I gave myself a B this quarter. I found a good, consistent rhythm and have been feeling generally good about work. I do still feel like velocity could be a bit higher, and I would have liked to see higher compliance on key habits.

Here’s the lowdown:

• 🚀 Midana’s beta program is up to ~1500 users, has an NPS of ~44, and is generating ~$2/mo in revenue. People clearly love the product! Monetization continues to be a challenge, though I haven’t yet had a chance to really invest time into experimenting with new monetization channels.
• 🐢 Midana growth has been stalling while I invest in scalable infrastructure and product management tooling. Most of this quarter has gone to upgrading the backend and mobile client to handle larger amounts of traffic and data.
• 🍅 I’ve been hitting a pretty consistent ~16-18 pomodoros/day. I’m feeling pretty good about rhythm, routine, and cadence overall, but do want to start seeing if I can increase velocity a bit.
• ✈️ I’m planning to travel with my girlfriend for ~3 months this summer. We’ll be headed to California, Mexico, Florida, The Bahamas, Washington DC, and New York for varying amounts of time. Planning for travel has taken a small toll on velocity.
• 🤑 I had a brief, but ultimately unnecessary scare over my taxes, which has served as a good reminder not to get complacent, financially or otherwise, and which helped produce some interesting philosophical insights about uncertainty, stress, and faith.
• 🚴‍♂️ I secured a bike! I ended up with something very $$$$, and probably tricked out than an amateur really needs, but I’m very happy with it. So far this year I’ve been on ~26 bike rides, though not all on my new bike.
• 🏊‍♂️🏃🚴‍♂️ I’m training for triathlons again. I’m feeling strong and ready to start competing. I missed the April race deadline, but am registered for an event in Taiwan in September.
• ⚖️ I’m down to ~163 lbs from 170 lbs at the start of the year. If I’m being honest, I expected to have made more progress here this quarter, but know I should celebrate the progress regardless.
• 🀄 I completed 725 minutes of Chinese active immersion and learned 2060 new Chinese Anki flashcards. Language learning is slowing down, however, as exercise ramps up and concerns mount over language learning eating too much into other productive time.
• 🇰🇷 I learned to read Hangul, which is rather random and is, hilariously, motivated by wanting to playing League of Legends on the Korean servers with a few friends.
• 📚 I read 11 books this quarter, mostly from the Dune series.
• 🙅‍♂️ I haven’t completed any rejection challenges yet, though I did compile a list from a number of friends. No good excuses here.
• 🍻 I’m feeling like my social life is fairly fulfilling at the moment. I’ve made enough regular friends in Taipei to feel like my social calendar is full enough to keep me busy. I still have the intention to meet new people and make new friends, but not feeling like it’s as strong a need.

Next quarter:

• 🚀 Aiming to (finally) launch Midana publicly in Q2 of 2022 after completing a hit list of prerequisites I’ve compiled.
• 💸 Hoping to really push on the monetization problem for Midana once scaling infrastructure is in place to handle it.
• 🚂 Will continue chugging along using many of the same techniques as Q1, including Sprints, DMAs, and Pomodoros. I like how this system is balancing outcome and process.
• ⏩ Cautiously adding a stretch goal of an additional 5 pomodoros each week to increase velocity, though I am concerned that this won’t work well while traveling.
• 🏃 Training for half marathons while abroad, culminating in two half marathon events in NYC in June/July.

Quarterly Review 🔍

Qualitative Review 🎨

Reflection 🤔

Overall, I feel like Q1 2022 was a successful quarter. I found a good rhythm and I’ve been able to maintain it fairly consistently. In the past, I’ve struggled to stay focused and productive on my independent projects. I’m pleased to report that I didn’t have any major issues this quarter.

Here’s what happened this quarter:

• 🚀 Midana’s beta program is up to ~1500 users, has an NPS of ~44, and is generating ~$2/mo in revenue. People clearly love the product! Monetization continues to be a challenge, though I haven’t yet had a chance to really invest time into experimenting with new monetization channels.
• 🐢 Midana growth has been stalling while I invest in scalable infrastructure and product management tooling. Most of this quarter has gone to upgrading the backend and mobile client to handle larger amounts of traffic and data.
• 🍅 I’ve been hitting a pretty consistent ~16-18 pomodoros/day. I’m feeling pretty good about rhythm, routine, and cadence overall, but do want to start seeing if I can increase velocity a bit.
• ✈️ I’m planning to travel with my girlfriend for ~3 months this summer. We’ll be headed to California, Mexico, Florida, The Bahamas, Washington DC, and New York for varying amounts of time. Planning for travel has taken a small toll on velocity.
• 🤑 I had a brief, but ultimately unnecessary scare over my taxes, which has served as a good reminder not to get complacent, financially or otherwise, and which helped produce some interesting philosophical insights about uncertainty, stress, and faith.
• 🚴‍♂️ I secured a bike! I ended up with something very $$$$, and probably tricked out than an amateur really needs, but I’m very happy with it. So far this year I’ve been on ~26 bike rides, though not all on my new bike.
• 🏊‍♂️🏃🚴‍♂️ I’m training for triathlons again. I’m feeling strong and ready to start competing. I missed the April race deadline, but am registered for an event in Taiwan in September.
• ⚖️ I’m down to ~163 lbs from 170 lbs at the start of the year. If I’m being honest, I expected to have made more progress here this quarter, but know I should celebrate the progress regardless.
• 🀄 I completed 725 minutes of Chinese active immersion and learned 2060 new Chinese Anki flashcards. Language learning is slowing down, however, as exercise ramps up and concerns mount over language learning eating too much into other productive time.
• 🇰🇷 I learned to read Hangul, which is rather random and is, hilariously, motivated by wanting to playing League of Legends on the Korean servers with a few friends.
• 📚 I read 11 books this quarter, mostly from the Dune series.
• 🙅‍♂️ I haven’t completed any rejection challenges yet, though I did compile a list from a number of friends. No good excuses here.
• 🍻 I’m feeling like my social life is fairly fulfilling at the moment. I’ve made enough regular friends in Taipei to feel like my social calendar is full enough to keep me busy. I still have the intention to meet new people and make new friends, but not feeling like it’s as strong a need.

