I spend 3 hours at the gym every day, go on mountaineering and snowboarding trips every three months, work as a founding engineer at a Series A startup, and still have time for side projects like this blog post.

Someone recently asked me what’s my secret for getting all this done. How do I have time to do all these things?

In this blog post, I’ll share my secrets on how to be hyper-productive using some theories from business books I read and insights from science (e.g. three laws of thermodynamics), with examples from my experience climbing, training at the gym, and working as a software engineer.

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A few weeks after I turned 30, the world went into a lock-down. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve done a lot of growing and learning as there is a lot of time to reflect on our values and think about better ways to live a more fulfilling life. There are two categories of lessons I’ve learned in my 30s. First is how to make better tradeoffs - opportunity cost, money vs time, efficiency vs effectiveness, and quality vs quantity. Second is how to prioritize.

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I worked from home for almost 4 months since the start of the quarantine before I got a monitor for working from home. I’m a programmer. I was under the impression that we were going to be able to go back to work first in April, then May. Now the government is saying August, but I no longer trust anything the government or the media says about the reopening timeline. I’m going to assume the worst that we are going to work from home until the vaccine becomes widely available. A realistic timeline for when that will be is late 2021, early 2022. I’m making preparations for a long term social distancing, work from home situation. Buying the monitor is the first step. I’m also getting a new set of furniture and moving to a bigger apartment so I’ll have a better time staying at home for an extended period of time. COVID-19 is the catalyst for me initiating the process of purchasing a home in NY, but I’ve always planned to purchase. This is my experience buying a home in NYC in the spring / summer of 2020.

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What is stress? Stress is your subconscious telling you that you have sh*t to do. Feeling stressed about your health? Go to the gym everyday. Feeling stressed about your financial situation? Get a more high paying job. If only things were that simple. In this post, I’m going to teach you how to get rid your stress by understanding where your stress is coming from, then come up with an action plan and execute actions to address the source of your stress. This is not another “top 10 things you can do to ….” article. I will be discussing specific algorithms and heuristics with roots in computer science and mathematics that can be followed for every step of your journey to eliminating the source of your stress.

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I joined the US Navy after graduating from college. The service commitment is 5 years. At the end of my service commitment during my terminal leave, I obtained a position with a mature startup in NYC as a Senior Software Engineer. There were a lot of bumps in the road during the last five years, especially the last 3 weeks of my transition out of the Navy. I will share the story of how I prepared for my career transition and shed some light on how job search works today.

My KeyValues filter My KeyValues filter

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People have different reasons to want to quit their 9-5 to pursue entrepreneurship full time. I was drawn to the opportunity to take something from idea to product and being able to “be my own boss”. We all want the lifestyle of a successful entrepreneur but you don’t need to have your own VC funded startup to build a great product.

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High-value employees are a major assets for a strong company. Losing a high contributing team member could leave a void and impact the team’s morale and workflow. Investors are also concerned by high turnover rates, especially amongst the senior executives. Groupon had trouble retaining their senior executives, which contributed to an 85% drop in their value a year after going public. It’s clear we want to retain high-valued employees, but is employee loyalty the way to achieve retention?

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Author's picture

Xiaoyun Yang

Software Engineer. Climber. Snowboarder.

Software Engineer

New York