Recently I’ve developed, involuntarily, a craving for understanding how time passes, how much have passed and if I’m aware of it and not out of my control. It’s not about using time efficiently or productively, actually not at all, but more about the recognition of time.

Often times I feel like my time has been “stolen”, like “how could it be possible that 1 hour passed so quickly when I was hanging out with my friend?”, that’s happy moments, and “oh gosh I can’t believe I’ve spent 20 minutes to wash the dishes”, that could be the natural outcome of a chore.

What Time Is It?

“What time is it?”, a couldn’t be even simpler question that we may ask ourselves or others several times a day, it’s not just about understanding what’s the time now to arrange your next activity, but also how much time have passed since the last “checkpoint”, to have a sense of it.

When working in front of my laptop, with a glance I could just tell what time is it. But the challenge comes when I’m “off”. I don’t have a watch and that wasn’t a problem to me until now. How do you know what time is it? Either check your phone or ask someone nearby, I guess that would be the answer for most of people who adopt the same lifestyle.

Sure you could pull the thing from your pocket, but that’s a huge obstacle. That extra process could prevent you from even trying to understand the time, also sometimes you’re physically impossible to reach your pocket when your hands are busy(tight?).

All these things give me a compelling reason to wear a watch again. I’ve purchased a Pebble watch and I’m very excited to see how could I utilize this tool to have a better sense of time.

How Would You Perceive Time?

There’s an interesting watchless watch called Durr, it doesn’t tell the time, it’s not smart at all, it just vibrates every five minutes, gives you a new measurement about time. It’s a very interesting concept, but also reminds us the big gap between how we perceive time and how it passes physically. Like the writer says, what I want is a friend reminder of how uselessly unproductive I can be sometimes.

I’ve found myself amazingly suck at time management. So many mornings I check the time of the train, and tell myself I should leave the house in 14 minutes and then find myself running late 2 minutes and miss the train.

Then let’s think in the bigger span, in one week, one month and even years, how could you tell time actually passed, how would you describe your last year? What proves your existence, what mark you’ve left?

We’re not physicians nor philosopher, to answer it in my way, I think the best possible and practical way is to keep a journal. I do write in Day One time to time, and recently I also started to record short videos of myself describing recent changes in life. Verbalizing is quite different than writing, there’s no time to stop and edit but meaningful pause. It’s a different experience, feels like talking to yourself. “Video journal” never comes to my radar but I wouldn’t be surprised there’re quite amazing services targeting that area.

Oh besides that I’m also keeping an engineer journal. I spend more than 40 hours a week on programming both work and private, that’s a big component of my life. And the “format” of the journal is quite different than personal journal, I split the sections to “Frustrations”, “Questions”, “ReadLater” and “Done”. It gives me a sense of self improvement when I see more and more of my “Dones”, and how I’ve used time struggling and learning stuff.

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If you’ve found your answers to “what time is it” and have your way of perceiving time, then lastly how would you spend the time?

I got a new iPhone 6S and have used it for a week, not a strict technical review but here are the top 3 changes I found really helpful.

1. Fast

DHH mentioned “speed is a feature”, and that’s so true. The overall feeling of the device is no time lag, to me especially the speed improvement on switching input language is huge. Normally I’d switch between English, Japanese and Chinese input keyboard several times a day, and on my 5S that was not super slow and had a significant delay which was my number 1 frustration, if you’re a bilingual person you know what I’m talking about. Now the transition is so smooth almost instant.

2. 3D Touch on Safari: Peek and Pop

Lots of posts contain multiple internal links and I have a mixed feeling for it, it’s providing more information but also make me a bit paranoid as I want to check them all and somehow disturbing my reading experience. With the new “Peek and Pop” it’s way easier to have a peek of the content and decide if it’s disposable or a read-it-later thing. And I think it’s a compelling reason to use Safari than Chrome in your phone.