Consistency 🚂

One of the major themes in my annual goals was consistency. I’m doing really well on this so far. I set out this quarter with the intent to explore a 16 pomodoros/day cadence, and found that that was pretty easily maintainable. By the end of this quarter, my records show that I completed 1057 pomodoros, which averages out to around 17.6 pomodoros/day.

I had some days here and there that were more challenging, and where the pomodoro counts were lower. In particular, I found myself often complaining in my journal that I didn’t rest up on Sunday and set myself up for a good week, so often Mondays were a bit of a struggle. Additionally, some Fridays had a lower than average pomodoro count, particularly earlier in the quarter when I had been experimenting with the idea of rewarding myself for higher productivity during the week by ending my day early on Friday.

I feel good that at 16 pomodoros/day, even when I felt potentially at risk of falling out of rhythm, it was generally easy to get back into it—the goal isn’t so high that it was impossible to meet on a bad day, and it also wasn’t so high that it was impossible to make-up pomodoros from a bad day on a better day.

Outside of work, consistency was OK. I could definitely have been better about maintaining some of my habits. Language learning, particularly, fell off towards the end of the quarter as I started to have concerns around velocity (which I’ll address next).

Velocity 🏎️

While consistency was good, velocity could probably have been better. After a quarter of work, I don’t feel like I got everything I wanted to get done, done. Progress on Midana still feels slow despite knowing that I am consistently putting the time in.

There were a few distractions this quarter that contributed to feeling like velocity was slow, including unexpectedly scoping planning for a ~3 month stint of travel this year (more on that later).

Overall, though, I’m struggling with the question of whether or not 16 pomodoros/day is enough. Generally I’ve been counting any time spent working towards my goals as valid pomodoro time. That includes time spent journaling in the morning to start my day and get my thoughts together. It also includes language studies, which some days took 3 or even 4 pomodoros to complete. It also doesn’t help that when I have students for Spike Lab, one student session will often consume 4 or 5 pomodoros of my day.

Losing nearly a quarter of my day to language learning often doesn’t feel great, and it’s surprising how weighty student sessions can feel when viewed in this light.

I certainly could work more than 16 pomodoros a day, and many days I do—there are a good number of 18s, 19s, and 20s in my log. At my current velocity, on a good day I’ll get a few hours of free time to use however I want. This extra time is also a good buffer to ensure that the day never feels too crunched, which I know can lead to an ever present sense of stress. Some days I feel more motivated to spend that extra time on work, other days less so. In the worst case, the extra buffer also allows me to make-up for mishaps from previous days by investing more time into work.

In coming into this review, I am toying with whether or not I should try to increase my daily pomodoro goal slightly or even increase my weekly pomodoro goal without explicitly changing my daily pomodoro goal. I’m also playing with the idea of “heavy” and “light” days. Perhaps a couple a days a week I expect myself to work a little harder and relax a little less. I am also finding that daily routines that allow me to start my day and finish my typical 16 pomodoro day *very early—*I’ve had a few days where I was done by 2:30pm—tend to leave me with enough extra time in the day that it isn’t hard to do a little extra credit.

Outcome Orientation 🎯

With regard to velocity, an important question is: what can I do to motivate myself to spend more of my extra time on work on average without necessarily obligating myself to do so?

I experimented with a couple of strategies this quarter that may hold the key. Specifically, those are Sprints and Difference Making Actions (DMAs). Sprints are two-week planned chunks of work, where I start the Sprint with a planning session and end it with a retrospective. During my planning session, I come up with a clear list of goals for the Sprint, which I do my best to align against my quarterly or annual goals. DMAs are something similar but on a daily scope. When planning the next day, I’ll write down the 5-10 most important things (fewer tends to be better) that would tangibly decrease my stress if they were to be completed.

Thematically, I’ve noticed both of these tools tend to force an outcome-oriented approach to work, which can serve as a good counterbalance to the more process-oriented time tracking tactics I employ.

