Leave of Absence During Pandemic — Getting the Most Out of the Time

Image by Jan Vašek from Pixabay

Background

It’s been a month since I’ve been on Leave of Absence (LoA) from my day job. For the context, the LoA was not voluntary. On one hand, I was somewhat concerned about my job during COVID-19 outbreak — the company that I work for went through several re-org since the pandemic. On the other hand, I was looking forward to some time for my personal growth.

When the LoA started, It was Christmas time. My to-do list was already full: make Christmas cards, write greeting emails, decorate the house, prepare for the Sunday School event, and do the end-of-the-year retrospective.

The retrospect became a project in itself. I ended up making a video in three languages: English, Spanish and Korean.

That was December, and January came so fast. I knew the time would fly and in no time I will be back at work. I definitely needed a good strategy to get most of my LoA during this critical time.

Plan to Maximize My Time

As soon as I finished all my Christmas chores, I got myself into strategic mode. This year, instead of making a New Year resolution, which is well known to last a month or two, I decided to do something different. I will introspect myself, examine what I really want, what really matters to me, translate into My Purpose, My Core Values and My Principles. I used Vishen’s exercise as a tool to help me with introspection.

Once I had clarity on My Purpose and My Core Values, I proceeded to make a list of things I wanted to do and things I wanted to learn. The list was ambitious: write articles on publishing sites (.e.g medium.com), develop a tool to keep my personal retros, create contents for my YouTube channel, read books (there is another list for this), learn mobile programming, blockchain, AI & Machine Learning, Unity, philosophy fundamentals, macro economy and finance, and of course, exercise more.

I knew I won’t be able to do all of them, I had to pick a few that I felt I could manage during my LoA time that could be up to three months. To help me prioritize, for each item in the list I wrote their Whys, Hows and the Level of Effort.

I came up with the following plan:

1. During the work hours except for Fridays.: Develop a mobile app to track my retros. This addresses my need for personal retro tools and learning mobile programming
2. Fridays: Create content for EmpoderemosMas.com / YouTube Channel
3. During lunch and dinner: Watch philosophy video courses.
4. Saturdays: Learn Machine Learning
5. Sundays: Family development, presentation day
6. 30 mins every weekday: Read book

Yup, it is still ambitious, but I needed to try. I can always iterate as I go — à la agile 😉.

Here is my progress as of today

1. Development a Personal Retro App (Learn Mobile Dev)

The best way of learning development — in fact, the best way of learning anything — is by doing. Adopting the concept of learning by doing, I initiated a project of developing a tool I have been wanting for a while: an app that keeps my retrospectives.

I found an app called journey.cloud that resembles what I have in mind, but does not quite fit requirements.

I did some research and decided on Typescript + Ionic + React as the language and framework. I created a mockup, learned about Ionic development, react-toolkit, react-hook-form, and implemented a simple UI of the app.

I recently found out that there is a new library trending in React ecosystem called Recoil for state management

In addition I also completed a small PoC to verify that Social Login is possible with the tech stack mentioned above.

This is my repo at GitLab.

Retro

• New technologies are constantly changing: new concepts, frameworks libraries, keep coming out. It is still a good idea to learn the existing proven technology so that you have enough insight to understand the new technology.
• Writing an article about my learning and publishing it was a good way of organizing my thoughts and putting a closure on a spike-like task such as the PoC.
• I used to start a project with the server-side — e.g. API — but this time, I started with the UI, more akin to Consumer-Driven Contracts. This approach got me more excited as I could see the visual aspect of the UI.
• Mockups were useful, but I need better vision on the fluidity of the experience. Perhaps a user journey can help.
• I need to setup CI/CD pipeline
• Try the PWA, it could be a good interim step before deploying the application on App Store (which incur cost)

2. Create Content for my YouTube Channel (Empoderemos Más)

I completed the “2020 Year In Review’’ video. It took me about 5+ full days working from 9am to 9pm. But it was worth it. I not only learned few facts I was not aware of while researching about 2020 such as Apple valuation goes up to $2T; Polio eradication in Africa; Chuck Fenney officially completing his four decade mission of Atlantic Philanthropies; impeachment of Peruvian president, Sudan banning female genital mutilation.

I was satisfied with the video which motivated me to create the Korean and English versions.

I am currently working on the next video about the framework for finding the Your Purpose and Value. I have almost completed the script.

Retro

• It requires more time than just one day per week to produce a video.
• The video published in YouTube requires better metadata to improve SEO.
• With a small-ish effort, the content can be reused and published in different media. I will try in Medium.com first, another platform that seems to be in competition with Medium.com is steemit.com but it hasn’t shown up in my radar which is making me conclude that it reaches a smaller audience.
• I have not been doing a good job on keeping track of the resources and assets I used for the content. At the end it was more work to go back, find the reference to the resources.
• I need to find someone who can proofread my text.
• In practice, the video took 3+ days per week.

