Life Updates: How to Learn Better and How I Monetised My Low-Value Hours

It has been 6 months since I embarked on my career break to take the opportunity to reassess my life, priorities, and how I value time. Initially, I hoped to recharge and explore new interests, but I also went through a period of immense personal growth and discovery. It was also very enjoyable to have the time to work on a new article for this blog each week.

In this article, I’ll share some of my latest updates in my life.

Embracing a New Way of Personal Development

In previous articles, I mentioned that I enjoyed going for my morning walks and reading a book over breakfast. I recently started highlighting and making notes from the books, videos and podcasts to record interesting points that I have learnt. These information is then transferred into Notion where I manage all my personal knowledgment.

I also started shared some of the learnings from the books that I have read in recent articles which received compliments from a few readers. I decided to double down on these sharing since my readers enjoyed them.

Making My Learning Notes Available

I have created a Learning Notes section that will showcase all the summarised notes that I have compiled from the books, videos and podcasts that I have gone through in the past. I hope my readers will find these resources meaningful.

Here are some of my recent learning notes.

Sharing Simple Cooking Recipes

Another fun and engaging activity that I enjoy during this career break is learning how to cook simple dishes. Cooking became a therapeutic hobby and is more of a science than an art to me. I would record my cooking recipes so that I can easily replicate these dishes easily any time.

I decided to also publish the recipes that I frequently use on my blog.

I Started Monetizing Low-Value Hours

I wrote about how my perspectives about the value of time has changed in recent months and one of the things I am planning to do is to try monetising my low-value hours.

Working on Digital Projects for The Financial Coconut

I started working 16 hours a week on digital projects for The Financial Coconut, the largest personal finance podcast network in Singapore. This role allowed me to make use of my digital marketing experience to contribute to the business.

The benefits were multifold: I earned extra income to cashflow 75% of my monthly expenses, for a fraction of my time each week working in an industry (personal finance) that I am passionate about, while I continue to hone my digital marketing skills.

Being a Freelance Data Labeler for Artificial Intelligence Projects

Additionally, I took up a role as a freelance data labeler for various AI projects with an online platform. This involved categorising and tagging data to help train Large Language Models (LLMs). For the unintiated, the work of a data labeler is one of the sources of data that AI companies use to build the datasets used in their LLMs.

Data labeling roles are widely available across the globe but most of them are not lucrative, paying as low as a few cents for each task. But because there is a shortage of bilingual data labelers who are able to perform data labeling tasks in Simplified Chinese, the platform is willing to pay as high as USD 20 per hour for bilingual data labelers.

It is a flexible job that I could do from home, but the income is not stable since it is dependent on available project tasks. I would spend around 5 hours a day on these project tasks and earn around USD 100 per day. I could work longer, but it becomes involution (内卷) and defeats the purpose.

Conclusion

I have concluded that if I want to improve myself through personal development, it’s important to learn and write them down for future references to help me remember what I have learnt. From a financial perspective, I found that as long as I am resilient, it is never too difficult to build a variety of income sources that can supplement my cash flow needs. I feel that these two lessons will become really useful when I go into my retirement years.