The key word in that sentence was counterbalance. Being overly outcome-oriented has lead to situations where I finish everything on my list super quickly and feel good about myself, but still have plenty of time that I could or even should have devoted to a new set of tasks. By contrast, being overly process-oriented has lead to situations where I follow my process and feel good about myself for e.g. completing 16 pomodoros today, but don’t necessarily ever make progress on the things that were most important.

Thus far, I’ve found both Sprints and DMAs hugely helpful because the outcome orientation leaves me feeling motivated to spend my time efficiently in order to complete the goal set, and sometimes even motivates me to spend extra time to complete a particularly ambitious set of goals.

In both practices, however, I struggle with over scoping, which is when I consistently choose a set of goals that is, ultimately, unachievable. Sometimes when this happens, the motivation swings the other way: knowing that I’ll never finish everything, I now have even less motivation to try. Obviously I have this problem with my annual goals to some degree as well :).

Setting goals is always a bit of a dance: I need to give myself a set of things to do that is challenging, but accomplishable. When I fail to do this consistently, I naturally begin to lose faith in the practice, which negates its otherwise positive effects.

I’m still experimenting here. I’d like to keep both Sprints and DMAs in my regular workflows, but feel I need to take more steps to resolve scoping issues. I think this will solve itself with more time and practice, and potentially with a bit more padding around my estimates for myself—larger development tasks especially tend to take a bit longer than I wish they would in the ideal case. I also need to remember that when I commit to less, often I actually accomplish more and I maintain some adaptability around unplanned urgent and important needs that inevitably arise in life.

Retrospective Takeaways 🪞

Another consequence of the Sprint structure is that I’ve done a series of mini-reviews (formally called “retrospectives”) over the course of this quarter. Every two weeks, my retrospectives consisted of a free writing session where I reflected on how I did against my Sprint goals, what I did well, and what I could have done better. I then summarized any takeaways in bullet form.

I like that I now have a pool of takeaways that I can review for quarterly themes. Most of these insights have been pulled out and incorporated in narratives throughout this review, so I won’t repeat them here :). This feels like it has reduced the “load” of reflection needed to complete my review this quarter.

Though the review and planning processes have, at times, felt rather heavy—it often takes me more than half the day one every 2nd Monday—I do feel that the value outweighs the cost. Both of these processes help to concentrate strategic planning and constructive reflection time into a single, consistently visited space. Without these spaces, these processes may or may not occur ad hoc, which can lead to periods of not being sure whether or not I’m working on the most important thing until I’m inevitably forced to step back and think about it again.

It is worth noting, however, that the weight of the review and planning processes does affect both the velocity and over-scoping problems noted above—I’m often not taking the fact that I’m investing ~12 pomodoros into planning and review each Sprint into account when scoping the Sprint. The better part of a day every two weeks isn’t a trivial amount of time.

Midana 🚀

Overall, Midana is moving in a positive direction. I’m collecting NPS metrics graphed over time, and the product is now hovering in the low 40s with more than 100 survey responses. Though still in beta, the app now has ~1500 users, with many times that many downloads. There are, however, some indications that the active user counts are plateauing and there are some known obstacles to continued growth from here. Midana is generating ~$2/mo in revenue, which, though somewhat laughable, is still a big step from $0/mo.

There are clearly challenges to resolve, and it is by no means clear that, at least from a financial perspective, I haven’t completely wasted my time on this product. However, I am excited to see clear indications that I’ve built something that people love and that solves a real need!! Of course, there’s always the occasional sourpuss, but I’m learning to be more thick skinned about certain users who, frankly, would probably always have found a reason to be unhappy.

So far, monetization remains one of the larger challenges. At ~$2/mo in revenue, the product is still in the red, since it costs me in the range of $55/mo to run. Revenue currently comes from auto-redemption, which allows users to opt-in to split their winnings for qualifying receipts with Midana in exchange for help redeeming the receipts on a regular-basis. At this point, there are enough qualifying receipts from opt-in users that I can expect at least a few receipts to win and generate revenue, which is cool!

However, this monetization channel seems unlikely to drive the business long-term. Even if revenue doubles every 2 months (and, so far, it has), it will still take a very long time to even break even. I’m considering ways to restructure the auto-redeem business model to attract more users. I’m also considering several premium features which would likely get bundled into a subscription package. These premium features include:

• Receipt translation service
  • Currently, receipt details arrive in Chinese and there is no easy way for users to navigate them in English. I do actually get some requests for this
• Premium receipt scanning features
  • I get a lot of requests for OCR to handle receipts without QR codes on them.
• Unlimited product search
  • I’d like to turn my aggregated receipt data into an anonymized search service that can help expats in Taiwan find otherwise hard-to-find items they are looking for here.
• Free, no-commission, auto-redemption service
• Removal of ads
  • I’m not actually running ads in the product, but am considering inserting ads somewhere in the receipt scanning flow, since this is by far the most visited part of the app.

Importantly, though, I discovered this quarter that I can’t actually generate real subscription revenue until Midana is out of beta and live on the app stores. Tactically, this means that I need to find a way to beta test some of these features and I need to ensure that I have infrastructure in place to handle subscription-based feature gating before the app goes live.

