some of my exercise habits in Q4, though I can still hike and have been trying to get out to bike more often.
• 🏃🏻‍♂️ I participated in two races, a 9k and a 5k trail run. I completed the 9k in 43:11 at an 8:05/mi average pace, but with a few sub-8:00 miles despite rolling my ankle around the 6k marker. I had to walk the trail run due to my leg injury, unfortunately.
• ⛰️ I went on a decent number of adventurous hiking trips, including at least one 6+ hour hike, making good on my promise to myself to get out of the house a bit more on weekends.
• 🦃 I hosted my first Thanksgiving dinner in my new apartment. It was a little cramped, and the turkey barely fit in the oven, but it was a good time :)!
• 🍔 I lost some weight, but not quite as much as I had hoped. I’ve been waylaid by my reduced activity due to injury and a bit of excessive eating over the holidays. At my lowest this quarter, I got back down to ~165 lbs, but ended probably closer to ~172, down from ~180 when I started.
• 🎮 I bought a Nintendo Switch OLED to reward myself for an incredibly productive quarantine period and the launch of Midana v2.0.0.
• 🚴🏻‍♂️ I am closing in on a bike purchase after having spent this quarter learning about bikes, reflecting on what I want out of a bike, and browsing listings. It’s been tough finding the exact combination of things I want in my size and in my original price range, but with a little bit of luck and a bit of budget-fudging, I’ll hopefully make a purchase 2nd week of January 2022.
• 🌛 I spent a few days in Sun Moon Lake to celebrate the New Year. It was a chill vacation full of hiking, biking, and eating.

I started very strong, with a couple of extremely productive weeks in quarantine. Quarantine was so productive, in fact, that I continue to joke with people that if I ever need a jump start I should just check myself back into a quarantine hotel. A lot of good habits re-surfaced during quarantine and continued for much of the quarter. I lost some steam near the end, especially with the holidays.

Midana 🚀

Midana has been going well this quarter! During quarantine I completely a full design refresh of Midana, which I branded v2.0.0. I’m now feeling like I have a product that I’m proud to put my name on, and which generally looks and feels nice.

I did have a few delays at the beginning of the quarter, but not because I wasn’t being productive. After doing my UI/UX overhaul, I ran into a some performance issues in the app which required that I delay public testing by a couple more weeks. At this point, though things are running relatively smoothly and the product is growing!

I have not put the product up for general release on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store yet, however. Right now anyone who wants to try the app can, provided they’re willing to jump through a couple of extra hoops to install the early access version. For all intents and purposes, I’m happy with the app being in this sort of public testing mode. It allows me to continue iterating on the app while growing it cohort-by-cohort.

Right now my workflow is essentially to turn on ads, gather feedback about improvements to be made or problems with the app, turn off ads while I fix new things identified, then repeat once I’m ready to test the new iteration. I’m really liking this so far—it’s certainly slowing down growth, but it’s giving me a lot of confidence and peace of mind! It’s also allowing me to really battle test this product before I eventually declare it “stable” and push it out for wider release.

The app is growing substantially despite this, however. I’m up to nearly 700 users (with probably several times that many downloads), and for the last few draw periods, the total number of collected receipts has been growing exponentially. To be totally transparent, this is mostly still paid growth using FB ads credits, so these are all vanity metrics, but it’s motivating and exciting nonetheless.

I’ve been waiting to launch Midana until I feel confident that it will receive overwhelmingly positive reviews on the app stores. I’m hoping to use those positive reviews to generate momentum for growth, and am weary of the fact that negative reviews could have a very detrimental and lasting effect. I realized recently that I’m not actually collecting the right feedback to know how close I am to an acceptable level of confidence here.

To solve that need, I’m now collecting net promoter scores within the app, and so far feedback has really positive! Most of the scores I get are 9s and 10s, though there are also a fair number of people experiencing issues with the app and leaving lower scores. Overall, my NPS is currently hovering around ~20-25, which is decent, but not amazing. I’m hoping to get that number up above 30+ before I launch. Given that most detractors are people experiencing unintended bugs or performance issues (and are therefore likely to leave 1-star reviews, which I’d like to avoid), I think this is very in reach.

Monetization is a different story for Midana, however. Currently my main monetization pathway is an auto-redemption service that allows me to take a % cut of users’ winnings. Unfortunately, this service requires that users use electronic receipts, which is a relatively new behavior for my user base. Currently, less than 10% of my users are using e-receipts. I have been seeing a slow uptick in e-receipt adoption, but not enough to feel confident that this monetization pathway is going to pan out. It’s possible that as I improve the service, more and more people will adopt this (I discovered a bug not too long ago that was probably causing a lot of users trying out e-receipts to be confused), but it’s hard to say.

