Lifestyle

A collection of 30 posts

Lifestyle

From Latte to Laptop: Discovering the Perks of Remote Work in a Cafe

Lessons learned exploring and working from local cafes for the last 3 years. The thrill of finding hidden gems in my neighborhood, the smell of freshly brewed coffee, tasting exotic latte options, finding new songs to add to my playlist, and the random chitter-chatter with strangers — these are some of

Lifestyle

How To Design Your Environment for an Intentional Life

Rely less on willpower and more on environment design to develop good habits leading to a happy, healthy, and productive life. Relying on your willpower to live an intentional and disciplined life is usually a recipe for disaster. Instead, you want to design your environment in such a way that

Lifestyle

I Swapped 3 Hours of Screen Time with Reading Time

3 years, 86% less screen time, 1100% increase in reading time — How did I do it? How did it impact my life? In 2019, I had 3.5 hours of screen time and less than 10 minutes of reading time. Fast forward to 2023, and I have 30 minutes of

Tech

I Tracked My Sleep for 30 Nights…At What Cost Though?

I tracked my sleep using my Apple Watch SE for 30 consecutive days. The results surprised me. Being a tech aficionado, I always try to maximize the use of every gadget that I own. The Apple Watch is no different. One of the most marketed uses of smartwatches is their

Lifestyle

Our Obsession with Perfection is Killing The Planet

To start healing the planet, we don’t need a handful of people doing sustainability perfectly. Instead, we need a million people doing it imperfectly. Being at the extremes of the spectrum is never easy, and more importantly never sustainable. If you want to lead a lifestyle that’s easy

Lifestyle

Make A Statement With Every Dollar You Spend

10 ways I put my money where my mouth is, and you can too, to live a more intentional, meaningful, and sustainable life. Every dollar you spend is a vote for something that you believe in. There’s a famous saying (and a song too apparently!): Put Your Money Where

Lifestyle

5 Practical Approaches to Develop Better Habits in 2023

If you cultivate a few good habits based on a solid foundations, no one can stop you from having the best year of your life. If you want 2023 to be your best year so far, you need to create solid foundations. Every good life is based on a set

Lifestyle

A Software Engineer’s 2022 in One Word: Growth

20-something lessons from a 26-year-old software engineer’s year that might help you in life 2022 has been a year of immense growth for me — both personally and professionally. Like any other year, there were both ups and downs, however, looking back I can confidently say that the sheer volume

Lifestyle

10 Lessons I Learned in 2022 That Changed My Perspective On Life

Lessons you can take with you in 2023 to make next year happier, healthier, and more successful. Personally, it’s been one hell of a year for me! This was one of the most bittersweet years of my life. I am sure many of y’all had an extremely challenging

Lifestyle

My 5 Best Purchases of 2022

2022 was a year of massive change for me. I moved from San Francisco to Toronto. At work, I transitioned from a software engineer to an engineering manager. I worked remotely from 5 cities in North America. Such big changes can come with big purchases. However, I have kept a

Lifestyle

These Are The 5 Best Books I Read in 2022

Books that helped me expand my horizons, learn about a diverse set of topics, and transformed my perspective on life and the world. At the start of 2022, I made it my mission to read at least 12 non-fiction books cover to cover. Looking at my TBR (to be read)

Lifestyle

5 Things I Do In The Evening Instead of Watching Netflix

Read this if you want to spend your evenings in meaningful and productive ways, rather than doom scrolling and Netflix binging. If you are doing a 9–5, your evenings can be very exhausting. I do a 9–5, and sometimes I do feel that exhausting catching up to me

Lifestyle

How I Am Becoming A Responsible Consumer

10 things you can do to help save the environment and make the global society a little better. It’s been about two years now since I started approaching my life from a “less is more” perspective. After binging on numerous YouTube videos, podcasts, and books on the topic of

Lifestyle

How To Start A Sustainable And Eco-Friendly Life

What to wear, what to eat, what to buy, what to learn, and what to throw away if you want to help the planet heal. With every passing year, we are consuming more and more. Driven by a capitalist system, we solve all our problems by buying things. Even worse,

Lifestyle

10 Sustainable Living Changes You Can Make

These simple, cost-effective changes to your lifestyle can greatly benefit our beautiful planet. We are destroying our beautiful planet by overconsuming. We have become mindless consumers. In every decision we make, our beautiful planet becomes an afterthought. Hundreds and thousands of billion-dollar companies are spending billions of dollars on marketing

Lifestyle

5 Ways Overconsumption Is Killing Us And The Planet

With every decision we take and every dollar we spend, we can save ourselves and the planet. You are in charge. What will you do? In the western world, we live in a capitalist system driven by profits only. Everyone around us is trying to sell us something. Consumerism is

Lifestyle

5 Surprising Ways Reading Can Transform Your Life

You can get these amazing benefits by dedicating only 30 minutes of your day to reading I picked up reading as a habit during the pandemic just out of boredom. I never realized all the surprising ways this habit would absolutely transform my life. It’s been around two years

Lifestyle

5 Ways You Can Start A Robust Reading Habit

These five simple tips can help you create one of the best habits for your personal growth. Reading is one of the best habits you can develop. I was never much of a reader myself. However, once I developed the habit in the back half of 2020, I never looked

Health

4 Reasons That Made Me Go Vegan

I have been a vegan for one year now. My experience so far has been great. If you want to learn more about it, please check out my other blog post from earlier this week. The main trigger for me when switching to being a vegan was animal cruelty and

Productivity

8 Data-Driven Approaches to Improve My Life

One approach that has helped me tremendously in the last couple of years is a data-driven approach to everything in my life. I have been obsessed with personal growth and living an intentional life since 2019. I have been there — reading a bunch of productivity blogposts and books, binging to

Productivity Featured

5 Ways I Automate My Life

Automating is the best way to save precious time. By saving time, you are saving both your energy and money. Whenever I do the same thing more than a few times, I try to automate it. Being a Software Engineer by profession, I am a big believer in the concept

Lifestyle

How Much I Earned on Medium in 3 Months

How It Started At the beginning of the pandemic, it was chaos all around us. Lost of people lost their lives to the virus. Even more, got severely sick and the lucky ones amongst us had mild symptoms only. I was fortunate enough not to contract the virus. I am

Lifestyle

My Toxic Relationship with Social Media

Over the years, I have used various social media apps on my phone — Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. I moved to the US from Bangladesh in 2015. Prior to that, everyone in my life used either Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. That meant, in order to stay in touch with my

Lifestyle Featured

15 Essential Podcasts That Make Me Smarter Every Day

Listening to podcasts is a fantastic form of content consumption for gaining knowledge. You don’t even need to focus 100% to absorb at least some nuggets of knowledge from good podcast episodes. Unlike other forms of content, podcasts tend to be more conversational or casual. It’s similar to

Productivity

My Minimalist iPhone Setup 2022

I use my phone as a Swiss Army knife to make my life easier, not as a distraction. To achieve this, the way I set up my phone for success becomes very crucial. Every app in the phone must have a purpose. I am also very mindful and use every