VTV 012 : Sacha Chua – Adventures In Sketchnoting And Semi-Retirement
In this episode of The Verbal To Visual Podcast I chat with Sacha Chua, who is in the midst of a five-year experiment in semi-retirement. We talk about what led to that experiment, what she is learning from it, and the role that sketchnoting has played throughout it.
Notes & Links
Sacha has been documenting her experiments at her site Living An Awesome Life.
One of the early presentations that Sacha added sketches to was The Gen Y Guide To Web 2.0 At Work.
She also sketched out her presentation The Shy Connector: How to get strangers to talk to you.
Here are Sacha’s thoughts on digital vs analog note taking.
Here are some tips from Sacha on how to draw a visual summary of a book.
We talked about the benefits of sharing while you learn, which Sacha outlined in these sketches.
Where you can connect with Sacha:
Website
Twitter
Flickr
Thanks to Sacha we’ve got a full transcript of our conversation!
Doug Neill: Welcome to the Verbal to Visual Podcast, a program about bringing ideas to life. I’m your host, Doug Neill. My guest on the podcast today is Sacha Chua, who is in the midst of a five-year experiment in semi-retirement.
She saved up enough money at her job to be able to take five years in order to spend time on whatever she felt like spending time on. During that experiment, she has been documenting the things she has been doing, the things she has been learning, the projects she has been working on and how she is spending her time, and what she’s learning from the whole experience.
One of the things that Sacha has spent her time on is sketchnoting. Back at her job, Sacha first started using sketches in her presentations to clarify complex ideas and got such a great response from her coworkers that she kept doing it. She started sharing some of her sketch slides online, and she has been connecting with the broader community of sketchnoters.
In our conversation we geek out on some of the specifics, the tools she uses, the process, the digital versus analog question of notetaking. We also get into the big picture discussion of learning and sharing at the same time, and the benefits of doing that–not just for you, but benefits to others as well when you learn and share simultaneously. And I think the breadth of Sacha’s knowledge and experience is such that you will definitely learn something from our conversation. So, let’s get into it.
Sacha Chua, thanks for joining us on the Verbal to Visual podcast.
Sacha Chua: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Doug: From what I read, you are in the middle of a five-year experiment in semi-retirement. I thought that might be kind of a fun place to start the conversation for the listeners to hear a bit about the background of that. Then we can kind of dive into the role that sketchnoting has played as part of that experiment. Why don’t you start by kind of explaining the story behind that experiment?
Sacha: Ever since I started working, I’ve always saved a large portion of my income because I wanted to learn how to start a business, play around with different ideas and in general, experiment with alternatives to the usual kinds of career paths.
When I tallied up the numbers–I’ve been tracking my expenses and my income since about 2005 or so–I realized that I almost had enough to take five years off without worrying too much about paying bills or making ends meet. So, I told people at work, I turned all my projects over, wrapped everything up nicely. Then in 2012, in February, I started in this five-year experiment.
The idea is to be completely unhireable for five years. It’s so tempting to run back into what’s familiar. In my case, I actually really enjoyed working with a large company. I knew that if I gave myself that option, I might–at the first sign of things being weird, or uncertain, or uncomfortable, I might be tempted to run back into that.
So, I said, “Okay, you know what? You don’t have to worry too much about making ends meet. You’ve got enough savings to keep on going.” In fact, I had a fair bit of a safety buffer beyond that. I wanted to find out what you could do if you had that kind of space, since so few people have that kind of privilege.
In the past two-and-a-half years or so, I’ve had fun with sketchnoting. I played around with that and found it as a great excuse to get into conferences and other events that I wanted to go to. Lately, I’ve been focusing on drawing and exploring things that I want to, whether or not anyone else will pay me for it–hence the interest in using sketches to explain technical topics like Emacs, or just using it to help me figure out what my next steps will be or how I can make most of these moments.
Doug: It sounded like from the beginning of your professional life, you’ve kind of had this plan in mind, this idea of saving up enough money and then taking a break like this – if you even want to call it a break. I guess it’s much more of an active experiment as you have explained it. Was there anything in particular that kind of led you to have that planned in mind?
Sacha: Well, I’d grown up reading personal finance books. Yes, I’m that kind of geek. I’d read all about these good things you could do. As soon as I started working, I made sure that I took advantage of whatever retirement tax shelters there were. 20-somethings, 30-somethings are already thinking about this. The earlier you think about it, the easier it is, actually, and the more advantage time gives you. So that’s one of the reasons why I got into it.
The other reason why I looked at this experiment and decided it was worth going for, was also because I’ve been tracking my time over the past couple of years. I looked at my time. I found out that yes, I do actually sleep a lot, which is good, and I worked a reasonable number of hours, which is also good, and I had enough time to spend in discretionary activities – hobbies, playing games, learning things “just because.”
But when I looked at all the different things that I wanted to learn and I estimated how much time it would take me to learn all those things, I decided that squeezing all these stuff into evenings and weekends, that’s one way to do it, but maybe I can [inaudible] into other ways to play around with that. My financial needs are pretty small. I don’t have any student debt. I can live mostly like a student. In fact, I think my lifestyle now is much better than it was when I was a student, because I get to cook a lot more now.
Doug: Nice.
Sacha: Yes. I figured, I’ve got this opportunity to try it out, and the time is something that a lot of people don’t have. I should explore this. It’s almost the duty to do that.
Doug: What are the sort of things that you are tracking as part of this experiment?
Sacha: Well, I was very curious about how the way that I used my time would shift–whether I would actually use the extra time for productive activities, or whether I would end up spending it all on video games and the other things that people worry about. They think, “I can’t handle that much free time.” I like to refer to as discretionary time instead of free time, because of course, you only have 24 hours, so it’s up to you to choose what to do with it. That’s one of the things that I’ve been tracking.
I tracked, of course, my expenses and my income over this time.
I’ve been curious about things like: how does this influence the number of sketches I make? That’s an easy number to get. How does it influence the time that I spend in drawing, or writing, or working on open source projects or things like that?
Then I also track other weird things, depending on whatever comes to mind. For example, over the past two months or so, we’ve had this Raspberry Pi, which is a low cost Linux computer with a webcam. We added the webcam too. It’s in the basement furnace pointed at the cat litter boxes. We analyzed cat litter box usage patterns.
Doug: Wow. That’s pretty awesome.
Sacha: Yes. One of our cats poos outside the litter box, so we want to figure out why. Anyway, the nice thing about this is you can come up with all these little experiments and with a little bit of data, with a little bit of visualization, with a little bit of exploration, you can figure things out.
Doug: Is there a software that you have written to go along with the video so that automates the analysis of that? Or do you have to go through and look?
Sacha: Well, it’s one of the things that I do plan to learn. I’ve been teaching myself more Python these days which has a lot of these good image processing libraries. My background is in computer science. I really do like geeking about these things.
But I found out that it takes me about less than a minute to process each video. I speed the video up by ten times automatically–I use a little bit of software to do that. Then it’s just something that I’m doing in the background while I’m watching a movie (which we borrowed from the library) or just relaxing, kind of watching and tracking the data in something like Google Spreadsheets.
Doug: Got you.
One of the trends that I’ve been hearing about quite a bit lately is this increasing number of people who are moving toward freelance work. I’m curious because you talk about having this obviously discretionary time during this experiment. What was the first month or so of this experiment like for you in terms of figuring out how to spend your time, and how to use your time wisely in the way that you would like to, and if that has shifted from that first month when you jumped into this to now a couple of years in?
Sacha: It’s certainly an ongoing process of learning. It’s a skill that you can develop.
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