At the moment, conversion rate for auto-redemption is hovering around 7-8%, which isn’t amazing especially considering that not all of those users are even regularly using e-receipts. I need to do more experimenting to see if I can make this direction work—possibly by reducing the cut percentage and seeing if that improves conversion.

There are other monetization pathways to explore here, as well, and I am still optimistic that something will work—the data I’m collecting is valuable by its very nature, so if nothing else I think there’s potential to find a way to monetize off of that. Once I have enough users, I can also start thinking about ad revenue and premium service to remove ads if nothing else is working.

Stillness 🙏

Creating the space to reflect and write these self-reviews always re-invokes a sense of stillness. In today’s stillness I’m beginning to realize just how much stillness I seemed to lose over the course of the quarter.

I’m beginning to wonder if stillness is the key factor influencing how on top of my goals I feel over time. Coming out of reviews, which are typically periods of relative stillness, I usually feel renewed and ready to tackle the world again. As the quarter goes on, I tend to get caught up in the stresses of life, or I fall back into familiar bad patterns. I start feeling like I have less time for certain things. I stop making time for certain other things. I start to lose balance and things begin to unravel.

It’s worth asking, then: where did stillness break down this quarter? I think there were a few places:

1. Playing video games in the afternoon too often and sometimes for too long.
2. Video games before bed sometimes leaking into later bed times, or compounding on top of other excuses to be less disciplined about bed time.
3. Over fixation on raw amount of time worked after switching to a Pomodoro app that reported hours and minutes rather than pomodoro totals

Video Games 🎮

Regarding the first two points about video games: I’ve found that these both create a cascading effect into the future, where I feel like I have less time (either because I used up too much of my afternoon, or because I woke up later), which leads to me feeling more stressed and less still. Ironically, that sparks a negative feedback loop that presses on the impulse to play more to avoid short-term stress, but with the consequence of creating more long-term stress.

I think I was in a good rhythm at the beginning of the quarter, likely also through the middle of the quarter, where I’d complete two sets of four pomodoros in the morning followed by a 1-hour lunch break and two sets of four pomodoros in the evening. Usually I’d be sure to time it so that I could finish 16 pomodoros by 5:30 or 6:00pm and feel good about relaxing after dinner. 16 pomodoros would usually be enough for me to complete almost everything on my list for the day.

At some point, I started to introduce games into my lunch breaks, since I realized I could sometimes take a longer lunch break and still time it to finish 16 pomodoros in a day before 6:00pm. At the beginning, this was a result of my being extra productive in a morning, or because a particular type of work would force me to skip pomodoro breaks so I’d finish the morning session quicker.

Since I involved a friend in these lunch breaks, and because we had a competitive reason to try to fit more games into them more often (the end of the 2021 League of Legends ladder season and our last chance to prove to ourselves that we’re better at the game than the game thinks we are :P). These longer lunch breaks started to become regular occurrences. Sometimes I’d feel drained by the intensity of the games we’d play. Instead of taking a nap during my lunch break to recover, I’d start the afternoon session feeling tired. Or worse, I’d play, and then still take a nap, cutting into my afternoon session. My daily pomodoro count started dropping from 16 to 14, and later to 12 by the end of the quarter.

I think my original intentions were good, and I think it was OK for me to use video games as an occasional incentive to be more productive in the morning. Somewhere along the way, I got caught up in it, though. In the future, I think I need to avoid allowing this to become a daily occurrence. Probably better for it to be once or twice a week, and then only later in the week as a reward for productivity earlier in the week.

After a successful quarantine, I rewarded myself by buying a Nintendo Switch OLED. Ironically, buying a Nintendo Switch doesn’t generally feel like it’s contributed to problems here. At least for lunch breaks, much of the problem seems to center around the nature of League of Legends as a game—it’s a team game, so I naturally want to play with friends, and a single game can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour (but probably averaging around ~40 minutes). It’s also a tough game to play just one round of—win or lose, you pretty much always feel incentivized to play at least one more game. This makes it tough to fit League into lunch breaks without having some temptation to both do it regularly and to potentially have it overflow into work time.

By contrast, Switch games are mostly single player and super easy to pause and leave alone. Yes, sometimes it’s nice to just find a stopping point (maybe a couple of extra minutes), but it’s nothing like League in that sense.

Where the Switch did affect stillness a bit this quarter, however, was when I let myself break my rule about electronics in bed. I’ve been very good about keeping my phone away from my bed, but for some reason at some point I convinced myself that my Switch wasn’t the same thing. Maybe it was because my girlfriend and I aren’t always totally synced on when bedtime is, and I’d use the Switch to wait for her to come to bed. I’ve been stricter about this recently, however, and it’s been better.