3. 64GB, More Storage

Not a 6S feature but still want to mention it. I was using 16GB before and I found myself constantly deleting photos, musics, podcasts, books and even some useful apps to release some storage. It was extremely painful when trying to update to new OS as that normally requires at least 1+ GB space.

With 64GB now all the pain is gone. I could enjoy a tons of great contents without worrying about running out of storage.

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Other improvements are also great, bigger screen (from 5S to 6S) means more contents and boost in reading experience, faster fingerprint recognition, innovative Live Photo, etc. Really great product.

I watched the movie Inside Out the other day, a movie produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. My very biased perspective to every movie from Disney is, it’s for kids(even though adults go watching them too), and I expected no exception for this one but I was completely wrong heh! It’s more than a great movie, it’s also a thoughtful and reflective journey.

Spoiler alert below

Human Mind

It’s fascinated to see a concrete world inside human mind, how personality “islands” are established, what’s the “core” memories, how we struggle and respond to certain events, where goes the subconscious, how trivial memories get dumped and how a core value could be destroyed, etc.

One Big Take Away

It’s ok to be sad.

I know it sounds so strange. But that thought never occurred to me in my 31 years of life.

To be honest I’ve never been very conscious about the way I deal with sadness. Most of the time when it “comes” to me, I just instinctively escape, I would try my best to avoid it, dump it, lock it in a small “circle” like Joy did in the movie to keep myself “happy”. How can you be happy if you’re feeling sad right?

But I was enlightened when Joy realized that because Riley was sad, so her family showed up, her friends showed up to cheer her up, to be there for her, stayed with her, and that made her feel warm.

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It’s ok to be sad, to feel sad. So many things are not controllable, the world, the people change unexpectedly, sometimes good memories from old days could turn to sad ones and you can’t do anything to stop it.

So many books I’ve read are telling me, I could choose my response regarding to the events, telling me to be tough, to fake it until I make it. And I listened to it, pretended to be ok until today.

I still think those are good strategies and are keeping me in the positive side most of the time, but at that moment, at then end of the movie when Joy accepted Sadness, accepted her to turn core happy memories to blue, for such a long time I can’t be sure if it’s the first time at all, I gave myself permission to feel sad, sad for all the past events I failed to handle, for harsh words I’ve said to people closed to me.

There was nothing but sadness in my mind, yet I felt content.

I accepted it. That is one sad core memory for me and I will carry it on, that’s part of me, that grows me up, that brings new air and change to me.

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How about giving yourself a permission to feel sad for just a moment, see if that helps. Don’t be too hard on yourself.

Anyway it’s a great movie, hope you like it. iTunes - Movies - Inside Out (2015)

“Avoid negative people”. A life long tip that can be found in many self-guidance books, which is absolutely true. But what if it’s in your family or close friends that you cannot easily “get away from”?

I hate to label people as negative especially for those who are very close to me. But as close as they are, inevitably I would be involved into the negative conversations which is so painful for me. After all these years I still haven’t found any good ways to either improve the conversation or more directly help the person.

So if you’re looking for answers to the question, you might get disappointed but I’ll try my best to note down all the findings and hope that could give you a hint.

Definition of Negative Response

First and foremost, I’ll keep using the term “negative response” instead of “negative person” in the rest of the post.

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Biggest characteristic of a negative response is, refuse to believe there’s hope. That’s my explanation from my experience.

No matter what I say, we just can’t get out of the negative crazy circle. He/she could list 10 different ways why that won’t work, there seems no way to be done to either solve or escape from some the issues. After those conversations I would unavoidably carry those negative feelings around me, draining for the whole day or days, surely that’s contagious. Here I’m really trying to list all the rational things I’ve found to remind myself how to help them and myself to get over it.

1. Don’t Try To Change It Forcefully And Ruthlessly

It takes years of experience or significant pain to shape it to the current state. There’s no point of saying “please stop thinking that way because that’s wrong that’s too negative”, it’s not about right or wrong, no one wants to be negative.

