June recap: Intentional living

Half of 2025 is over. How have you been, really?

I write down the key events with my family and for my work, personal growth, and fitness daily, to remind myself of the most important things in my life. But even this act gradually became another thing I did without much thought.

Despite my last annual review and monthly recaps, I found myself slipping.

I started the year wanting to be intentional about how I live my life and spend my time. But gradually, I went into autopilot.

Bad night's sleep.
Workout (if I can get up).
Send my son to school.
Breakfast.
Work.
Lunch.
Work.
Pick up my son.
Dinner.
Urge my son to sleep, so I can rest.
Bad night's sleep.

Sure. I was still spending time with my family, working on our startup, and exercising. But I was just going through the motions. I wasn’t present. I was often thinking about the next thing.

Sometime in the middle of June, perhaps because it dawned on me that half the year was almost over, I caught myself drifting through life.

I don’t have a stable job but I’m married, have a house, and have a kid. I realized this isn’t a bad thing because I was intentional about all of them. They didn’t just happen. My wife and I pursued them.

But once I got into a comfortable state, I became less thoughtful about how I spent my time, my life.

Instead of playing with my son in the evenings, I sometimes wished he would go to bed, especially after we had played for two to three hours. I craved for some quiet time to read but when I got the time, I mindlessly scrolled Reddit. I created content and posted on social media to promote Dewlop because it’s what I know, not because it’s the best thing to do. Often, several days would go by, and I only had a vague idea of what had happened.

One day, I just decided to do better. Of course, I didn’t become better immediately and I’m still working on it. I try to pay attention. And not rush. I try to enjoy the daily mundane again. I remind myself that time with my little boy and wife will not come back if I let it slip away. I regularly look at my 2024 annual review to revisit my life principles.

Here’s a fun change as a result of the mindset shift. In the second half of June, I became more deliberate at improving my product skills. Instead of just posting about Dewlop and hoping people would be interested, I contacted my friends and managed to have several insightful conversations with them and their referrals. I practiced and refined my user interviews. I researched and reached out to more experienced folks for advice. These are things I desperately wanted to do in my previous jobs. But when I could do it for my own startup, I had been rather thoughtless.

But it’s never too late. If you have been feeling rather sluggish lately, I hope this is the nudge you need!

How am I doing for my 2025 goals

The first half of June felt rather off. I felt I wasn’t doing my best work, and I was too tired. My son felt sick, and we barely slept for three nights.

Then, I had the reflection above. To be honest, I’m not sure how I managed to convince my brain but I suddenly looked at many things much more positively and did much better work. It was a virtuous cycle: I felt better, did better work, felt more recharged, and became excited about my work.

Build a meaningful profitable business

We are not generating revenue for our new project Dewlop yet but it felt like a month of good progress.

After launching our closed beta for Dewlop last month, we have been working with a small group of selected beta testers. They have been very kind to jump on calls with me and share their actual workflows and documents (without any sensitive or confidential information) so that we can improve the app to handle more complex work.

The beta testers, despite being in very different industries, have two similar use cases:

1. File organization: They have files from clients and colleagues that are poorly named and not sorted. They manually open each file, check the content, rename it, move it into the right folder, and repeat this for every file. Some even hired admin staff to do this.

2. Form filling: They have documents to submit to other departments or third parties and repetitively copying information from various documents and pasting it into the main document. (This turned out to be harder than we had expected because Microsoft Word documents can be so complicated. Tables, nested tables, checkboxes, etc. We were able to improve Dewlop to handle these because our beta testers shared their documents with us.)

For the new month, I’m opening up our closed beta to a few more people. If you are interested, let's jump on a call to see if Dewlop is suitable for you.

Bring my family on a vacation ✅

We went to Perth in March.

Read at least 3 books on parenting

I completed Good Inside in April and have been mostly reading The Daily Dad. I only skimmed a few pages of The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read.

I struggled to pick one favorite entry from The Daily Dad for June, so you get two!

June 6
It Takes a Team

It’s impossible to do this all, isn’t it? We have all the task, responsibilities, and aspirations we’ve always had—eating and sleeping and working and paying our taxes and taking out the trash and following our dreams—but now we have little people to care for on top of all that. Little helpless people with infinite needs. How can we do it all?

Ursula Le Guin was a full-time wrier. She was prolific, publishing twenty-three novels, thirteen children’s books, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, five essay collections, and four works of translation. Additionally, she worked as an editor and taught college undergraduate classes.

Oh… she was also the mother of three and the wife of a history professor, Charles Le Guin.

How did she do it all? How did he do it all? They didn’t.

