Living a calm and productive life in the Philippines since 2019. Prior to that, my family was based in New York City for almost a decade. I miss the city but I’m so happy to be back home.
After a nine-year stretch in digital media, I’m currently doing innovation and product work for the Palawan Group of Companies, the Philippines’ leading non-bank financial services provider. Our flagship service, PalawanPay, launched in April of 2022 (now with over 19 million users). Asia just scales differently!
I still maintain a nano-consulting practice with Southpaw Labs LLC, with a few clients on retainer. Side projects are great ways to augment your professional development. I highly recommend it.
I’m also proud to be part of Quantic School of Business and Technology’s EMBA Class of February 2026. Accounting is hard. But I’ve been learning a lot!
I’m currently obsessed with the following:
- Digital Gardens – I’ve been doing a considerable bit of (private and public) digital gardening the moment I transitioned to Notion (from Evernote) back in 2017. I do all sorts of stuff in Notion, ranging from my yearly dashboard, hobby logs(!), a system to process loose paper-based notes, weekly meal plans, shopping trackers and all sorts of stuff. I’ve performed a lot of garden “remodelings” through the years and these continue to evolve. Even this site runs on Notion.
- Story Formats – Playing with freeform tools like Notion and Day One gave me an opportunity to experiment with story formats. Story formats can be described as structured content that have clear intent. Think “Hot Ones”, “Wordle” and “Humans of New York”. I’ve played around with monthly reviews, show recaps, media diet posts, etc in my private journal. The newsletter “Formats Unpacked” by Hugh Garry explains this much better than I do. It’s also a great way to hone my writing skills as well.
- Revenue Exploration Studios – I like the idea of institutionalized innovation. I read Prehype’s “Acorn Method” book and loved it so much. It’s so good to see my current job through these lens.
I still do the following:
Record all my exercises in Strava, log food in MyFitnessPal, scrobble music in Last.FM, track app usage in Rescuetime, checkin in via the Swarm App, play Wordle and tally finances in Moneywell. And most recently, optimizing my sleep (among other things) with my Oura Ring.
Keeping up with my Goodreads Reading Challenge target for 2024. I recently enjoyed “Less” by Patrick Grant and “Shopkeeping” by Peter Miller. Andrew Wilkinson’s “Never Enough” was also a nice surprise. I also started a rereading project and it’s been so great for retaining and refreshing a lot of things.
Writing 1,500 words a day on average with the DayOne app but it’s been going way, way over that lately. I should learn to be more concise.
I’m curious about:
Gold! Personal Holding Companies. Personal Creative Studios. The right amount of exercise. Fiber. Tinned seafood. Enough. Kamala Harris. Tim Walz. Sleeping aids.
Last updated September 29, 2024