Though monetization remains a top priority, I didn’t get nearly as much time to spend on it this quarter as I had expected. I spent some time on a Notion-powered announcements and release notes system, which now allows me to easily push real-time bulletins to all app users, and allows my users to tell when a new update is available, and what changed in the app when they upgrade. These two capabilities have been crucial from a product management perspective, because they allow me to be proactive when new bugs are discovered, and it encourages users to upgrade to the latest app version (it’s frustrating to get bug reports from users who haven’t updated the app in literally months). In leading up to what I hoped was going to be a public launch, I figured these features would help me stay agile and responsive to users.

However, as the quarter continued on, I ended up needing to scope more and more work to resolve some unfortunate scalability issues. I’m at an exciting but painful part of the development process where the app is no longer just an MVP, and some of the things I had done in the interest of validating the product quickly now need to be swapped out for more sustainable solutions. To this end, I spent most of my time this quarter on upgrading the backend to scale-ably field API requests while also running important regular background processes and on upgrading the mobile app to handle large amounts of data (some of my users have 600-800+ receipts) without slowdowns or crashes.

All of this upgrading and swapping things out has me thinking a lot about software architecture lately. I’ve been reading Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin and really enjoying. I’m discovering that architecture is what describes a lot of what I’ve often felt was lacking in legacy projects I’ve worked on (particularly those created and then maintained by less experienced engineers). It also describes what I’ve often (imperfectly) driven towards in my own projects and in my client projects. Some of the pain I’m feeling now around restructuring parts of Midana could likely have been avoided with some amount of foresight around design, organization, and separation of concerns in the codebase from the start. These are good lessons for future projects, and it’s exciting to encounter real-world use cases for architectural concepts I’m learning about.

All-in-all, I remain optimistic about Midana, though I am now driving hard toward monetization and feel very motivated to start turning a profit from it somehow.

Financial Scares 😱

Some of the aforementioned motivation to monetize Midana comes from a set of financial scares I went through recently while preparing to file my 2021 taxes.

Everything’s settled down now, and it turns out there’s no issue, but there was a moment where, with incomplete information, I was terrified to discover that I may owe a huge sum of money to the IRS—enough to drain my cash reserves, require me to liquidate some investments, and potentially even start searching for some short-term supplemental income.

Going through that was hugely stressful for a few days. I kind of stopped sleeping. I felt stressed out about financial decisions I had made and guilty about recent large purchases. I felt like I needed to work more in order to deal with the stress.

Though everything turned out fine and nothing has actually changed in my finances, the need to cope with all of that extra stress and pressure drove me to a few insights that I would like to maintain even though I’m now out of the woods.

1. Uncertainty comes in influenceable and non-influenceable forms.

For example, I can be uncertain about whether or not WW3 is going to break out at any moment. For me, this is non-influenceable uncertainty—whether it happens or not, I don’t really have any control over the outcome. The actions that I can personally take here have minuscule, if any, effect. If I were, for example, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, or Joe Biden, this might be a different story.

By contrast, I can be uncertain about whether or not I’ll get a promotion this year, or crush an assignment my boss gave me, or pass an exam coming up. These are all things that involve some uncertainty, but where I can directly influence the outcome to a large degree. There may be a few other factors at play, but for the most part how hard I work or study will directly correlate to how likely it is that the desired outcome will come to pass.

2. Stress is a natural response to uncertainty of either form.

Uncertainty is stressful. Where there is no uncertainty, there’s generally also no stress.

When I was certain about my financial future, I was not stressed about it. When I suddenly became uncertain about my financial future, I was extremely stressed about it.

3. Stress from non-influenceable uncertainty is almost always negative.

If I can’t influence or control the outcome of something that is uncertain, then there is no value in my stressing about it. This stress can only affect me negatively, and experiencing it is generally a choice. In order to limit stress from non-influenceable uncertainty, I must adopt a different perspective or mindset, and I must acknowledge what is and isn’t within the limits of my power.

4. Stress from influenceable uncertainty is positive, but only in the right amounts.

Stress about things that I can directly influence is motivating. If whether or not I pass a test, or whether or not Midana succeeds, is largely tied to actions I take and consequences of those actions, then I am incentivized to take action and feel motivated to do so.

Quantity is important here, however. Too little stress motivates no change. Too much stress is anxiety-inducing and creates a counterproductive feedback loop. There is a goldilocks zone for stress that is positive and productive. This is eustress, or “good stress.”

Athletes understand this concept well: no stress on my body produces none of the desirable change; too much stress on my body causes injury, which is counterproductive long-term, as I will be forced to rest to recover. The perfect training program challenges the athlete, but does not break the athlete.

Game designers also understand this concept well: no stress in a game makes things easy and leaves players bored with no desire to play; too much stress in a game makes things impossibly difficult and leaves (most) players with no hope to eventually win after repeated attempts and practice. The perfect game challenges the player, but does not overwhelm the player.

Stress from all sources, whether influenceable or non-influenceable combine to create my mental reality. Not dealing with stress from non-influenceable uncertainty can lead to a lower threshold for taking on stress from influenceable uncertainty.