“One person cannot do two full-time jobs,” Le Guin once explained. “Writing is a full-time job and so is children. But two people can do three full-time jobs… That’s why I’m so strong on partnership. It can be a great things.”

Parenting is so hard to do alone; so hard. For too long, too many mothers had to do it alone, were forced to sacrificed alone. But, of course, we are strong when we, our children’s parents, parent together. We go farther, together. It’s one of the only ways to make the math work—not just for the benefit of the children, but for the parents as well.

I’m genuinely surprised that most fathers in my dad’s generation don’t know how to change a diaper. Let’s do better, dads.

June 14
Keep Your Head Up and Take Another Swing

No person has a perfect track record. Certainly no parents does. We all mess up. We all fall short. We make mistakes. We lose our temper and our patience. We handle certain situations in ways we wish we hadn’t.

Is there anything worse than that feeling? Knowing that you screwed up? That you might have hurt them?

Shane Parrish, creator of the wildly popular Farnam Street blog, explained:

I remember calling my late mom one night, exhausted and feeling overwhelmed. I had lost my cool on the kids. She gave me a piece of advice that stuck with me, “If you don’t learn to let go of your mistakes today, they’ll compound tomorrow. Get some sleep and start again tomorrow.” I still remember that when I have bad parenting days. Tomorrow I’ve got to get up and start all over.

You can’t go back and undo what you did yesterday. You can’t erase from their memories that time you lost your cool or that time you said those regrettable things. But what you can do is make this just one memory among many greater, more positive ones. What you can do is show them that this one moment isn’t who you are. You can strive to get better.

Keep your head up. Step up. Try again tomorrow.

This applies to you, even if you are not a parent. Just keep showing up.

Write daily, publish monthly

My journaling streak is at 572 days, as of the end of June. I really enjoy reading my entries from one, two, and sometimes three years ago to see how far I have come. But this is only possible because I kept journaling. So, start asap!

I “only” published four essays in June (a total of 47 for the year). I was rather overwhelmed in the middle of the month when my son felt sick. Of all my commitments, I decided to cut back on publishing because it is meant to help my other commitments. Doing otherwise would be putting the cart before the horse.

Eat healthily, exercise 5x/week, sleep well

I skipped a few workouts, and we ate out a bit more. Otherwise, I feel rather healthy (except for the sick days). Like last month, I felt energized by thinking about my work, which I shared above.

My remaining goals

One-year goals (i.e. other 2025 goals)

• Help my son develop a night routine and be in bed by 8 p.m. - He has been going to bed even later, at around 10 p.m. Our night routine has been roughly the same but he seems less tired in the evening.

• Take three deep breaths whenever I’m angry or frustrated - I almost tipped over one night when my son kept screaming in the middle of the night for, I think, no good reason.

• Accompany my parents and uncle to their health appointments - Three so far.

• Cycle 10x a year - I cycle my indoor trainer once in June. 5/10 now.

• Switch from kopi (coffee) to kopi siew dai (coffee less sweet) - Like last month, I had many kopi siew dai and teh siew dai and almost an iced latte every day. I’m okay with my caffeine intake but I need to reduce my sugar intake through coffee.

• Host five dinners at home - Still 1/5 for now.

• Get a part-time cleaner for our house - I think we are still doing okay.

• No coffee after 3 p.m. - Yep.

Five-year goals

• Bring my family to Europe and New Zealand

• Create a library at home for my son - I turned our unused TV console into a mini-library for now.

• Teach my son to cycle and swim - He seems to have lost interest in swimming these few weeks, and I think that’s perfectly fine.

• Learn to play the piano

• Complete a triathlon (any distance)

Lifetime goals

• Publish a book

• Get back into drawing

• Complete an Ironman triathlon

• Bring my son somewhere to see snow (maybe Japan, Seoul, or Switzerland)

• Raise kids with integrity, compassion, and agency

• Build something with my dad

• Have a workbench for playing with hardware

• Visit Ghibli Park in Aichi, Japan, and Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, Japan

• Mentor someone

• Volunteer somewhere (maybe contribute to healthcare or education)

• Contribute somehow to Singapore (maybe through my business)

• Become rich enough to be independent, not to acquire material possessions

• Live until 100 while being physically fit and mentally sharp

• Use social media to help others, not just consume content

• Learn to speak another language (maybe Japanese)

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Links

• [Life] You Are What You Won’t Do For Money by Ryan Holiday

• [Life & AI] The Gentle Singularity by Sam Altman

• [Growth] Maybe you’re not Actually Trying by

  Cate Hall

• [Design] on not changing for the sake of change by Ryo Lu

• [Branding] The Great Differentiation