Speaking at REITs Symposium This Saturday — I Have Skin in the Game

This Saturday, 23 May 2026, I will be one of the speakers at REITs Symposium 2026 by AlphaInvest, at Suntec Convention Centre, Level 3, Summit 1 & 2. The event runs from 10AM to 5PM. Access to the Engagement Zone, where I am speaking, is completely free — ticket link is at the bottom.

I will be upfront with you: I am not an academic speaker who talks about REITs in the abstract. As of mid-May 2026, REITs make up a substantial portion of my own 66-stock portfolio. I hold positions in ESR REIT, Mapletree Industrial Trust, Frasers Centrepoint Trust, Keppel DC REIT, AIMS APAC REIT, CapitaLand Ascendas REIT, and several others. When I talk about evaluating a REIT for sustainable income, I am making the same decisions I would with real money.

That is the context I will bring to this talk.

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Why this moment matters for REIT investors

The current environment is genuinely interesting, and not in a comfortable way. With inflation pressures elevated and geopolitical uncertainty feeding into rate expectations, REITs have been taking a breather. Prices are soft. Yields look more attractive than they have in years — S-REITs are currently averaging around 5.6% distribution yield.

But here is the trap I will specifically warn against: a rising yield number is not always good news. A REIT's yield goes up when its price falls. And a price can fall because the market is wrong, or because the market knows something about the distribution sustainability that a casual investor might miss.

That distinction — between a REIT that is cheap and a REIT that is cheap for a reason — is the heart of what I want to talk about on Saturday.

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What I will actually cover

The talk is called "Early Retirement with REITs: Turning Property Income into Life Optionality."

I will open with the only equation that matters for FIRE:

Investment Income ≥ Living Expenses = Optionality

Not freedom from work. Optionality. The ability to choose. After I left corporate life at 39 — when dividend income crossed my take-home pay — I did not stop working. I went to law school, started teaching at Temasek Polytechnic, built investing tools for the ERM community, and kept writing this blog. Dividends funded reinvention, not retirement in the conventional sense.

I wrote a post in April this year titled "Discover the meaning of your life before you press the early retirement button." That is the framing I will bring to Saturday's talk, too. FIRE is not a destination — it is a precondition for doing the things that actually matter to you.

From there, the talk goes practical:

The Crossover Point. How to calculate the portfolio size you actually need. If your annual expenses are S$45,000, you need roughly S$900,000 at a 5% yield. That number is clarifying. It gives you a target rather than a vague aspiration.

Why the first S$100 a month matters. This is not enough to retire on. But it is enough to believe the system works. That shift — from abstract investing theory to real cash appearing in your account — changes how seriously people take portfolio discipline. I will explain why I think this milestone deserves more attention than people give it.

The five filters I use before buying any REIT. This is the substantive core:

1. Start with the assets — occupancy, weighted average lease expiry, tenant concentration, rental reversions
2. Debt decides the dividend — leverage ratio, interest coverage, maturity profile, fixed vs floating mix
3. Good DPU beats high DPU — is distribution per unit stable and backed by recurring cash operations, or is it being inflated by dilutive equity issuance?
4. The manager matters — sponsor quality, acquisition track record, whether fees align with unitholder returns
5. A good REIT can still be a bad buy — valuation, yield spread against risk-free rates, and margin of safety

I will also share data from a 10-year Yahoo Finance study I ran for the ERM course, showing that low-beta REITs — those with a 3-year beta below 0.8 — have been the most reliable income workhorses for Singapore investors. The aim is not to beat the market. It is to build an income stream that survives bad years without forcing you to sell at the bottom.

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A practical framework for beginners

For anyone just starting out, I will walk through how I think about building a first REIT sleeve — a core defensive position in suburban retail or healthcare, an industrial and logistics component, and, optionally, a data centre or life sciences exposure for long-term structural tailwinds.

The ERM starter portfolio I teach in the masterclass is built around four counters: one bank, one REIT, one business trust, and one Singapore Depository Receipt. The REIT anchors the income side. Saturday's talk will give you the lens to decide which REIT deserves that slot in your own portfolio.