5. Eliminating stress is not the goal.

This is a corollary from the previous point.

Because stress is uncomfortable and because most of us have experienced stress in excessive quantities, eliminating stress is commonly conflated as the goal.

Where there is no stress, there is comfort, but there is also complacency. In a world or a life without stress, nothing ever changes, let alone changes for the better. Without stress we do not grow or change.

The goal is not to eliminate stress, but rather to control and limit it within productive bounds.

In returning to a place where my financial situation does not generate excessive stress, I am careful to remember that the goal isn’t to return to a place of no stress, but rather to find the sweet spot.

6. Faith is fundamentally a strategy for coping with uncertainty and stress, and not solely a religious concept.

In the face of an otherwise non-influenceable source of uncertainty, faith may enable me to believe that things will work out for the best, thus eliminating stress from sources I can’t otherwise control.

This faith doesn’t have to be religious. Yes, it could manifest as the idea that a higher-power is taking care of me, so if I trust and surrender to that then I can know things will be OK. Alternatively, this faith could manifest itself simply as a form of optimism; an emotional belief rather than a rational one that things will work out for the better.

Faith, even in a religious sense, is fundamentally about coping with uncertainty, and is therefore a tool to limit stress. Whether backed by religion or not, faith allows me to experience a degree of certainty where otherwise I had none.

7. Self-confidence is a form of faith applied to influenceable uncertainty.

Self-confidence is a sense of personal power and optimism that allows me to believe, on an emotional level, that I am capable of producing a desired but potentially uncertain outcome.

Ultimately, this is just faith applied to inwardly rather than faith applied outwardly—a sense of faith in one’s self.

—

While all of this is philosophically interesting to me, the main practical takeaways are to not take my financial situation for granted and not to get complacent. In the dark moments when I was really scared, I lost faith a little bit, both in the sense of wider optimism, and in the sense of self-confidence.

The whole experience has scared me out of what might have been a relatively complacent place. Though I’ve found a rhythm for myself that seems to keep me consistently productive at a reasonable velocity I’m now asking myself whether or not there is enough stress in my life. It’s possible that I’ve minimized stress, and so I don’t move quite as quickly as I could, and I certainly don’t have the same sense of urgency that I would if there were more stress.

When I was worried that I might need to find some additional outside work to supplement my income, suddenly the time and energy I’ve spent on projects like Midana seemed kind of trivial. Now that my faith has been restored to some degree, I’m thinking less catastrophically. Still, I want to see Midana generate profit, and I feel a little more pressure to do so, in a good way. I don’t want to go back to a place where I don’t have the freedom to choose what I do with my time. Ultimately, that’s only guaranteed if I’m entirely able to support myself through my own projects. Better get moving.

Travel ✈️

Somewhat unexpectedly, my girlfriend and I are going to be traveling ~3 months this year. I leave at the beginning of May, and I’ll return at the end of July. I’ll be headed to California, Mexico, Florida, The Bahamas, and New York in that time frame. Primarily, the reason for travel is to celebrate my Dad’s 60th birthday and to attend my girlfriend’s cousin’s wedding.

I will still be trying to work while I’m gone, though I do expect (and worry) that travel will affect velocity a bit. The effort to plan and prepare for travel did already have an effect on velocity this quarter.

Regardless, I am excited about this, even if it is adding some stress to my life (a good thing?). I’m unsure what traveling while COVID cases are still so high will look like, but looking forward to being back on the road for a bit, particularly with my girlfriend. She’s traveled less than I have, so there’s a wealth of experiences to share with her! This is also an awesome opportunity to share parts of my nomadic past that previously I’ve only ever been able to describe.

Fitness 🏋️

It’s been a good quarter for fitness! I started the quarter recovering from an injury that had kept me away from running. At the time, I had been focused mostly on cycling in order to maintain and improve fitness, and had been becoming increasingly frustrated by how inconsistently I was able to find public bikes when I wanted to go for a ride.

Early in the quarter, though, I was able to lockdown a road bike! It took many months of searching, but I’m very excited about the bike I ended up with. It’s a 2019 Trek Madone Project One Icon—custom made and custom painted for the previous owner. The purchase ended up being $$$$, and several times my initial expected budget, but I think I got everything I wanted out of a bike and more with this one. For the perfect bike, and this one is damn near perfect, I think the money was worth it.

Since purchasing my bike, I’ve been very motivated to get back into the triathlon scene, and have been training pretty consistently. I’m feeling pretty strong these days across all 3 triathlon disciplines. Unfortunately, I missed the cut-off to register for a race before I leave Taiwan, but I am registered for a race in September after I return.

I will say, I haven’t been cycling quite as much as I set out to at the beginning of the year, as I discovered pretty quickly that riding in the rain is miserable. I’m willing to do it if push comes to shove maybe ~once a week, but I had a few weeks where I had to go on multiple consecutive days of rainy bike rides and just couldn’t. (It didn’t help that it rained for all but ~6 days in January / February here in Taipei.)

