Kelly Huang

Author: kelly huang

  • Money update: chunks of one time expenses

    November is a month with multiple large one time bills; we’ve almost doubled the monthly expense from NT$82,558 of October to 165,212 of November. There are 3 expenses that contributed to the inflated number.

    1. MacBook Air M3 13-inch (NT$35,600): the old Macbook Pro 2015 wasn’t able to keep up anymore, it was the right purchase since I had a chance to run it for an interview over Teams on Chrome. A task that the old Intel i5 just couldn’t keep up.
    2. TOTO toilet and sink (NT$30,750): replacing a crack on the previous toilet, this is obviously for safety reasons. Sink was not a necessary expense, but it was nice to see them in a set.
    3. Gym membership (NT$26,000): this is on Linda, some tasks and habits are easier when there’s a professional tracking it.

    It accumulates 55% of the November expense; without those, the November expense is 76,138. The baseline expense is actually lower than October.

    Some observations

    • I’d pay more for convenience. I could have paid less price for the toilet with a lesser known brand, but TOTO was a 10 minute walk from home and I don’t have to figure out the drainpipes myself. It’s just easier since I was finding time to meet work, family, and interviews.
    • The family number. Linda and I merged our income numbers on the same spreadsheet, it required a habit tweak, relocating accounts, and discussions for both of us. I wonder if it’s true that two will work faster than one.

  • Do difficult task with sugar and junk food

    Sugar and junk food rewards the brain, releases dopamine to make us feel happy. Eat it while we are working on a difficult task makes the task feel less stressful by building a reward loop.

    To take advantage of dopamine release,

    • Eat healthy most of the time to establish a baseline, when sugar high hits, it actually triggers the reward loop.
    • Learn to distinguish difficult task. Some task are naturally more difficult, requires structuring of information, long process, or multiple hard decisions; sometimes mediocre tasks seem difficult because we feel tired.

  • Benefits of an actual radio

    Radio has become the staple for family meal time.

    • More fluent user experience, simply flip a switch. No face unlock, no finding through apps.
    • Less decision making. No search for the “best” channel or topic.
    • More focused. No screen, no pop-up.
    • More engaging. Not all hosts or music falls into our likes, but that turns into a dinner table discussion.
    • Practice accepting imperfection. Less favorable songs, hosts, uninterruptible ads; the fact it can’t be swiped is a reminder to accept what happens in the moment.

    It’s an outdated, single purpose technology, but it reminds us to live in the moment, even if it’s imperfect or unpleasant.

  • Exercise when feel not to

    Unless it’s health related, these sometimes turn into a great exercise.

    A long day of work; exercise becomes a switch of thoughts.

    An argument with family; exercise blows the steam off.

    Emotion can be flipped with motion.

  • Lean team and big team

    Teams come in 2 sizes, lean versus volume. Former focuses on mission execution and the later focuses on strategic formation.

    Recently, I traded 1 headcount in exchange of removing video production from the responsibility. The team becomes leaner and easier to focus on go-to-market planning, asset creation, and channel enablement. It made sense since video production is resource intensive.

    It has, however, got me thinking if I naturally opted for a leaner team that dedicates on critical mission execution. It would eventually lead to a different career path since no Secretary of Defense ever came from a special operation role. Major management role requires overall strategic formation.

    A leaner team also creates more personal relationships from the accomplishment of execution. This attachment could be contradicting in strategic planning; decision of sacrifice or letting go is more difficult.