Another eventful month went by. At the start, I wanted a “Play October”, where I’m going to run a learning experiment to learn how to inject joy and play into my daily work. I just want to enjoy every f**king work day, because I’m so bad at it and don’t want to reach my destination without enjoying the journey. So I set out experiments to learn about injecting joy and play into my work. Instead of setting a definitive outcome or output, what if I set open-ended, exploratory questions that guide my way towards learning about it?

First, a quick rundown of stuff done:

?‍?Work

✅Made play and joy my main focus this month. Reflections further below.

✅Prettified my MVP from Sept, Your Life In Months. Went slow on this to follow my curiosity and energy for other things.

✅Concept to launch of Keto List Singapore within 3 days!

✅Got that 1 customer that I didn’t get in Sept. Received $5 in my Stripe account this month, for Keto List Singapore! It’s strange yet wonderful…   

✅Tinkered with and made my first JAMstack site - so excited about this new tech!

✅Learned new tools - Table2Site, Airtable, JAMstack. Stoked with the ease, speed and look of products made using Table2Site (but at same time, it discouraged my learning coding efforts), not so stoked with its pricing. Airtable is really shaping out to be the next generation, nocode backend, so am glad to finally get on it.  

?Health

✅Overcame the classic keto stall (and consequently, productivity stall) - 2 weeks of low energy, muscle weakness/cramps, brain fog, fatigue. Not good for productivity, but a necessary milestone towards fat adaptation. 

✅Flab loss: At least 6kg weight loss so far. Belly flab noticeably disappearing. Down two belt holes!

✅Nutritional myth-busting: Learned so much about how the nutritional laws that I was brought up with needs updating!

✅Sleep: Abandoned alarm clock in favour of waking up naturally. Messes up the planned daily micro-habit schedule, but feel more rested than ever.

?Life

✅Managed care needs for my mum who just went for a surgery.

?Books finished or started on

Finished -

• The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime! by MJ DeMarco
• Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination by Hugh MacLeod
• Ruby for Kids
• Ruby on Rails for Dummies

Started on -

• The Magic of Thinking Big, by David Schwartz
• America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilisation, by Graham Hancock

Stalled on -

• The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want, by Sonja Lyubomirsky (I blame the too-good book notes by @juliasaxena haha! Didn’t feel like I need to read it after her comprehensive and on point book notes)

-–

Play October reflections, from learning to inject play into work

?Following my energy, instead of a plan

I followed where my energy flowed, and avoided where my energy stalled. Often, I would conduct mind-body scans at the start of the day, and then I followed my energy for the day. That energy can be curiosity or excitement, or it can be fatigue or indecision. When there’s excitement, I ride the wave and work with it. Productivity often improves without trying. When my energy stalls, I often walked it out - “solvitur ambulando” - or work offline.

It’s unnerving at first (see next point), but following the flow of my energy had definitely made me experience more joy. If I had pushed through on doing a task just because I arbitrarily planned to complete it a few weeks ago without foreseeable context of what will happen a few weeks later, then that would have taken the joy right out. But even right now, a part of me still asks in panic, “What if you got a real deadline to deliver, but you don’t like the work??!!” I don’t know yet. Maybe when I do client work again, I’ll have to face this with a vengeance. But for now, when I’m working for myself, on my own products, it goes. And it goes very well.

Energy is also opportunity cost. The more energy I have for my task, the faster/better I do it, which leads to better opportunities. Doing stuff I don’t enjoy, is energy inefficiently spent/wasted and therefore opportunity cost wasted. But the critical voice in my head is screaming, “You’re all over the place, being completely hedonistic and irresponsible, and will probably not finish anything!” Not true. Following my curiosity, I managed to launch my product Keto List Singapore within a week, and created my first few JAMstack sites (which was a direct benefit of following curiosity last month from learning command line for Ruby on Rails, hence it wasn’t so scary following the tutorials for GatsbyJS and Netlify).

?Embracing an unnerving loss of direction initially

Unmoored by my old ways of following a specific plan with S.M.A.R.T. goals, what do I then do each day? For Type A, hyper-motivated and productivity-obsessed people like me, it’s difficult to take a different, more chaotic tack to work. This feels almost wrong. But in the famous words of Muhammad Ali,

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”

So I decided to give myself permission to not do <insert old habits here>, because seriously, nobody cares! (in a good way, that there’s a sense of freedom in that) Follow my bliss, not the crowd.

?A lot of injecting joy in work is just not doing things that take joy out of work

Goals of avoidance work too. Via negativia, as Nassim Taleb says. Throughout the month, it felt like I wasn’t seeking out joy directly, but more in a round-about way. By just following my energy, I naturally avoided the stuff I hated. Working on stuff that my energy is drawn to didn’t exactly feel like a “woohoo!”, jumping-for-joy kind of joy either - it just felt……right. Aligned. In balance. Sailing with the headwinds. Calm, not crazy (even if crazy in a positive way).

Techniques of avoidance feels like gardening - you can’t make the plant grow on command, just like I can’t invoke joy in my work upon instruction. All I could do is to just till the soil, plant the seeds, water just enough, make sure the sunlight is not too strong. 

And wait for joy to sprout and blossom.