Since starting triathlon training, my training plans have required less cycling overall—only once or twice a week—which has actually been perfect because it allows me to flexibly work around the couple of days a week where it either doesn’t rain or doesn’t rain as hard. Now that I’m recovered from my injury, it also feels good to add running back into the mix.

I haven’t lost as much weight or body fat as I had hoped by now—I’m still hovering around ~160-165lbs. I likely need to pay more attention to diet. As my training has ramped up, I’ve found little excuses here and there to cheat and “reward” myself. There’s a place for that, but if I’m not meeting my goals it likely needs to be re-examined.

Still, given that I started the quarter weighing closer to 170lbs, I’ve lost a non-trivial amount of weight over the course of the quarter.

Social Life 🤗

In reviewing this year’s goals, I notice a lot of things about meeting new people and making new friends. I’d still like to meet new people, but as I review myself this quarter I find that I’m actually decently happy with my social life in Taipei right now. In fact, I’d say there are enough people in my life that I want to see and catch-up with regularly or semi-regularly, that this quarter I’ve sometimes felt a little like my weekends are constantly too busy. Sometimes I worry that I’m actually not getting enough time to myself to just rest and do what I want to relax.

While I do want to maintain the intention to meet more cool people, I feel like a lot of it is happening naturally right now without the need for me to press too much. All of this is to say that even though I expect to have missed a few things I said I wanted to do this quarter, I’m actually feeling quite fulfilled on this front right now :).

Quantitative 🔢

Summary 💯

I’m giving myself a B this quarter. Effort this quarter was solid, though in some cases outcomes were lacking. Feeling pretty good about routine, rhythm, and balance right now.

In order to earn an A, I’d like to have seen myself be a little more consistent on some of the key habits like waking up early and meditating, and I’d like to have seen a little more real progress on monetizing Midana.

Break Down 🧨

Habits 📅

• Daily
  • Morning
    • Wake up by 6:30am
      • Failed on this. To be fair, I shifted my schedule to a 7:30am wake-up in the middle of the quarter, but in spirit I think wake-up discipline has been lacking this quarter.
      • ~22% success rate
    • Meditate for 20 minutes a day
      • ~61% success rate
    • Write in my journal
      • ~71% success rate
    • Leave my phone silenced until my morning routine is complete
      • I’ve slowly and accidentally gotten back into the habit of checking notifications on my phone when I wake up. I should recommit to avoiding this.
  • Evening
    • Get to bed by 10:30pm
      • ~47% success rate. Considering I purposefully didn’t follow this on weekends, that’s actually not too bad, but probably not ideal.
    • Leave my phone and all other electronics (Kindle excepted) charging far away from bed
      • My phone has never returned to the bedside, though I have occasionally taken to playing Switch in bed before going to sleep. Not exactly the best habit.
      • ~57% success rate.
  • Work Days:
    • Take no longer than 1 hour for my lunch break.
      • I’ve found that this actually isn’t that important to a successful day. On a good day, I can still get lots done even if I do take a longer lunch break. Many days, I’ve been finding that working through lunch is also quite effective. This particular rule hasn’t contributed or detracted much from cadence on the whole.
      • ~16% success rate
    • Do a pomodoro of reading from a book that helps me sharpen and advance my professional skills
      • It’s usually not a full pomodoro these days, and I do forget or skip this fairly often, but my records show I did this ~41% of the time.
      • I’ve finished Design Patterns by the Gang of Four,
    • Leave my phone in Do Not Disturb during work sessions
    • Clear my inboxes
    • Plan tomorrow today
  • Do a pomodoro of Chinese active immersion
    • Did pitifully on this this quarter, though I need to re-evaluate how I’m going to sustainably fit language studies in without detracting from ordinary productivity.
  • Stick to my diet plan
  • Complete my Anki reviews
    • Complete 25 backlogged reviews for Chinese
    • Complete 25 backlogged reviews for French
      • Decided to abandon these for now in favor of Spanish since I’m headed to Mexico again this year.
    • Complete 25 backlogged reviews for Spanish
• Weekly
  • Complete an average of 16 pomodoros each day for a total of 80 pomodoros each week
  • Exercise 5-6 times each week
    • Looks like I worked on, on average, just under 4 times a week. Overall, I feel OK about where my exercise routine is, and I do think I’m hitting 5-6 times a week many weeks recently.
  • Find something adventurous to do every weekend
    • I’ve been OK about this.
    • My log shows that I did something I felt was noteworthy 7 out of 12 weekends this quarter.
  • On weekends where I fail to find something adventurous to do, complete a rejection challenge
    • I haven’t done a single rejection challenge yet, and don’t have a strong excuse.
  • Call my parents and sister
• Bi-weekly
  • Complete a sprint planning session
  • Complete a sprint retrospective, and implement actionable takeaways for the next sprint
  • Participate in a family therapy session
    • Been doing therapy sessions with my Dad. I think we missed one Sprint in here somewhere, but we’ve had a few good sessions and a few tougher ones.
• Quarterly
  • Host an event that will allow me to meet friends of friends
  • Attend at least one new meet-up and aim to meet at least one person to grab coffee or drinks with
  • Attend a networking-style event and aim to meet at least one person to grab coffee or drinks with
  • Participate in a race event of some kind
  • Increase weekly pomodoro target, if feasible
    • Going to attempt this this quarter, but on a stretch basis
  • Pick a dieting method each quarter and stick to it at least 80-90% of the time