No matter wether the thinking is positive or negative, it’s developed under years of constant experiences or events, each time it reinforces itself, builds into the brain deeper and deeper, finally that becomes the belief.

It may sound negative to you but they may not be conscious of it, they’re simply expressing their feelings. So don’t try to give a quick-fix unless they explicitly ask for, just be there and hear them out.

Worst scenario would be arguing about it and trying to “sell” your perspective. That won’t change their staunch views no matter how reasonable your point is. It took me years to realize it and still in the process of practicing.

2. Don’t fear of denial

Believe me or not I actually got hurt quite often from a negative response, I’m sensitive when it comes to this. “Everything will be fine”, “It’s gonna be ok”, some of the things I tend to say when trying to offer a mite of comfort. Then a sudden and firm denial “No, you don’t know that”, “No, how can you be sure”, or just a single “No” would hit me down.

I felt like it was me being denied, a serious conflict between the person I care about… Heh, that’s how we react when we’re upset, desperate and discouraged. That’s totally normal so don’t overreact, the “no” has nothing to do with you and is surely not personal.

I’m still stupidly repeating the same thing: “Everything will be fine”, it’s OK if they don’t buy it, all I need is to make sure they hear it.

3. Don’t overthink

You may feel overwhelming after the conversation, but first you must get it, it just means you’re a human being with the ability to feel empathy. That’s a good trait so don’t be too hard on yourself.

However as a side effect, it also affects your emotional feelings. So please don’t overthink about it, so many things in life are out of your control, do your part right, then time and patience could solve the rest.

But I Still Want To Help

The least thing you could do is to make them feel better.

And at times even that’s hard to accomplish. You’ve got to admit that ultimately it relies on the person to deal with the problem, not you. Just like I can’t fix my dad’s health issue, I can’t give enough money to help my friends get over whatever seemingly financial issues(I tried), I can’t make their bosses to make them promoted. That’s not how it works.

Instead what you can is to stay positive and try your best to make them feel better, lots of times the solutions are already inside them.

My dad likes electronic and recent years he’s so into lithium battery. He owns a small store on the web and is kinda generating tiny amounts of money. Every time I call him, I’d ask about his “business”, and give him the chance to talk about it even though I understand nothing about the details of a lithium battery. But that makes him feel a bit better, and that’s all I want.

At last, I would like to send one of my favorite quotes to the people who are suffering significantly and believing in nothing.

Forget all the reasons why it won’t work and believe the one reason why it will.

Recently I read the post Look and Feel and Feel by Jason Fried, where he talked about how product makes you feel, not just the look, not the single design but the product as a whole, delivers what kind of emotion to you.

It was a interesting read. He compared Twitter and Instagram, former generates negative emotion like anxious, unhappy, uncomfortable because people on Twitter tend to post shitty experience, while for Instagram it’s harder to be negative when sharing a picture.

It was an inspiring read, since then I kept thinking about some tools and services I’ve been using, or used to use on a daily basis.

Slack

I would rate it 5 stars. It shocked me in the beginning with the clean, modern design compare to Hipchat. The way of setting profiles and avatar are by answering questions from Slackbot. It gave me a warm feeling instead of a boring form.

Then it keeps improving itself in the UX perspective. You try to login Slack on your phone, there’s a thoughtful “1password” link that saves you from switching/copying/pasting mess. Or you could ask for a “magic link” that sends to your inbox, by clicking the link inside the mail you’re magically logged in without typing the password.

Getting double, triple notifications from all your devices? Slack also takes care of that, it disables email notification once you enable push notifications on your phone. 

The overall feeling of Slack is super comfortable. It makes me feel like they understand all your little frustrations, and is doing pretty good job on providing the solutions transparently.

Day One

I don’t have a habit of keeping a journal everyday, but when I strongly feel I would like to write something down about that day, I always go to Day One.