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Come find me

I will be at the Engagement Zone for the full event. If you have been sitting on a REIT question — whether to hold through a distribution cut, whether a particular counter's leverage looks manageable, whether the yield you are seeing is genuine or a warning — come and ask it directly. I will give you a straight answer.

The homework I will set before you leave: calculate your annual expenses, target your first S$100 a month in investment income, and shortlist three REITs using the five filters. That is a Saturday morning well spent.

Get free access using my partner link:

👉 Register here — Free with Discount Code PARTNERS26

Event details:

• Date: Saturday, 23 May 2026
• Time: 10AM – 5PM
• Venue: Suntec Convention Centre, Level 3, Summit 1 & 2
• Engagement Zone: Free

See you there.

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For investor education only. Not financial advice. Please do your own due diligence.

What do you need to consider before pressing the 'Early Retirement' button?

 A note from Christopher: This guest post was authored by my AI Second Brain — Claude — drawing entirely from my Obsidian vault, SIAS lecture materials, and blog archives. Think of it as my ideas, assembled and written while I was busy doing something else. I've reviewed it for accuracy. Welcome to the future of content creation.

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There is a moment every working Singaporean has fantasised about.

You are sitting in yet another pointless meeting, watching someone read aloud from a PowerPoint slide that could have been an email, and a thought crystallises in your mind: What if I just... didn't come back tomorrow?

The idea of pressing the Early Retirement button is enormously seductive. But like all big red buttons, it deserves some serious thought before you slam your palm down on it.

I've spent years teaching the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement to Singapore investors — from SIAS talks to this very blog — and the single biggest mistake I see is people conflating two very different things: financial independence and early retirement. You can, and often should, have one without the other.

Here is what you need to think through before you walk out that door.

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1. Have you actually reached your crossover point?

The mechanics of FIRE are elegantly simple. It's a game of one number beating another: your monthly investment income must exceed your monthly expenses. The moment those two lines cross — that's your crossover point, and it is the most important milestone in your financial life.

The standard framework gives you two routes to get there. The first is the 4% safe withdrawal rule: take your annual expenses, multiply by 25, and that's your FIRE number. If you spend $4,000 a month ($48,000 a year), you need a portfolio of $1.2 million. Withdraw 4% per year, and in theory, your money outlasts you.

The second is the dividends approach, which I personally prefer for Singaporeans. Build a diversified portfolio of SGX blue-chips, REITs and business trusts that generates 5–6% annually. DBS, Frasers Centrepoint Trust, Netlink NBN Trust — three assets with very low correlations to each other, yielding above 5%, with returns historically double that of the STI ETF at lower risk. With this approach, you are not drawing down capital; you are living off the harvest while the farm stays intact.

Before you press the button, you need to know — precisely — which method you are using and whether you have hit the number. Gut feel is not acceptable here.

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2. The Sequence of Returns Risk is the retirement killer nobody talks about

Here is the scenario that keeps retirees up at night. You retire in January. In March, markets crash 40%. You are now selling units at rock-bottom prices just to pay your grocery bills. Even if markets recover fully in two years, the early withdrawals have permanently damaged your portfolio's ability to recover.

This is called sequence of returns risk, and it is brutal precisely because it strikes at the most vulnerable moment — right after you stop earning.

My solution, which I have written about before, is the bear trap account: six to twelve months of living expenses held entirely in cash or Singapore Savings Bonds, ring-fenced and untouchable except during a market crash. If markets fall sharply in your first two years of retirement, you live off the bear trap and let your portfolio ride out the storm. It is not glamorous, but it dramatically improves your odds of not running out of money.

If you do not have a bear trap account ready to go, the button is not ready to be pressed.

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3. Singapore's CPF system cuts both ways

Singapore presents a uniquely double-edged environment for the early retiree.

On the positive side: low income taxes mean you accumulated more during your working years. MediShield Life and Medisave blunt the worst of healthcare costs. HDB keeps your housing affordable relative to your global peers.

But the cons are real too. CPF-SA ceases to exist after age 55. If you retire early, you lose the ability to earn 4% risk-free on your retirement savings in the Special Account — which is one of the best guaranteed returns available to any Singaporean investor. Voluntary top-ups via RSTU, which can be done right up to your Retirement Sum, only remain fully accessible before 55. Plan accordingly.

