What I'm Doing Now - January 2025

🗓️ Updated: 30th January 2025, Melaka

I’m writing this from a converted Peranakan house coffee shop in Melaka during the Lunar New Year celebrations. January has been full on with an apartment move and work deadlines, but I’ve managed to stay on top of things. While some of my New Year’s habits got temporarily disrupted, I’m embracing Oliver Burkeman’s “dailyish” philosophy – consistency matters more than perfection.

New Y̶e̶a̶r̶s̶ 12 Weeks Resolutions

Instead of having a traditional New Year’s Resolutions, I’m having 12-week goals - inspired by “The 12 Week Year”. The shorter timeline creates urgency, forces selectivity, and provides faster feedback loops. I’ve written my goals in an OKR (Objectives and Key Results) format to help track progress and I’ve posted publicly for accountability.

Work Life

Recently delivered a 4-hour customer training workshop on our AutoML and MLOps products, which pushed me to deeply understand our offerings quickly. Despite the inevitable technical hiccups, it went smoothly and I’m keen to apply my reflections into future sessions. Next month’s focus is designing our customer’s new machine learning and data engineering platform, and brainstorming customer-centric agentic applications.

Active Life

Just signed up for a local half marathon (hello, 4:15 AM start time). Maintaining my weekly rhythm of a 5K run and a climbing session. This year, I’m combining my fitness activities with my social life, maintaining my health and relationships simultaneously. I’ve become that person who calls their friends whilst on a run, both indoors and outdoors (apologies to treadmill runners without any earbuds).

Reading Now

Finished “Made to Stick”, a great book on how to better communicate and persuade. I’ve already recommended the book to several friends and will write a blog post as I’ll definitely revisit these concepts.
Reading Oliver Burkeman’s “Meditations for Mortals”, which builds upon his “Four Thousand Weeks”
Currently absorbed in a new dramatised Audible version of “1984.” “Reading” it again years after school, it’s striking how relevant Orwell remains despite being written in 1949.

Inspired by Derek Siver’s /now page. A now page that tells you what someone is focused on at this point in their life.