OKRs 🎯

• Launch Midana to the general public
  • On track to happen this year
• Achieve a 4.5/5-star average rating for Midana
• Make at least $1/month of passive profit with Midana
• Reach at least 50 active users for a new project
  • At current pace on Midana, not sure if I’m on track to start a new project and start attracting users.
• Get my weight back down to the ~145-150 lbs range
  • Currently still in the 160-165lbs range, so still a ways to go, but potentially do-able. Losing weight while traveling is going to be tough, however.
• Reach 10% body fat
  • Likely closer to 15-18% right now.
• Go on 100+ bike rides
  • I’ve hit 26 so far this year, which is actually on track.
• Clear out my backlog of old Anki cards
• Register for a TOCFL Level 4 test in early November
  • Registration opens later this year!
• Pass the TOCFL Level 4 test this year
  • With recent cut backs in language learning to reserve time for other work, I’m lately feeling like I’m not learning quickly enough to expect to pass.
• Reach out to friends to build a bank of 40 rejection challenges
  • Rejection challenge bank built!
• Complete at least 20 rejection challenges
  • I haven’t done a single challenge yet, though 😅…
• Read 40 books
  • Q1: 11 books read! Mostly been re-reading the Dune series after being inspired by the movie released last year.

Metrics 📊

• % compliance for daily, weekly, and bi-weekly habits
  • See above
• Body weight
  • Q1: 163.7lbs at last weigh-in
• Body fat percentage
  • Q1: 15.4% at last weigh-in, but scale is questionably accurate
• Pomodoros completed each day
  • Q1: ~17.6 pomodoros/day
• Average number of pomodoros completed per week
  • Q1: ~88.1 pomodoros/week or ~176.2 pomodoros/sprint
• Midana average star ratings from Apple App Store and Google Play Store
  • Q1: N/A since have not launched yet
• Midana profit per month
  • Q1: Negative ~$53/mo at the moment. Still not profitable.
• Weekly active users across all products
  • Q1:
    • Midana: ~300 weekly active users, though probably better to ask how many users were active since the last lottery draw
• Number of bike rides completed
  • Q1: 26
• Number of rejection challenges completed
  • Q1: 0
• Minutes of Chinese active immersion
  • Q1: 725
• Number of new Chinese Anki flashcards learned
  • Q1: 2060 new cards for an average of 23 new cards/day
• Number of backlogged Anki cards remaining
  • Q1:
    • Chinese: 5277
    • French: 900
    • Math: 128
    • Spanish: 3771

Quarterly Planning 🗓️

Goal Modifications ✏️

No huge changes so far this year! Travel is likely the biggest source of small modifications.

Travel ✈️

Travel will affect my goals a bit, though i’m trying to limit the impact. Under normal circumstances, I’d look to increase my weekly pomodoro goal by 5 pomodoros. With travel in the mix, I suspect that this will be difficult to accomplish, so for now I’m going to commit to this as a stretch goal. If it turns out to feel OK on the road, then I’ll do my best to keep it up.

While I’m abroad, I’ll be switching to a running-focused training program culminating in a half marathon race while I’m in New York City. Part of the motivation for this is also to give myself a calorie sink so I can eat more delicious food :P.

I’m also likely unlikely to be executing rejection challenges while I’m abroad. We’ll see, I’ll try to keep these in my back pocket, but the whole point of rejection challenges this time around was to create a tenable fallback for weekends where I wasn’t otherwise getting adventure, challenge, or uncertainty from other sources. Adding traveling back into the mix should satisfy most of that need. I’m not going to throw rejection challenges out, but I am going to lower the goal number this year.

Goal modifications:

• Stretch: Complete at least 85 pomodoros each week.
• Complete at least 20 rejection challenges.
• Complete at least 10 rejection challenges.

Midana 🚀

No major changes here, but want to crystalize my thoughts on what I’d like to accomplish for Midana this quarter.

There isn’t that much time before I leave Taiwan in May, but I’d like to get as close as possible to launching publicly before I leave. Prerequisites for launching are:

• Scaling issues solved for at least the mid-term if not the long-term for both the mobile client and the backend.
• Backend infrastructure in place to track receipts for in-app purchases and subscriptions.
  • Ideally I build this in such a way that I can re-use the architecture and/or code for future projects.
• Backend infrastructure in place to allow or deny access to features based on purchase status.
• At least one premium feature to ship with the app on launch.
  • Personally, I think receipt translation is the most interesting, but premium receipt scanning features are probably the lowest hanging fruit.
• Smoother onboarding experience.
  • Right now I’m probably losing 50% or more users in my onboarding process, and half of those are probably falling out of the funnel because they’re encountering errors they can’t get past on their own.
  • I either need to stabilize the onboarding experience (there may not be a huge amount I can do here) or re-imagine it to eliminate the technical blockers making it tough for users to get in.

