Essays from the Weekend

Who doesn’t love the Pareto principle? 80/20, or 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes.  Finding the 20% always gets me excited. For example, a 15-minute meditation in the morning translates to a positive, clear mindset the whole day. Carving out a half-day at work to fix a process translates to efficient projects for the rest of the year. Low-hanging fruit and easy wins are the best! Especially when it comes to the important things in life that one really has to take care of, like diet and exercise. Those determine the baseline quality of your life. You want to keep your physical and mental health in tiptop shape but you also want it to be low-maintenance because you have a lot of other things to worry about. A couple of my life obsessions are productivity and health. Combining the two, I’d like to share my best health hacks and habits from several years of personal study of what works and what doesn’t. I'm still learning as I go along, happily collecting tips. I hop...

Two weeks ago, this book came out of my baul .  It was time. I've been hearing people talk about The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron for years. Mostly in connection to morning routines.  I used to be obsessed with operationalizing the optimal morning routine, and productivity gurus on the Internet mostly recommended: meditation, exercise, and Morning Pages.  Morning Pages is an exercise where you freely write three pages of longhand in the morning, every day. Write about anything, stream of consciousness, whatever you like. As long as it's three pages.  This is supposed to help unblock your thoughts, to get you started on your day with a clear mind, as you already unleashed all the issues and blocking thoughts out on the page first thing in the morning.  People recommending this cited The Artist's Way.   So I was doing Morning Pages for some time now even if I haven't read the book, I can't go without regularly doing that. It's therapeutic. Most times I ...

I start this blog (and newsletter, depending on your choice of viewing) for a number of reasons. First, the many ideas, thoughts, and experiences that I've been keeping to myself have to be shared with other women in Asia and beyond, who may find them useful and worth exploring. These ideas are only percolating in my head most of the time, helping and entertaining noone but myself and people close by.  I have not engaged in social media for the past year and have no intentions of going back for the meantime. More on that later, but effectively -- there is a responsibility to share and contribute, and I'll likely have fun in the process. Second, there is a need for more Asian female writers in my inbox that I can relate to, so I decided to be one for other people.  I see and read a lot of Western women of all races online, and I love them and can relate to them, but not fully. I am Asian and I live in Southeast Asia, gratefully Level 4 , like people in Western countries, but sh...