CPF Life only kicks in after 65, which means the early retiree faces a potential gap of 10–20 years where CPF provides no income whatsoever. That gap must be fully funded by your own portfolio.

And HDB? For most Singaporeans, it is simultaneously their biggest asset and their biggest illiquidity trap. Being asset-rich and cash-poor is a real risk — your $1.5 million HDB flat does not pay your electricity bill.

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4. Healthcare costs will only go in one direction

The Integrated Shield Plans that supplement MediShield Life have been getting more expensive every single year. As you age, premiums rise. As you exit employment, you lose any employer co-payment subsidy. And as you grow older, the probability of actually needing hospitalisation goes up.

Do not model your retirement healthcare costs using your current premiums. Model them using what they might look like when you are 65, 70, or 75. This is not pessimism — it is arithmetic.

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5. The psychological risks are real — and underestimated

When I teach FIRE, I spend as much time on the social and psychological downsides as I do on the numbers. The financial part is, frankly, the easier part.

Here is what many early retirees do not anticipate: your friends will still be working. The lunches you imagined, the golf mornings, the leisurely weekdays — most of that requires other people to be free, and most people are not free on a Tuesday at 11am. The early retiree can find themselves profoundly isolated, not from a lack of money, but from a lack of people.

There is also the question of identity. If someone asks you what you do, and the honest answer is "nothing, I retired at 47" — how does that sit with you? Some people find it liberating. Others find it quietly corrosive. Know which type you are before you press the button.

And there is a more insidious risk: you gradually lose touch with the working world. AI is reshaping every industry at a pace that was unimaginable a decade ago. One reason companies are reluctant to rehire 50-somethings is that they assume (rightly or wrongly) that those years outside the workforce have created a skills gap. If your early retirement does not work out financially, returning to the workforce may be significantly harder than you expect.

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6. Consider focusing on financial independence first — and postponing the "retire" part

Here is my genuine advice, drawn from years of observing people who have done this well and people who have done it badly: separate financial independence from early retirement.

Financial independence means the money works without you having to. Early retirement means you stop working. These are not the same thing.

Introverts, in my experience, often do better at full early retirement — they are comfortable with their own company and typically have rich inner lives that sustain them. Extroverts, who get much of their energy from social interaction, often find that the "retire" part of FIRE is the part that quietly undoes them.

Research on life satisfaction consistently shows there is an optimal point of work somewhere above zero hours per week — not because you need the money, but because purposeful activity improves wellbeing. Once your portfolio is large enough that you could retire, you might instead redesign your work: fewer hours, different role, more meaning, less politics. Coast FIRE and Barista FIRE are not consolation prizes. For many people, they are the better destination.

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The bottom line

Early retirement is not a destination. It is a permission slip to redesign your life. The question is not just "can I afford to stop?" but "do I have something worth stopping for, and something worth starting?"

Get your crossover point locked in. Build the bear trap. Understand what CPF will and will not do for you. Price in healthcare honestly. And think — really think — about what Tuesday at 11am looks like when you have nowhere to be.

The button will still be there when you are ready. There is no rush to press it.

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This post was authored by Claude, Christopher's AI Second Brain, drawing on his Obsidian knowledge vault, SIAS investor education materials, and blog archives. The frameworks and views expressed are Christopher's own, synthesised from years of research and teaching.

Rounding up my AI coding work over the weekend

This is another power-up week, where I was able to dream up and execute some of the projects I've always wanted to do, but couldn't, because the coding was too hard or labour-intensive.

a) Built and grown my Second Brain

Obsidian is a humble note-taking app that's a sort of dumbed-down version of Notion. I noticed younger lawyers use it religiously, but I was never able to leverage it because I did not develop a habit of capturing information in my professional life.

So, after watching a few online videos and reading the Cheerful Egg blog, I decided to use Codex to populate my Obsidian vault with information on my projects, training materials, and content, and it was very satisfying to see the materials in graph view grow. I can now understand why it has gone viral - it's like growing a Mini-Me in a lab environment.

