Greetings Friends! ✌🏼👽

I hope you all had a restful and rejuvenating weekend. I definitely had a great “reset”, which blessed me with the space and energy to restarts these “weekly” emails, the last of which was sent out at the beginning of last month. After conducting my Monthly Check-in ritual, I realized that I engaged in quite a lot this past month and had unknowingly allowed external factors outside my control to overwhelm and affect my intended actions. With that said, there’s three objectives I would like to accomplish in this email:

1. Briefly set the context - what’s been going on in my life?
2. Express my learnings from this past month of intentional and not-so-intentional living.
3. Introduce some guiding structure to this email to make it easier for me to write and for you to read in the future.

What’s been poppin’?

Company lay-offs and promotion 🪓

Prior to the New Year, the company I work at laid off a chunk of employees across multiple teams and departments. Directly after that lay-off, I was promoted to a “senior engineer” position with new responsibilities starting in January 2024. So far, this has meant picking up the “loose ends” of incomplete work left behind by exited engineers, collaborating with tighter resources, and getting onboarded to new engineer-y duties. Not bad, except that the company also invited remaining product-related team members to a mandatory on-site event, further adding constraints to time and energy. In short, a little more money, a lot more busy 🙄.

Gave a knowledge share presentation on “Building a Second Brain”

Last year, after an engineering manager got laid off, I volunteered to assume her role as the steward of a monthly “Technical Knowledge Share” event. My intention was and still is to rebrand this from an event geared towards transfer of technical knowledge to a small number of people into a more inclusive space with content relevant to a broader audience of knowledge workers. As such, I decided to share my learnings about personal knowledge management from my reading and distillation of Tiago Forte’s “Building a Second Brain”. You can check out Manifest 00 for more on that. You can also view the slides I used in my presentation here. To be honest, there were only like 7 people in attendance, BUT the CTO and CPO did attend and had kind words to say about it. The Director of IT also viewed the recorded presentation, got inspired to purchase and read the book, and even added the entire IT team to the event invite. So…success? 🤷🏻‍♂️ Anyways, definitely more to come about Technical(ly) Knowledge Share™️ 👀.

Side-Work

Not much to say here - I helped an old friend write a heartfelt recommendation letter for application to a data science graduate school program. I coded a tax calculator for my brother’s business partner using some a new development framework I had always wanted to try out. Just planting seeds of goodwill when I feel moved to do so.

Re-connected with old friends, made new friends

It always feels great to resonate with others on their journeys to manifest their higher self. Making these connections feels natural to me and it is something I’d like to develop and chase more.

Learned how to crochet

This is a hobby 641 and I picked up in hopes that we can make funny clothes for Seven. So far, so good 😏...

Got some timely advice from Mike Kim through his Youtube video, “Solopreneurs: 5 Ways to Strengthen Your Self-Respect”​

After letting 3 weeks slip by without writing this “weekly” manifest, Mike’s video popped up in my Youtube feed to nourish me with some hard, but compassionate truths. I will leave the summary and distillation of his content for a future correspondence, but digesting his video podcast episode leads to the next objective of this email…

Learnings from this month

More money doesn’t make the work more fun

Getting promoted put me in a mindset where I felt I needed to put more energy into the thing where my progress was being acknowledged and valued. Putting more energy into the job, however, immediately affected my stress levels. On reflection, I realized the promotion doesn’t mean I magically have more energy to throw into my work. Instead, it means I have been recognized for being able to more effectively leverage my energy. So the learning here for me is stress less and be more prudent with how I spend my time and energy.

Finishing things and honoring commitments builds self-respect, confidence, and momentum

Having projects drag on or making commitments I can’t keep take a large toll on my overall confidence and motivation to stay invested in the process. These, however, do not even need to be external commitments - they could be commitments to personal habits, like journaling or gymming. Taking this practice directly from Mike, I committed to a small act of writing introspectively for at least 5 minutes a day. And for external commitments…

Do less to finish more

In engineering, we have a maxim, “scope down and ship it”. At startups, it’s all about getting things done quick without compromising quality. As we know, quality ≠ quantity, so the tradeoff is to do less to finish more!

Make things more fun by being more sincere, not more serious

I got this one from a book I’m reading by my favorite productivity guru, Ali Abdaal. The book is called Feel Good Productivity and it’s main premise is that we are much better and more productive at the things we have fun at. Sometimes there are tasks that just aren’t inherently fun, but because we are intelligent and willful beings, we can affect our mindset as we undertake that work. In most cases, the consequences of our work are never as dire as they seem to us, so generally, we can take things less seriously while still completing them with genuine sincerity.

Now, to establish some lasting structure, introducing…

Favorite Tings of the Week

Most of the “work” I’m doing with these emails is consuming content that resonates with me, distilling them into more palatable points, and giving my personal thoughts and perspective on how I integrate them into my life to become a more effective individual. I will continue this format, but also recognize that you all can also do that work for yourselves. So for stuff that I don’t get to fully dissect and discuss, I’ll just build little bridges to the content for you all to explore and enjoy on your own time:

• Breathwork Practice - Guided Breathwork: More Gratitude (Wim Hof, Cyclic Sighing, Coherence)​
• Quote - “Don’t be serious. Be sincere.” -Alan Watts
• Thing I Made - A crochet llama for my work desk

Anyway, thanks for reading! If you have any suggestions or feedback for me, feel free to respond via email or fill out this short form.

​

Cheers,
- AT🌐

Post(s) to get to know me

• ​What is Good Work?​
• ​Manifest #01​
• ​Manifest #00​