My Biggest Life Hack of 2022

I started creating tables of the most important things in my life I want to keep track of and stay consistent in. I do this in Notion because it has the prettiest interface, has a good search function with command + P, you can have multiple views of the same information (gallery, list, database, filters, sorting), many areas to add comments the way I want to (as opposed to Excel/Sheets), and I am very used to it (been using it for years). But you can apply this using any table or workspace tool you want.

Here’s an example:

Notice how it’s not perfect. I used to need to make it super complex, but now I know complexity is the enemy of execution. We are only human. Layers of complexity are distractions. Simple scales, fancy fails.

Resuming from the above pictured table, I leverage subpages for additional details for each online tool I use. In this case, the following picture shows all the dates and amounts of whenever I pay for this monthly subscription service to Splice, a cloud-based music creation platform that I only use for sound samples.

I’m passionate about tracking and having the data, because it increases the feeling of ownership and I love to analyze it to improve my life.

Tracking is great and all, but I think the power comes when you do this for initiatives you want to stay consistent in and for writing.

• I recently made one for all the research replications that I would like to do. This actually motivates me to do more, as I can keep track of it.
• I have one for all the products and solutions we have in Alibaba Cloud.
• I have one for all the insights I gain. Every time I have an “aha” moment, I would put it here.
• I have one for everything I own. This helps show my net worth that I can also depreciate for “accounting” purposes. It also kind of motivates me to earn more or gain higher level intuition for how money can be spent.
• I have one called “Taru University.” At this stage of my life, I want to invest a majority of my income into investing into myself. I’ve found there are so many possibilities online. This is a one stop table to keep track of this. Having an independent entity for this psychologically gets me to find more to add to the table.
• I have one for trips, one for monthly spending reports, and one for my weekly YouTube journal.

You don’t have to take it to my level, I have one for every wardrobe item I own.

Importance of Intentionality: Turning powerful ideas into templated tables and pages

It’s important for each table to have a scope that isn’t too large, and for each to have it’s unique clear purpose. Once you’ve found something that adds value and you need to regularly do in your life, make a table for it. I have so many examples of this in my own workspace, and research replications of important papers is one of them. To become an AI researcher with novel and original ideas, Andrew Ng once said that replicating research papers is of de facto importance. Having this table set up is conducive to me doing more replications, and also a template because on each entry, all the dimensions I create for it can help me consider what factors are important.

It’s also a good way to implement particular perspectives on things into our habits. For example, I used to have a TODO list. Now I have an energy investment portfolio where I group the things I have to get done in these following categories: autopilot, bucket list, high energy, one and done, discarded, and finished. They’re the same thing, but one way is more practically effective than the other and is driven by the philosophy that I shouldn’t focus on too many things at once, because our energy is a limited resource.

Adding More Dimensions

The magic happens to when you add more dimensions to the table. The simplest example of this is adding categories per entry. You’re training yourself to critically think how to best organize these items into categories.

One of my favorite columns to add is a text column called “Note” where I either elaborate on the particular entry or add more detail that’s directly visible. For deeper stuff, Notion’s first column automatically encourages doubling the entry as a subpage, so that’s where it goes.

Modularization of Life

Often times, your information you collect, or you use as your second brain is scattered and duplicated across multiple sources. These one stop tables create a modularization of my life, which helps me take advantage of insights over time, data driven, and less likely to miss important information.

Whatever system you make, just get started and improve it over time based on your habits and preferences, because the right answer is just what enables you to consistently achieve the most. You won’t see results at smaller scales. It’s after sustained effort over time, as these tables iteratively grow bigger and bigger, you’ll thank yourself for it.

Of course, PowerPoint might be better for presenting this information or creating graphics. Writing on paper or on an iPad might be better for the learning stage. I actually have an infrastructure diagram for which stacks and tools I find most effective for particular purposes, and how information can ebb and flow in between them. This is very much in the spirit of data engineering, knowing the right place, with the right characteristics, to put data and information based on the 5Vs of data.

Most data engineers don’t think about nor care about the day-to-day life applications of theoretical concepts, only when applied to larger scale and transactional or analytical data. But I am personally just passionate about the idea of solution architecting for life. I believe that even in the smaller scales or daily life, data engineering can help you get the most of life. I will make this more concrete in a future post.