Pomodoros 🍅

Overall, the pomodoro technique was really helpful in Q4. I started out using an online tool called Pomofocus, and it really helped me get into a rhythm. After awhile, though, I got fed up with some of the bugs in the product making my workflows tougher. For example, if I close Pomofocus’ window on accident, I lose all of my pomodoro data for the day. Part way through the quarter I started using Focus Todo on my phone instead.

While generally being pretty good, Focus Todo gives me daily reports where it reports my productivity in terms of hours and minutes rather than in pomodoros. I hadn’t realized just how important this is to me, but I really prefer having the abstraction of pomodoros. Seeing hours and minutes has slowly turned Focus Todo back into a time tracker like Toggl, where I feel like a slave to the timer. I also feel anxious about seeing how many hours I worked because it immediately triggers a comparison with “work norms”.

Even though I know that people don’t get that much focus during a 12-hour or even a “standard” 8-hour day, I can’t help but see a number like 4h30m or 6h and feel bad about my productivity in comparison even if I got important work done and spent my energy in the right places. I’m finding that the abstraction of tracking pomodoros creates rhythm and stillness. Tracking hours and minutes creates stress for me and therefore destroys stillness. I can imagine striving for two more pomodoros each day, but might stress out about the idea of adding an extra hour of work each day. Interesting how that works.

Self-Sabotage 😵

Given my reflections from Q3, it’s important that I examine whether or not stillness issues this quarter were part of a pattern of self-sabotage.

I’m inclined to cautiously say no. I say that because, though my velocity did decrease as the quarter went on, Midana did actually move forward quite a bit this quarter, and in directions that put me in the paths of real rejection and failure. It could be argued that as I leaned more into that, I self-sabotaged a bit to slow my exposure to these things, and I think there might be some validity to that argument.

On the whole, though, I feel OK about what I accomplished this quarter. There’s clear room for improvement, and I intend to keep my eye on this, but I don’t feel like I’m freezing myself where I was the way I might have been Q2 and Q3—Midana has clearly moved into a new mode of operation, and the scope of my responsibilities to users has increased to match.

Exercise 🏃🏻‍♂️

Exercise also started really strong this quarter, but dropped off in the middle. I did have a strong 9k race finish (8:05/mi with a few sub-8 miles in there), and I was feeling really good about where my fitness was headed. Unfortunately, two injuries this quarter have kept me from exercising the ways I wanted to.

First, I rolled my ankle near the 6k marker of the 9k race—I actually still finished the race with a respectable time despite this, but I was off the foot for ~a week after that, which stole momentum.

Next, I strained a muscle in my hip doing squats at CrossFit not too long after I recovered from the ankle injury. It was a stupid injury—it was my first time doing squats in a long while do to the pandemic, and I knew I needed to take it slow. I let the coach goad me into pushing me further than I had intended to go that day, and that’s where the injury occurred. I probably have a right to be mad at the coach, but honestly I’m more mad at myself for not sticking to my game plan.

I’m still recovering from the hip injury—it’s been a couple of months, and it’s still not quite the same. I suspect I could run at this point, but my physical therapist seemed pretty against it last time I saw him, so I’m trying to respect that. I don’t think the injury is anything super serious or permanent, but it has been slow to completely recover.

Because of the hip injury, I’ve found a myriad of excuses to not take exercise as seriously as I wanted to in Q4. In truth, I could probably have done a lot more biking and hiking in Q4 to compensate for not being able to run, but I didn’t. I think part of that was knowing that the public bikes here, while amazing for what they are, are not that great. I’m hoping that having my own bike will change this, and I am hoping to do a lot more biking in Q1 2022 until my hip recovers enough to feel confident about running again.

Courage and Discipline 💪

Courage and discipline were areas I noted for immediate improvement in my Q3 review. I did OK here in Q4—I made some steps in the right directions, and generally biased toward getting myself out of the house to do something adventurous or uncomfortable on weekends.

I think my theory that adventures will create opportunities to demonstrate courage was correct. I went on at least one long hike this quarter where I was forced make a potentially difficult and somewhat scary decision about how to proceed. My girlfriend and I ended up descending a mountain on a side where there were warnings about slippery trail conditions. The reality was nowhere near as bad as I think we both imagined when we saw the warnings, though it was certainly slow going to get to the bottom.

Discipline was good in some ways, less good in others. The major vehicle I chose for discipline was exercise and health, which, as I noted above, got somewhat derailed this quarter. I definitely could have done a better job of adapting to changing circumstances.

On the whole, I was pretty good about things like waking up on time and meditating. There were, however, some obvious lapses in discipline for work to play games, especially as the quarter stretched on. I think lapses in discipline certainly go hand-in-hand with lapses in stillness, which tends to decrease awareness.