3. Learn Fundamentals of Philosophy

The source can drastically change your learning experience. The old advice used to be “choose your book wisely” nowadays is choose your book, audio or video clips wisely. Even with TikTok — I am actually not a TikTok user — and its 60 second limitation, choose carefully what you are going to watch. Video clip after video clip, those social media can yank out a good chunk of your life time.

With an hour of research, searching for appropriate books online courses on philosophy. I settled on CrashCourse series on Philosophy by PBS. The series consists of 46 episodes of 9 mins average videos. The main factor in choosing that source was the family-friendliness: my daughter liked the format. So far we watched 20 episodes, and during the video my daughter from time to time likes to take a pause and discuss the topic.

Retro

• Philosophy is a great topic to engage kids in a healthy discussion.
• I learned and re-learned many things that didn’t seem consequential but they are.
• I should have taken notes, I forgot the concepts and people’s names. Knowing the exact names are not important in itself, but to allow me to dig deeper about the topic that was dealt with.

4. Learn Machine Learning

This is the area which I did least of. I haven’t had much progress other than reading a few comparisons between PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras and SciKit.

Basically PyTorch and TensorFlow are used for Deep Learning (Neural Network) whereas SciKit is a toolset that includes machine learning tools such as SVM, nearest neighbor, k-Means, etc. The Neural Network does include a library for neural networks, but is simpler compared to PyTorch or TensorFlow.

Small knowledge gain. But still, gain.

I am trying a new tactic: I asked (persuaded) my wife to take on learning PyTorch and then teach me afterwards. Context: she’s not a developer.

Retro

• I knew the items in the plan went overboard. Machine Learning was the major victim.
• Instead of learning by reading and watching, I should try finding a concrete use case that adds value to what I do, this would add motivation.

5. Family development, presentation

December 31, 2020. I had just uploaded the 2020 Retro Korean version to YouTube, and I was excited to show it off to my family. My family was gathered in the main room and watched the video together. I was tired but inspired, I can see that my wife and daughter were also inspired. The video naturally led to a discussion about spreading the information and acting on things that matters and “changing the world.” The discussion gave birth to 기발 (it is aKorean acronym we made and is pronounced Ghi-bahl, but we are calling it “Giveall” which sounds similar but has nicer meaning😊). “기발” is actually acronym for “기쁨과 발전이 있는 가족” (Family with Joy and Progress).

The first activity that the Giveall family adopted was the weekly presentation. Every week a member of the family does a presentation about a topic of his/her preference. Eventually we will create videos and publish on YouTube.

Three weeks have passed, and everyone presented once. I was surprised that my 12 year old daughter — who used to freak out in front of the video camera — did very well. She attributed her confidence to the mastery of the topic she presented: “fanfiction”

My wife’s presentation was also very interesting. She presented about the lifecycle of plastic and the responsibility of consumers. She debunked major misconceptions about plastic recycling and legislations — in a few words, it was frightening.

Retro

• Because of other responsibilities on weekends, Weekly Family presentations were conducted on Sunday afternoon 3~4 pm. But by then, the energy of most of the people have been already drained, making it difficult to pay attention.
• When the presentation starts running for more than 40 mins, the audience starts losing focus. We should put a time limit, 30 mins max seems reasonable.
• We have recorded videos but have not edited them yet. Thinking about editing a 40+ mins presentation was overwhelming. Once we have a sub 30 mins presentation videos, editing will become a more attainable task.

6. Read Books

Taking the recommendation from my daughter, the first book I read during my LoA was Frindle by Andrew Clements. It was very engaging and the ending was moving. During my school years I did not seek books but even if I did, it wouldn’t have been easy for me to find these interesting children’s novels in Central America where I grew up.

The second book I read was Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, a Newbery award winner. As with all other Newbery award winners, the book did not disappoint me.

The book I am reading currently is Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. Two weeks ago my wife started waking up early and studying together with an accountable partner by keeping an online call and they referred it at the “Miracle Morning.” I recalled seeing the title in one of the self-help books in Amazon Unlimited catalog. Since my wife is into it, I might as well read the book about it.

Retro

• Finishing a book was not followed by any reflection or review. Other than enjoying the content, I was not internalizing or retaining any of the book wisdom or experience. I should write a short report of the books I read.
• Waking up early in the morning guarantees allocation of time to read.

7. Other Wins

Besides the earned values from the plan, I had few other wins. One of those wins was initiating the early “Morning Miracle” routine, starting at 5am. The routine includes exercise, meditation and reading. Few good ideas for my video content came during the morning session. At the end of routine I do a quick day planning which helps me have a clearer picture of what I want to achieve that day.

Another win was attending Tony Robbins’ virtual 4 days workshop, I’ll post a separate write-up about this.

Conclusion

A month has already passed since my Leave of Absence has started, and I am so enjoying it. While taking a walk with my family in the morning, I told them that I wish there were 2 more hours a day, so I can learn more, do more. The exercise about My Purpose and My Core Values played an important role in prioritizing and coming up with a plan that I am happy with.

There are going to be more changes, more disruptions in the industry and the society. There is more uncertainty than ever. I have to constantly re-create myself to keep me relevant during this time. The best tools are learning, executing and retrospecting.