Category: A Matter of Time
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Learning Chinese again
When my parents decided to immigrate from Hong Kong to Canada, there was a system-level consequence: their future child was going to grow up speaking English, soaking up North American culture, and living a Canadian lifestyle. Saturday morning cartoons were part of this culture and lifestyle, but my parents had other ideas. Instead of letting…
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Shape your projects and tasks
Shorten how long it takes. It’s easier to convince yourself to do a five minute task, than it is to do a thirty minute one. You can outpace procrastination. Shrink it. Small projects and tasks look more approachable than big ones. Simplify it. The more straightforward it is, with fewer steps to follow through the…
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Learning fast vs. learning with your heart
When you’re a child, you have a superpower: you learn incredibly quickly. You soak knowledge up like a sponge. The only condition is that your heart needs to be in it. (This is known as enrollment.) This turns out to matter a lot, because you’re not always in control; you haven’t learned to trick yourself…
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Keep interruptions brief
In a series of events that’s too detailed and boring to explain, I found out the bank sold all of my stocks. It felt very jarring. As I considered what to do next—should I just move all the money out? Wait to buy my positions at the same price I sold, or even cheaper? Reassess…
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Release and consumption cycles
If your favorite TV show releases once a week, and you want to binge watch it, here’s a simple tactic: wait until the whole season is out. All it takes is restraint. We live in a time where there’s no shortage of distractions, so that can be useful here as well. Here’s how I apply…
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Early and late are relative
When you book a flight, you know you need to get to the airport by a certain time. If you need to get there four hours ahead of boarding time to feel comfortable, anything less than that buffer feels late. Even if you arrive two hours before boarding, you may feel like you should’ve been…
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The six lean, long, years of starting up Pokémon
The Pokémon Company is owned by three companies. One company is Game Freak, which is owned by the person who came up with the original idea for Pokémon, Satoshi Tajiri. Game Freak developed the original Pokémon video games, and owns roughly ⅓ of the company. In 1990, Satoshi approached Nintendo to publish and distribute the…
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Your intentions need baking and cleaning
When you intend to do something, are you set up to follow through? If you find that it’s more difficult than you think, I’d like to suggest a metaphor and two techniques: Baking new intentions: Start your workday with a paper index card which has a list of a few tasks, preferably with the most…