I don’t know that it’s realistic to finish all of this in less than a month, but I would like to see all of this done by the end of Q2. I’d like to see the app launch publicly this quarter, even though I’ll be abroad.

I’ll add these things as “sub”-OKRs to the OKR to launch Midana publicly:

• Launch Midana to the general public
  • Resolve long-term scaling issues for the Midana mobile client
  • Resolve long-term scaling issues for the Midana backend
  • Resolve stability issues in registration and onboarding flows
  • Implement backend infrastructure to track receipts for in-app purchases and subscriptions
  • Implement backend infrastructure to gate access to features based on purchase status
  • Implement at least one premium feature to ship with the app on launch

Risk Mitigation 🛠️

Habit Maintenance on Weekends

I need to do a better job, on average, of maintaining key habits on weekends and days off. Even though I expect to relax and want to give myself space to decompress, a few important things like meditation, journaling, exercise, and, perhaps, language learning should all still be happening over the weekend. For the most part, I should also be trying to maintain good sleep discipline on the weekends to help avoid feeling like I switched timezones on Monday morning.

As a “risk mitigation” this isn’t exactly satisfying, as it isn’t terribly actionable. Still, I think the intent here is important, and I do know what success feels like. Even though I can stay up late on Friday nights, I still do love the feeling of being awake at 6 or 7am on a Saturday morning and having the whole day ahead of me.

Calorie Tracking

This one is really tough for me, but I do need to get back into the habit of tracking calories more closely. Not only because this is going to help me lose weight more consistently, but also because while I travel it’s going to be really important that I have a sense for, at least generally, how much I’m eating. Tracking calories sucks, but it does force a certain sense of mindfulness around how much I’m eating and whether or not I need to self-regulate.

Even if I do pig out for a day, and perhaps especially if I pig out for a day, I’d like to have a full log of how much I ate.

Summarized Habits and OKRs 🎯

Habits 📅

• Daily
  • Morning
    • Wake up by 6:30am
    • Meditate for 20 minutes a day
    • Write in my journal
    • Leave my phone silenced until my morning routine is complete
  • Evening
    • Get to bed by 10:30pm
    • Leave my phone and all other electronics (Kindle excepted) charging far away from bed
  • Work Days:
    • Take no longer than 1 hour for my lunch break.
    • Do a pomodoro of reading from a book that helps me sharpen and advance my professional skills
    • Leave my phone in Do Not Disturb during work sessions
    • Clear my inboxes
    • Plan tomorrow today
  • Do a pomodoro of Chinese active immersion
  • Stick to my diet plan
  • Complete my Anki reviews
    • Complete 25 backlogged reviews for Chinese
    • Complete 25 backlogged reviews for French
    • Complete 25 backlogged reviews for Spanish
• Weekly
  • Complete an average of 16 pomodoros each day for a total of 80 pomodoros each week
  • Stretch: Complete at least 85 pomodoros each week.
  • Exercise 5-6 times each week
  • Find something adventurous to do every weekend
  • On weekends where I fail to find something adventurous to do, complete a rejection challenge
  • Call my parents and sister
• Bi-weekly
  • Complete a sprint planning session
  • Complete a sprint retrospective, and implement actionable takeaways for the next sprint
  • Participate in a family therapy session
• Quarterly
  • Host an event that will allow me to meet friends of friends
  • Attend at least one new meet-up and aim to meet at least one person to grab coffee or drinks with
  • Attend a networking-style event and aim to meet at least one person to grab coffee or drinks with
  • Participate in a race event of some kind
  • Increase weekly pomodoro target, if feasible
  • Pick a dieting method each quarter and stick to it at least 80-90% of the time

OKRs 🎯

• Launch Midana to the general public
  • Resolve long-term scaling issues for the Midana mobile client
  • Resolve long-term scaling issues for the Midana backend
  • Resolve stability issues in registration and onboarding flows
  • Implement backend infrastructure to track receipts for in-app purchases and subscriptions
  • Implement backend infrastructure to gate access to features based on purchase status
  • Implement at least one premium feature to ship with the app on launch
• Achieve a 4.5/5-star average rating for Midana
• Make at least $1/month of passive profit with Midana
• Reach at least 50 active users for a new project
• Get my weight back down to the ~145-150 lbs range
• Reach 10% body fat
• Go on 100+ bike rides
• Clear out my backlog of old Anki cards
• Register for a TOCFL Level 4 test in early November
• Pass the TOCFL Level 4 test this year
• Reach out to friends to build a bank of 40 rejection challenges
• Complete at least 10 rejection challenges
• Read 40 books

Metrics 📊

• % compliance for daily, weekly, and bi-weekly habits
• Body weight
• Body fat percentage
• Pomodoros completed each day
• Average number of pomodoros completed per week
• Midana average star ratings from Apple App Store and Google Play Store
• Midana profit per month
• Weekly active users across all products
• Number of bike rides completed
• Number of rejection challenges completed
• Minutes of Chinese active immersion
• Number of new Chinese Anki flashcards learned
• Number of backlogged Anki cards remaining