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Start here!

Looking ahead to the coming months, I recognize the time that I have is finite and easily expendable. I have an equal amount of time at home as I do abroad, so it feels important for me to hone in on the people and practices that matter to me while I’m here + utilize the time I have overseas to build long-lasting habits while I’m away.

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Focal Points

I have about five weeks and four weekends home in NYC. That means a limited amount of time to spend with all of my favorite people!

• All-day activities: With autumn in full effect, I’m aware that I have a limited number of weekends for outdoor activities. I’ve got tentative plans to visit Stormking and climb at the Gunks, and it probably behooves me to find some time for me and Laika to hike again before the winter kicks in after my sabbatical travel.
• Daily bits: I’m also aware that every day is an opportunity to connect — whether that’s grabbing coffee, food, and coworking; doing ~ city activities ~ like seeing plays, shows, and other events; visiting spots to sketch and chat; or bringing people together for rituals like board game nights, neighborhood dinners, or communal meals like dim sum.

At the center of these activities is my desire to deepen my relationships with the people I want to be spending time with — whether I’ve known them for a long time, or just felt a connection with them that I’d like to build and strengthen. I’ve been living on my own for a little over a year now, and I’m grateful for the time and space it’s afforded me in recollecting and reshaping how I share my energy with others.

I’ve created a new Notion calendar specifically for sabbatical, and my goal is to fill each NYC day with exactly one thing that I want to focus on. A day trip, lunch with a friend, seeing a show… let’s make these days count! 💖 🙏 🙇

Habits and Practices

Aside from the social aspects of my life, I want to ensure that I instill some personal habits that will have intentional long-term outcomes. These are habits that I can work on in short bites (~30-60 minutes a day), even when I’m abroad or after I’ve gone back to a 10-6 job.

1. Learning mandarin — despite my Chinese ancestry and an entire half of my extended family living in Taiwan, I have zero ability to speak or understand Mandarin beyond some basic words and phrases. Maybe that’s because i’ve spent most of my life figuring out which words are burmese and which ones are chinese. Anyways, i’d like to feel comfortable navigating taiwan and the chinatowns of the world; holding conversations with extended family; and feeling more connected to people that look like me and hold a similar cultural heritage.
2. Physical sketching — i’m really really bad at drawing. like, surprisingly bad, and probably worse now than I was as a high-schooler with a wacom tablet. I’d like to sketch and watercolor regularly for a few different reasons:

(a) Most of my riso work has been designed through digital means (i.e. code). I’m really missing the freedom and personality of something hand-drawn and I can tell that my abilities to use a pen and paintbrush are atrophying as I spend more and more time at the keyboard. The ethos of zines and riso is being able to take something quickly from zero to print, and I’d like to improve my ability to do that. I’ve also often struggled to replicate the form of people, places, and objects around me and would like to focus on manifesting those images onto the page.

(b) I like to observe and capture my surroundings. I feel really comfortable taking portraits and compositions with a camera, but it can be pretty invasive and also unsafe when I travel. Sketching feels more lowkey. I’d love to have a way to imagine and create instead of always capturing when I’m out and about. 3. Building tech leadership guidelines — big swerve ~ i’ve spent a lot of time managing different types of individuals & building and leading teams of all shapes and sizes. At the end of the day, I want to ensure that folks have the right structure and support to be productive and to feel good about coming in day after day.

I’m not perfect, but I’ve learned a lot through hands-on experience and from working with tons of people that I admire. While i’m not looking to define ✨ the best way ✨ to be a manager, leader, or peer, I hope that by documenting my own approaches and experiences, I can formalize my approach for future teams and help others in finding their own form of leadership, no matter what role they play within a team or organization.

Project Deliverables

Phew….that’s a lot already. In addition to all the above, I’ve got two concrete projects that I need to work on:

• The Space Type online shop. We’ve talked about it for a long time, and now’s the time to get it up and running. This includes development, photo editing and setup, and writing up processes and guidance around shipping and fulfillment.
• THING. https://thing.tube/ will be running an exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image, and I’m supporting development. While the opening has been postponed, there’s a decently-sized backlog of improvements that will need to be made for the exhibit and livestreams.

Outer Rims

With relatively little time in the city, a few things will need to fall to the wayside.

I’ve enjoyed attending Lindy Hop classes and think that it will continue to be in my future, but I’m aware of the limited time I have at home for the rest of the year and believe that it will naturally need to be out of focus during my sabbatical time.

Similarly, I’ve enjoyed delving back into the Space Type riso micropress practice, but don’t see it being as big of a factor as it’s been in the past month. I may focus on developing some ideas and practicing physical mediums while I’m abroad — with the intention of bringing it back into some riso experiments in the new year.