Another day working from home! I have been working from home for over two months. The first week or two was the learning period where I made changes on my work style and how to communicate to my team. When I first started working from home, I kept my work style the same where I use text messages and relied on email. It didn't work well so I made a few adjustments including more phone calls and more communication with my coworker. I would say it seems like I micro manage my team where I ask the same questions everyday. Do you have everything you need? Is there anything that is stopping you from finishing you tasks? Are we still on track? How do you like my work style? Is there anything I can support you better? They all say they are good with it but I am not sure whether it's because I am their manager or because they see it works out well. I keep over communicate where I talk to people then send out follow up emails to summarize my understanding, action items, and deadline. I personally find this very effective in term of managing the project. I am not a project manager but this is something that works really well. I cook more and eat healthier food! My first month working from home is filled with pizzas, fried chickens, and all other junk food. After that one month, I had had enough! I started looking up online recipes and shop more. I now most meals ranging from stir-fried veggies and meat, chilli paste with seafood, to coconut based spicy soups. I enjoy cooking so much that I always want to go to the market to find new ingredients! I also change from buying fruits from markets or grocery stores to buying them directly from the farm! Farmers have been transforming their business to online from Facebook pages to online marketplace platform. I find that fruits quality is better, much fresher, and a little cheaper! A key selling point that I like about buying directly from the farm is that they collect fruits by order. For example, if I order 1 kg of mango then they collect just 1 kg of mango from their farm and ship it to me. Lastly, I can spend more time with my family! I can talk to my kids whenever I want and this is really good for me. I feel that my work-life balance is much better and I am more productive at work. I think this new normal is coming with lots of good things and tons of new opportunities!

Introducing contrast ideas I learned about phrases to introduce contrast ideas or opinions which are however, on the other hand, in contrast, yet, and despite. However is my favorite word and I want to add other words or phrases to my vocabulary list. Let get started. - I enjoy working from home. On the other hand, I feel like I work longer hour since I can do everything at my desk. - I like the design of italki website. In contrast, I think there are a few improvements they can do on the top menu. - The pork ribs soup that I cooked this morning was really good. Yet, I felt like there were a couple missing ingredients. - Some people in my city disagree with the lockdown despite the fact that it brings down the numbers of new cases to 15 per day.

5 Things I learn from traveling I have been to a few countries around the world include Laos, Myanmar, Japan, Australia, Sweden, Germany, France, and Norway. Every traveling experience teaches me about people and culture and it helps me learn more about the world. These are five things I learned from my traveling experience. 1. Local food is amazing I am a foodie and I always try new dishes whenever I have opportunities. I have tried everything from a basic dish like omelet to fine dining restaurants. I still remember I tried omelet in Australia to see whether it was different from Thai omelet and it was. I always cook omelet with oil and makes it a little crispy while omelet I tried in Australia was cooked with butter. 2. People are nice Our experience traveling aboard has been really good so far. Locals have been very nice and helpful to us. I remember when I went to Paris and arrived late at night. I got lost in the city and asked a guy around to tell me the direction. He did not speak English and could not tell us how to get there. So, he gave us a ride to the hotel and I was still thankful to him until this day. My wife also joked to me that I was so brave to get into a stranger's car which I agreed with her haha. 3. There are some amazing places that are not touristy I had a really amazing experience in Sweden when I just walked randomly in the city and made a stop where I wanted. I visited a few places that was really nice and beautiful. I also had really great dishes and snacks during these 'getting lost' days. 4. Experience new things and seeing the city is fun I also stay at an Airbnb apartment in downtown area instead of a nice hotel since I want to spend most of my time outside to experience the city and culture while the room is only for sleeping. This has been working well so far. We spend most of our time outside talking to people, visiting local places, or just getting lost in the city and I am happy with this. 5. Traveling helps you grow Traveling has opened my world view and helped me to be more confident. I went to Japan with an expectation that it would be easy to get a SIM card and I was wrong. I spent one day searching for a SIM card with no luck. I needed to talk to many people asking for help and learned that I should better plan my trip next time. These are 5 things I have learned from traveling. Comment below about your traveling experience!

Tomorrow plan It has been a slow day for me and there is nothing much to write. I think it might be a good idea to write about tomorrow. I sort of have a fixed scheduled a couple weeks in advance where every day is more or less the same. Tomorrow, I will have my first meeting at 9am. In this meeting, we will discuss about updates and challenges. This meeting is quite productive because it is short (only half an hour,) and lot of information are being shared across team. In this meeting, I will have to update my team that we will delay our plan by one day since the other team asked us to pause our work, otherwise it will further delay their timeline. On a good side, my team will get one more day to polish our work! The next meeting starts at 11am and I might want to skip it because it's not under my radar. I would rather spend that time working on more important things, especially our top priority project. I am a fan of single-tasking model where I focus on one thing at a time. So, I will skip it and get 2 hours of my time back. In the afternoon, I will have a meeting to introduce my team member to another team that she will work closely with. On top of introducing her to another team, I also ask them to walk her through their product and its features. My goal is to give her enough information to understand the purpose of the product, why we build it, and how it works. Once she learn that, I will assign her to improve some existing features of this product to work better and more efficient. Before day ends, I have one last meeting for status update where everybody updates their statuses. We want to make our team as transparent as possible and we think that every one updates on what they are working on, whether they have challenges, or need helps will make our team work better. That should be pretty much it for tomorrow and I hope it will be another quiet day for me.

Being persuasive and the art of agreeing I just finished a lesson which I learned about being persuasive and the are of agreeing. There are a few things that make you more persuasive. However, I was asked to pick top three things and they are: 1. Understand what customers need and how they feel 2. Have good communication skills 3. Know your job and your products well Let's start with the first one. Understand what customers need and how they feel. I have read a few books about persuasion and influence. What they have in common are understand other people and theirs feeling. This reminds me of Apple events where they start with story that we can relate to, then move on to things we want to do, and after that how their products can help us. For example, with the new iPhone. They start with the same pattern where they talk about taking photo or capture beautiful moment in life and how iPhone can help us capture the "best" picture at the moment. They never start with we have 50 lens, 200x zoom, or the fastest CPU on the planet. They start with story! (I intentionally put "best" in quote because I know some people will disagree with me.) The second one is to have good communication skills. This is tightly related to the first one and I think good communication skills are necessary for everyone to have successful life whether at home or at work. If you have good ideas but you can't communicate it to anyone. You will end up doing everything by yourself and cannot scale your team. The same goes for things at home. For example, talking to kids is never easy and you need good communication skills to do that. The last one, know your job and your products well. If you want to sell something to someone, you better know everything in details about it. Every question that your potential customers might ask, you need to have an answer. The best way to achieve this is to spend time learning about your products and practice selling it with your coworkers and friends. I believe with these three things, you will become much more effective in persuasion and influencing.

What do you call the medicine the doctors inject to your body and it makes you feel nothing? I am going to the hospital and the doctor might inject the medicine to my body to make me feel nothing. It is usually use before you extract your wisdom teeth or have the operation. What do you call it?

What is the difference betwen "take off" and "lift off" when talking about aircraft? I watched a video talking about aircraft and it had the words "take off" and "lift off." What is the difference between them?

How to ask your boss to go out with him (and his friends)?

I can say that my boss and I are pretty close. Sometime I want to hangout with him but it's not ok to do that, at least in Thailand. It is a cultural thing, if I do that then most people will think I am a sucker.

 

I don't want my boss (and his friends) think that I am a sucker. I just want to talk and socialize with them.

 

In Western culture, is it OK to ask your boss to hangout with them? If so, how to ask the question politely?