MELVIN YUAN
Technopreneur MELVIN YUAN’S obsession with self-optimisation doesn’t stem from Silicon Valley’s biohacking brinkmanship or the need to tame a busy schedule, but from a desire to maximise potential and contribution to others and communities, he tells Grace
It’s a digital nomad’s stone stack of sorts: Macbook at the base, a mobile phone, notebook and small leather pencil case centred atop. It’s Melvin Yuan’s desktop arrangement when off work – his mobile phone deliberately out of sight under the navy-blue notebook, so he can focus on a conversation he’s having, such as ours when we meet up at Straits Clan.
The technopreneur, who recently returned to Singapore from a yearlong sabbatical spent in Melbourne, is now working “in stealth mode” on his next start-up. Technically, the 42-year-old could be enjoying an early retirement following the 2013 acquisition of indoor positioning systems company Yfind Technologies, which he co-founded, by an American company, and pickings from past business and investments. “But I don’t have enough to start a micronation – a concept I’m fascinated by – and to do everything I want to do or build everything I want to build, so that keeps me motivated to stay on in business.”
The self-professed geek is also a “productivity freak – I’ve been reading books on productivity and self-development since I was 12, when my dad bought me Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I know that chronological time is finite. People say time is money. I say time is life. Time is more valuable than money, and because of that, I made time one of my most important fields of study.”
Yuan spent the holiday period developing his own framework for designing a productive life. Called sharpe, it focuses on Systems, Habits, Automation, Routines, Preferences and Environments. He says he plans to publish his methodology later in the year, then pauses and offers to send me some typed-up answers after our interview. “I have a lot of this stuff written up because I do help some of my friends – some ask, ‘Oh, how do you do this?’; others ask for coaching. So the easiest way for me to do it at scale is to type out stuff and share it with them.”
Optimised systems, for him, extends to copy-pasting single sentences to get a task done faster and 16-hour intermittent fasting to raise energy levels. “I constantly look at everything in my life and work, home and office – I have lists for each aspect of life – and ask myself, how can I stop doing this, how can I automate this task?
“I keep a document called the ‘Melvin Yuan User Manual’ in which I extensively describe myself, including my long-range goals, preferences, the collaborative software services that I use, personality profiles, habits, etc. I share parts of it with some people in the form of a ‘User Guide’ to enhance collaboration. For instance, I publish a ‘Common Ground’ page, to accelerate quality conversations with new friends.”
WRITING AND REALISATIONS
“Noise, clutter, distraction – I find these the most disruptive, so I review my various environments to ensure I’m eliminating these three things,” he shares.
He unpacks his desktop stone stack. Whether working at home or at a cafe, he uses the same exact set-up every time: Macbook in front of him; coffee to his right; his journal open and set at 45 degrees to his left, within easy reach; mobile phone face down and just beyond arm’s length to the right. (Even the pen he uses is the embodiment of efficiency – a Uni
Jetstream with four ink colours and a mechanical pencil.) He diligently makes inputs into his notebook throughout the day. His writing is neat and very, very tiny – most would appreciate a magnifying glass to read it.
It might strike many as odd to see a techie using pen and paper. “I use tech to automate a lot of my life, but one thing I will never automate is journalling and the planning of my day. For me, I am really present when I keep it on paper, far away from distractions such as the Internet.”
At the start of each day, he fills a page in longhand with a stream-ofconsciousness free flow of words – part of his 4am morning routine that also entails meditation, breathing and physical exercise, tai chi and focused work. “I combine an exercise called Morning Pages, developed by an artist called Julia Cameron, with say, thinking of some problems or things I want to imagine or dream up the night before. I find that the subconscious mind actually comes up with something the next morning: I’m either solving problems or becoming aware of things I was otherwise not prepared for.”
On the first page of his notebook is a hand-drawn table where he puts check marks or crosses to track the daily success of habits he’s cultivated into routine, such as “Wake at 4am”. Two pages are devoted to his thoughts and plans for each day. After crossing tasks or meetings off his list, he rates them and adds notes in different-coloured inks. “If a meeting or activity was two stars – I didn’t enjoy it or feel the output was good – it allows me to very quickly realise that something is not going really well, rather than at the end of the day or worse, at the end of the week,” he explains. “When I record these little realisations and I’m present with them, it just overall improves the way I operate.”
