How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives

Hi friends,

It’s the first week of 2022 and like many people this week, I’ve decided to take on a new habit. Once a week, I will write and send out this newsletter where I capture, distill, and share ideas and thoughts about design, creativity, and life. I will stick to this as best I can for at least one year.

My job often involves me flitting from one meeting to another, switching gears from creative projects, to nitty gritty operational discussions, to client presentations or calls. I’m constantly exposed to useful and interesting information, but scarcely have a moment to document and reflect. On the most hectic of these days, I’m reminded of a quote I’ve read many times but only bothered to look up on writing this:

“How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.”
- Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

This powerful quote shatters any illusion that you can live life by any intention or design unless it translates into things you are doing hour-to-hour. This is why committing to small, consistent habits often delivers far greater results than one-time heavy lifts. I suppose committing one (or more) of those hours to writing this newsletter is an effort to steer my life from one of constant activity and movement to one that involves a modicum of reflection.

Who am I?

A little bit about me: My name is Anson and I’m a designer living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was born and raised in Hong Kong and studied Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. These days, I’m a partner at Bould Design where I have a hand in business strategy, operations, and marketing as well as leading creative projects. I have ten years of professional experience designing and developing hardware products for industry leading brands. Notable recent work includes a powerful UV lamp that blasts COVID (and pretty much everything else that could get you sick) to smithereens, and a shared micro-mobility scooter. In my free time, I'm an avid photographer and home cook, with a special fascination for ramen.

What am I going to write about?

Honestly, I'm going to figure it out as I go. I'm broadly interested in the topics of design, creativity, business, and productivity. I'm going to aim to write on these topics consistently and see what interesting intersections occur. Some weeks I might just do a little bit of reflection and sharing. I think it's more the writing habit that I want to build up. If this ends up just being a collection of weekly personal thoughts, that wouldn't be a bad outcome either.

Why should you subscribe?

Right now, I can't give you any reason to subscribe other than you're already a friend or professional connection of mine that might even be remotely interested in what I have to say on a personal level. Eventually, I think there will be some interesting content here that might be useful if you're a designer or a creative professional of some type.

Let's see where this goes!