It’s private, it’s personal, it’s about me. Passcode helps me protect it, weather and location provide the assistive information of that day, simple design provides quick access to all the things(95% is “New Entry”), I need.

It doesn’t have some killer features in my opinion, it’s kinda common nowadays to have your apps available on all devices. But it makes me feel it’s the app to write a digital journal without any unnecessary noises.

Instagram

Jason said it’s harder to be negative when sharing a picture, so true. Long time ago I noticed the photos I posted to Instagram usually became the highlights of that period. Those are all delightful moments for me, the community and contents are already there, even though I don’t have photos to post I still like to browse my timeline to see what are the joys from my friends.

Twitter

It really depends, depends on whether or not you cultivated your following list.

Facebook reflects all the social pressure like if your colleague requests to be your friend, it’s hard to say no. But on Twitter it’s free(at least for me). I could follow and unfollow anyone based on if their tweets fit my needs.

I remember when I first joined the company, I got lots of new Twitter followers from my colleagues. I felt warm and almost immediately followed back without thinking, then OMG it turned out to be a total disaster. My timeline got robbed, so many meaningless chitchats were literally polluting my eyes.

After that lesson I’ve been very careful on who to follow. And so far it does pretty what I want from it: I could get inspiring contents to feed my brain whenever I open it, but also they are discardable I have no pressure on shutting it down completely.

Facebook

I remember I was checking Facebook lots of times a day 2 or 3 years ago, when focusing in the browser address bar it was so hard to resist the temptation of hitting the “f” key to open Facebook. But the usage of Facebook has changed dramatically for me.

Now I don’t want to post anything on it, and also don’t want to check it unless it’s necessary(Facebook Message). What Facebook makes me feel is it owns me, I may have control over several things but who knows tomorrow if they’re gonna change it. Maybe it’s the impression I’ve got through the years how Facebook expose without your permission first then give you the control back later.

Like the birthday notification, I know lots of my friends, including me are hiding our birthdays before the day to prevent it from sending the sidebar notifications to all your friends. You either choose hide the info completely or let it be pushed to others’ timeline.

Then the profile photo, how to change it without sending the notification? You could remove the change from your timeline immediately but that won’t stop it spreading through the timeline.

As a user, why I have to try this hard to figure out how to prevent these shitty things?!

Last like I said above, I feel social pressure on Facebook. It feels like I’m dressing suits, holding mic to send my words to the public. In reality I prefer to talk 1 on 1 or in small groups, maybe Facebook is not designed to provide that kind of feeling.

How to design the “feeling”?

As a developer I tend to use the word “can” when talking about features. “Now user can comment”, “they can drag and drop photos!”, but why they want to do that in the first place, what makes them use your feature?

The topic itself could be another post someday in the future, I’ll end this one quoting these questions:

The Twitter vs. Instagram experience is really reinforcing what matters when designing a product. What kind of behavior can we encourage? What kind of moments can we create for people? What do people anticipate before they use something? How does it leave them feeling when they’re done? These are now some of the most important questions for me when working on a design.

I don’t usually lose my temper, but if I get angry, it’s true - I’m scary. It’s like a room full of gas, any tiny spark will fire the whole universe. No one likes to get angry, we can’t control the trigger, but we surely could choose how to respond.

Whenever I get angry, I mean really angry, what I tend to do is getting drunk, throwing whatever stuff reachable against the wall(normally my phone), wasting money on things that never make sense when I’m sober. Oh there is a bottle can on the road? Perfect I would kick it badly and let it bounce and bounce. I do have the violent part inside me.

However, over the years I’ve learned it in a hard way that if I can’t calm myself down, not only the issue can’t be solved, but also it’s gonna hurt the person involved and further make a huge negative impact to the relationship almost unfixable. Thus I’ve written down 4 ways to accomplish the inner peace and use it as a personal reference.