I’ll need to continue to focus on these areas in 2022, and perhaps find more intentional ways to exercise these skills.

Quantitative 🔢

Summary 💯

I’m giving myself a C for Q4. I think there was real improvement this quarter over Q3, and I feel decent about the progress I made. I definitely could have done more, but this wasn’t bad.

Combining that with my other scores for the year:

• Q1: B+
• Q2: C+
• Q3: D
• Q4: C

This averages out to a C/C+ for 2021!

Interestingly, this is about the same score I gave myself in 2020, as well. The downward trend throughout the year was also seen in 2020. While not surprising, I think I’ll need to start exploring methods of staying more consistent in 2022.

Break Down 🧨

Habits ✅:

• Daily
  • Get at least 8 hours of sleep every night
    • Felt mostly well-rested this quarter, so I’ll give myself this one.
  • Go to sleep by 9:30pm
    • Started to slide bed time back a little bit, especially as we got close to the holidays. Mostly playing video games with friends before bed.
  • Wake up by 5:30am
    • Mostly good on this, but had a few days here and there where I woke up a bit later, and definitely fell off over the holidays.
  • Reserve the first hour after waking for self-care
    • Meditate for at least 20 minutes
    • Write in my journal
  • Leave my phone charging far away from my bed each night
  • Leave my phone silenced until my morning routine is complete
  • Reserve the hour before bed for self-care and relaxation
    • Meditate for at least 20 minutes
      • Was really good about this for ~half the quarter, then stopped doing it because I wanted 20 more minutes of free time haha.
  • Aim for 12-16+ 25-minute pomodoros each day
  • Aim to minimize the need to log more than 8 hours of work a day
  • Plan tomorrow in the evening
  • Clear inboxes in the evening
  • Clear Anki reviews
  • Learn 8 new Chinese Anki cards
    • On accident, I spent more time on Japanese this quarter than on Chinese. Really just what I was finding fun and interesting at the time, but means that I didn’t put the focus into Chinese that I could have.
  • Add an average of 8 new Chinese cards to Anki
  • Actively immerse in Chinese for at least 30 minutes
• Weekly
  • Watch an episode or two of something on Netflix without subtitles for 30 minutes
  • Exercise 5-6 times a week
  • Make friends, relaxation, and extracurricular activities the priority on weekends
  • Get out to do something adventurous every weekend
  • Plan my week on Sunday nights
• Semimonthly
  • Attend an improv workshop and participate in at least the bilingual groups
  • Read a book
• Monthly
  • Host an event for friends in Taipei

OKRs 🎯:

• Maintaining a healthy mind and body
  • Pick a set of dietary rules quarterly and stick to them ~80% of the time
    • Was meant to track calories this quarter. Did not end up doing that. I did, however, find a couple of repeatable meals that I knew would help me lose weight and stuck to those most of the time. Fell off around the holidays, though.
  • Buy a road bike
    • Making progress, but did not make a purchase. Hoping to close a purchase early January 2022.
  • Register for at least one race
  • Read a couple books about fasting
    • Bought a book, but did not get around to reading it this quarter.
  • Stretch: Reach ~10% body fat
• Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom
  • Free up time to work on my own projects
    • Stop consulting full-time by February
    • Wind down consulting to the bare minimum by start of Q2
    • Don’t take on more students for The Spike Lab unless I have to
  • Launch at least 1 of my own projects to the general public this year
    • Midana is sort of available to anyone who wants to use it, but it’s still in “early access” mode and not yet fully listed in the stores.
  • Secure at least 1 paying customer for one of my own projects
  • Launch Midana and secure paying customers for it
    • Reach 1000 users in the Midana closed beta.
      • We’re now in public beta, and I’ve reached ~700 users.
    • Test monetization pathways for Midana.
      • Prototype monthly subscription for receipt translation service.
      • Prototype taking a cut of winnings to allow users to throw away scanned receipts rather than keeping them.
      • Prototype taking a cut of winnings through automatic prize redemption via PayPal or other non-Taiwanese payment services.
    • Launch Midana to the general public in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
      • Midana is available to the general public, but is still in “early access” mode and not yet fully listed in the stores.
  • For inspiration and tactical advice:
    • Read Make by Peter Levels
    • Read about other peoples’ experiences doing 12 projects in 12 months
  • Stretch: Launch 12 projects in 12 months
• Overcoming my fear of rejection, deepening friendships, and expanding my network
  • Make at least 1 close friend in Taipei this year
  • Schedule some time to get to know the other The Spike Lab coaches
• Learning Chinese
  • Reach an upper intermediate level in Chinese (B2, ~3000 words)
  • Successfully participate in an Improv activity in Chinese
• Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for a longer period of time
  • Find an apartment of my own