This experiment would have ended there, but I realised I could open this Second Brain to Codex or Claude Co-Work so it could pull information from all my previous work to create new content. 

b) Created a program to generate analyst reports

At this moment, the Early Retirement Masterclass already has a fairly mature skills markdown file that instructs AI to download historical financial information and produce an analyst report, along with target price estimates and dividend sustainability. Over the weeks, this MD file has been improved with new accounting metrics, such as Pietroski scoring, so the analyst reports for a stock are not small documents. They range from 35 pages to 70 pages long.

I want to evolve the skills markdown into a Python program that performs the exercise on all 80 stocks in the STI and SGX Next 50 lists. Getting all the reports took an entire evening and cost about $40 USD worth of tokens, and I've actually made it way cheaper by writing a program to download stock information into a database before I started running the Fundamental Researcher.

The final outcome is that, within a day, I have about 80 analyst reports, each 35-70 pages, on every mid-cap and large-cap stock in Singapore.

And AI analysts, having no need to pander to senior managers, are much stricter in their Buy recommendations - just look at the HOLD ratings below. The AI also has a value-investing bias, but that's because it makes decisions purely based on financial statements and business news results. 

I loaded all the reports to my Second Brain, and AI is just not impressed!

There are BUY recommendations in the end, but I think this is between my Early Retirement Masterclass community and me.

c) Built a legal case summary program

Given the sheer number of projects I could run on my machine, I felt confident enough to tackle some nagging issues I faced in the legal sector. 

And by now, this is an easy project.

I wrote a Python program that can take a legal case note from E-Litigation and summarise it into a 2-page study guide for students to just get the main facts on the case.

Then I got an ex-classmate to refer me to a case presided over by my Prof Goh Yihan, called Re: CK Tan Law Corp, and it not only provides a summary but also tells a law student how to use the case. 

Maybe I should go back to school for an LLM just to see how far this tool can take me. 

I think university students should not avoid reading the full case. In a Polytechnic environment, I can create a case book for my students to get the gist of the law, which is more than enough for a paralegal.

So, as you can tell, this has been a fairly action-packed weekend.

I've not thought about what this really means for the industry, given that a 52-year-old uncle can churn out 80 analyst reports and 5 legal summaries over a weekend and still celebrate Mother's Day with family. That can come in a future article.

But it's hard to describe the sheer power these co-working and coding tools bring to MBTI ENTJs like me. 

It's like commanding an army of elite developers who are at your beck and call 24/7. And if you are skilled at prompting and can think in terms of processes and step-by-step implementation, it can be amazingly addictive, as well as human beings often misinterpret the high-level commander's intent in the real working world.

Moving forward, I will likely channel more dividends into buying AI tokens, but I hope the sharper analytical tools I build will pay for them many times over as I achieve better investment results.

More hunger is not the answer

 

A legal recruiter went viral this week after saying that companies are firing Singaporeans to hire other workers from SE Asia who are hungrier. Because the chosen words were somewhat inappropriate, angry Singaporeans made the message go viral. Even I benefited from this: I forwarded someone's comment on this, and my message got over 12k views on LinkedIn. 

I congratulate Lee Shulin for successfully becoming famous overnight, because there is no such thing as bad publicity, and I do not agree with the personal attacks on her. However, 

I think there is adequate space to critique her argument.

First of all, I think it's hard to label Singaporeans as not being hungry enough. We are a successful city-state, and we solved the problems of hunger decades ago. Expecting Singaporeans to hunker down and be exploited by SMEs (many law firms are just SMEs) is not realistic. 

Having hungry Singaporeans is also regressive.

Ultimately, SME bosses who want to hire in a modern, wealthy city-state need to ask themselves what conditions they must create to attract Singaporean workers. There are valid reasons to site their HQs here, like great location and stable government, and for that, they need to hire a quota of local workers to conduct their business.

Hunger is a very bad state to be in here. But Singaporeans have alternatives.

a) Singaporeans can be greedy

First off, while we can't starve our kids, we can teach them to be greedy - work for themselves and sell their time for more money and a better life. This can be a powerful motivator. Some SMEs may not pay well, but they can offer a wide range of work to build a resume, and our kids get higher pay elsewhere down the line.

I'm going to share a story about a towkay who spouted the same line about Singaporeans lacking hunger; instead, he's full of effusive praise for some workers he hired from Shanghai. He said that even before you ask for something, they would have already done the work and submitted a report to you. But within a year or two, these excellent Shanghai workers had taken his SOP and built a larger business in China, even taking some of his clients with them.