“Before I started using a daily planner four or five years ago, momentum would keep me going through the day – work creates its own energy. But if I look back, it wasn’t always time well spent. Using pen and paper keeps me grounded. When I make intentional living and productivity my focus – and I mean both effectiveness and efficiency – I tend to have a lot more perception-changing, sometimes life-altering, kinds of realisations. And those realisations are the little tipping points that allow me to evolve the way I work and live.”
He shares a recently adopted hack to breaking a bad habit or forming a new one: Because he tends to neglect reviewing his master list of major goals in lieu of his daily to-do list in his planner, he’s started “stacking” doing that with a trigger – having a coffee. “I do enjoy a good cup of coffee, so I now associate it with reviewing my master list. When I go get a cup of coffee, my next action is to do a quick review of my master list, to make sure I’m not dropping the ball on the big-picture goals.”
TYPE A BY CHOICE
Every week in Singapore, a small group gathers in a cafe at practically the break of dawn, ready to hunker down to complete a full day’s work – that’s eight hours – crunched into two hours. These entrepreneurs and professionals are here for focused work, tackling a list of no more than six prioritised, high-level tasks they should have planned the day before. From 7.30am to 9.30am, everyone works in silence. No distractions, no dawdling. Niceties and networking can happen after. Welcome to the Type A Breakfast.
This co-working concept Yuan launched in 2016 while living in Melbourne combines the 80/20 rule, reappropriates Parkinson’s Law (work expands to fill the time allocated), and harnesses peer pressure and collective energy as these go-getters get cracking.
Now organised twice-weekly in Singapore and held regularly in Melbourne, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Ho Chi Minh City and Bangkok, this working breakfast club has about 1,000 members, testament that “the method works and people believe it is possible, and desirable, to have work done in way less than eight hours a day, and have the rest of their day for other things in life,” says Yuan, who hosts them on occasion.
Asked if his extreme dedication to productivity is to deal with an extremely busy life, he counters: “I plan my life so that I’m not busy. I’ve stopped seeing myself as busy because it’s disempowering. If you look at my schedule, a common interpretation is that that’s a busy schedule – as most people’s are. But I look at it and I see choice – everything I put in there, I put by my choice. And if I want to be interrupted, I can choose to be interrupted. I have a lot of things on my plate, but I’m happy to move them and wouldn’t feel upset if things are moved. I have lunch plans today, but if you want to stay and talk for two hours, I can choose to stay; I can call that person and say, ‘Look, I think I want to do this instead.’”
The key reason for his productivity drive: “Time is finite. My life is the only one I’ve got. I just want to do what I enjoy. I want to make the most
“My number-one tip for productivity is to sleep at 8pm and wake at 4am, and spend four hours alone every morning with a routine”
out of this life on this earth. It might sound cliché, but I have lots of plans, and ambitions and causes I want to contribute to, so I need to constantly be more effective as a human being so I can maximise my contribution and impact and creative output in this world.”
By choice, he turns off his phone from 6pm to 8am the next day to spend quality time with his family. He makes it a point to spend at least a quarter of his day with his family (he and his wife Ruth homeschool their children, Elizabeth, 6, and Elliot, 3, for personal reasons – including not wanting to have them in school for “half their waking hours during their formative years”).
Both Yuan and his wife believe in optimised sleep, with quality bedding, essential oils and music. He used to think he could function on four to five hours of sleep, but is now convinced that he had been operating sub-optimally. Now, it’s lights out by 8pm.
Forsaking most nocturnal social activities for a solid eight hours’ sleep – “I value my morning routine more than, say, hanging out late in big groups” – he does enjoy meeting up with friends, many of them also entrepreneurs with flexible schedules, during the day. His workdays wrap at 5pm with a good glass of wine or G and T.
“A slight perk to sleeping at 8pm,” he muses, “is that most Happy Hours are 5 to 7pm!”