Now
I’m in Gullspång, Sweden, where I have moved in with my mom (oh joy at close to 40) until I’ve found my own place to live in Sweden after 13 years in Singapore.
Moving home and starting a company
I decided towards the end of 2024 that I wanted to:
- work less (so I’m leaving my employer of the last five years, and I have very ambivalent feelings about it, friends have told me it’s career suicide (it is). At the same time I really want time off. I took a 3mon unpaid sabbatical last year because I needed it, and I didn’t manage to change my ways of working enough to not feel tired again after a couple of months)
- start my own company (which is what I hear you do if you really want to work less, I guess more, work on what I want)
- get closer to family.
I was considering other places in Europe for a while (Berlin, Tallinn), because I liked the idea of continuing to be an expat (am I even Swedish anymore?), but after thinking it through I realized that making friends in a new place is hard and can’t get closer to family than within an hour’s car ride, and if you don’t stay in one of the big cities, then Sweden can be cheap and make my runway longer. The current place I’m looking for something is in Karlstad, Sweden.
I wonder whether I’ll acclimate back to life in Sweden after living for so long in Singapore (which is a world city), even if people there often feel it’s too safe and boring. I have already planned for going to one of the bigger cities nearby (by train, ideally) once a month for tech meetups or similar, so that I don’t get too insular.
Right now all my stuff is in a warehouse in Singapore waiting to be packaged into a container as soon as there’s enough other cargo going to Sweden. I have no idea when my stuff will show up, and I was originally, optimistically, hoping I’d have most of it by mid-October or so. It’ll be fun to see how long that takes 😅
Taking more control of my online life
I have been a bit enamored by the POSSE model of owning what you publish and do, and because my plan is to work in the open (post devlogs, share how I’m exploring, and learning, the series are examples of how) as I start my own company, I want to be in control of the stuff I write and that’s why I started updating this site. I’ve never been good at posting, and I tend to go verbose when I do, so writing longer and then posting/linking on other platforms feels more like what I should do. And then we’ll see if others find it useful or not. I have had some mild success on LinkedIn, and I’m not sure if I should be happy that it’s the crowd that likes what I’m writing or not. Makes me slightly doubt that I’m breaking out to run a small thing 😜
I’m trying to figure out how I want to do it all, Posse Party seems really neat, and Searls is getting it out in the next couple of months. And should I just cross-post manually until then, or figure out my own thing? There are various feed2toot and similar tools available to wire up myself. We’ll see. I like the idea of a tool and the description from the party website is what I’d like and it feels silly to rebuild it.
Learning and self-improvement
The thing I want to work on for my company is tools to help people be more intentional when they work, and to learn the skills to “see more,” which for me has been about various forms of journaling.
I did a presentation in October 2024 at work (I’ll share it once I start working, it’s basically my blueprint, though totally unvalidated) and several people tried to do it, but many of them fell off using many of my techniques, which I honestly only follow on good days (which isn’t all of them), so how can I lower the barrier and make it easier?
So to figure that out I’m trying to figure out experiments to run and then learning more about learning itself, so I can try and do something.
One of the things I need to do in the next couple of weeks is figure out a rough sales pitch and setup a signup page so I can link to it in my goodbye message at work on my last day.