1. Are you overreacting?

“There was never an angry man that thought his anger unjust.”

You must have every single reason to be angry, maybe that’s something related to your deep down memory, maybe that’s what you called belief, principle, the way you see the world and how you’ve disciplined yourself, but the person just break it cruelly again and again.

Well, take a deep breath first. Even though this sounds the stupidest question but I insist on asking and trying your best to answer it.

Are you overreacting? Is what you see and hear really the truth? Is the person who get you angry aware of your reason being and expectation? If you know the person well, do you think it’s his/her intention? What if there’s some misunderstanding, what if you missed one important piece of the story?

I find these questions very effective to shift my focus from being a “victim” to a “outsider”. And for my experience, to be honest most of the times it was not that big as I thought, main reasons were either lack of information or lack of communication.

2. Go outside, move your body

Go for a long walk with your favorite music.

You wouldn’t believe how amazing moving your body will lift your mood. If I close myself in a tiny room that may feel like sitting inside a time bomb. Limited space and static view will make you do nothing but stuck in your little angry world.

Also fast paced music is recommended. Just follow the rhythm and move your body, try not to think about the thing.

Normally after a 60 minutes walk I would start to think, “yeah maybe I’m being a little bit childish here”.

Any outdoor activity that can make you find some sort of solitude, make your brain go into autopilot mode is ok.

3. Pause, don’t hurry your response

“You can be right, but wrong at the top of your voice”, one great lesson I learned from book Love and Respect: The Love She Most Desires; The Respect He Desperately Needs

There’re times when you can be 100% right, but if you deliver it poorly it could cause so much trouble when you try to confront/communication later. And there’s no way to get back what you said, you could equally hurt the person if you can’t control your words.

Think about being the other side, have you forgotten what a person says to you when they are angry? You probably not, even though you can’t recall the exact words, you must still remember the hurt feelings. Don’t make the same mistake.

For me, I thought I was picking up the softest words at that time but, it turned out, I regretted afterwards every single time. I wish I would never said that kind of thing. So I just admit I’m totally not capable to response without anger when the emotion is that high.

Don’t speak with hatred, it backfires and really hurts.

4. How you react now is gonna redefine and reinforce who you are and who you want to be

There is no single moment more important to test who you really are than when you’re angry. How you react at this emotional high is gonna make a significant mark on your characters.

If you seek alcohol, close yourself and run away from this incident, next time you have a high chance to repeat the same thing, and the next time, and the next time… Through the repetitions the evil routines will grow and be “promoted” as your go-to solution whenever you get angry.

Everybody functions ok when he/she is happy, but not everyone handle the opposite well. This is the key moment to show your true color, to distinguish yourself from the others. On the plus side, if you handled it well the reward is invaluable. This is also a great chance to build and strengthen the trust between you and the person, and the people around.

We all have darkness inside, don’t let yourself be swallowed by it. Instead, conquer it, tame it.

I use this as the ultimate weapon to remind myself.

Last, because we care

Even though I’ve listed all the methods it’s still hard, it’s a hard work and pain process, and I assume this is never gonna be easier. Why? We get angry because we care. There’re things and people we care about, and when it doesn’t reach our expectation, the way we wish it to be, the stronger the presumption is wired in our mind, the more angry we become.

Be aware of the trigger, learn to deal with it and don’t make the move you know you’ll regret later.

When was the last time you get angry and how you responded to it? How do you calm yourself down?

Unlike listening to music which doesn’t require paying much attention, for Podcasts missing an important 5 seconds due to a loud motorbike passing by is critical. I find myself grabbing the phone from pockets and tapping the screen to rewind so stupid, I was sure there must be better way to do it, and here is the tip: using iPhone earphones control to do it!

• Double click and hold down the middle button to fast forward, 10 seconds each jump.
• Triple click and hold down the middle button to rewind, 10 seconds each jump.

This also works for other audios like music.