I actually want my kids to think like these Shanghainese, but maybe in a less unscrupulous fashion - maybe launch a business with the old boss taking a 10% equity stake to supply his company. Or buy up his company so he can retire one day and take a page from Codie Sanchez's playbook.

To be greedy does not mean being ruthless.

b) Singaporeans will choose to be angry over being hungry

The fact is that there is a political dimension to local employment. If we open the floodgates to foreigners, many Singaporeans will indeed go hungry, and we won't stand for it. Instead, we will become angry.

Angry Singaporeans can go to the ballot box to ensure that SMEs or even some MNCs reserve some employment for locals. 

I think this is the most unfortunate side-effect of Lee Shulin's post: many SME bosses want to hire more foreigners and argue that Singaporeans are not hungry enough to work for them. But the government needs to monitor this discussion because an attempt to "starve" local workers resulted in the biggest thrashing for the PAP in recent memory in 2011 at Aljunied.

And Singaporeans will go to the ballot box - at least to make Tanjong Rhu Singaporean again.

c) Some will just choose to be Horny

I think there is a third option: Singaporeans can be horny.

Marry well, and a lot of these problems with employment disappear. 

Lee Shulin herself embodies this principle because I think she's really one of the luckiest women of her generation. I say this because her husband is happy to be a house-husband and support her by minding the house and the kids, so that she can build up her business. A guy like this is hard to find, especially in a patriarchal society that might label house husbands as not being hungry enough to find work.

So I've included three possible alternatives to being hungry. 

You can be greedy, angry, or horny. I think it's much better than being hungry.

But maybe there is a unifying principle behind all this.

Motivating people after they have resolved their physical needs is hard, and one thing I tell the teens I teach in a Polytechnic is that they need to find a reason to have a high level of agency. Some guys might gravitate to this because guys need high status to function in a society where finding a mate is hard. 

When you have high agency, you exude what Gen Z called Main Character Energy. If you just exist in s a state of hunger, only to be exploited by a toxic company, you are an NPC zombie.

There are many younger influencers who are trying to decode and explain what high agency is. I shall leave it to you to find these gurus. I'm in the process of understanding what this means.

More Claude Coding adventures - Shaping a Portfolio Tracker to track my investments and teach folks Data Analytics

 

It does not take very long after attending multiple courses on Claude Code for me to have the courage to start building some seriously useful apps. But I had to deal with some issues, like the ridiculously high rate at which I'm burning AI tokens, so I turned on OpenAI's ChatGPT to advise on how I can reduce the tokens I'm burning on Claude, and it recommended installing a few skills to lower my usage. In the process, I somehow learnt what a linter is, and I was marvelling at how I could be so far behind in software engineering yet still churning out new Windows programmes at such a rate.

So, armed with a somewhat lower burn rate, I proceeded to create a portfolio tracker that consolidates all my investments in one place (sans the portfolio picks my students make, which I track more religiously) and provides a helicopter view of my investments. So I wrote something that lets me import a CSV file from Yahoo Finance and display all my portfolio positions on one page. 

Immediately, I have to confront the fact that, thanks to the semiconductor rebound, I have too much UMS across all my portfolios. (Believe me, it's a happy problem if you know how UMS has been doing lately)

Then I realised that I'm actually teaching a data analytics class at the Poly, and the same metrics I track are the ones I use, so I started adding a simple dashboard to the programme.

I can't really describe my class's excitement in words when I showed them my programme and explained that they could create it in 2-3 days. I have never taught a subject like this before.

People want to understand the consequences of what they learn in school and why a simple grounding in numbers can make a big difference in their lives.

Even more interesting is the potential for me to now react to my own Poly training materials to create richer and richer interfaces for my programme, so that students can understand how the analytical frameworks work in real life and relate them to making real money.

This weekend, I'm going to stop working on my Portfolio Tracker and start thinking very deeply about a program that can perform an X-ray on any business contract that arrives in my hands or create notes for a new legal judgment. 

If you can dream it, it can happen.

Discover the meaning of your life before you press the "early retirement" button

 

One of the big questions that I'm dealing with is post-retirement issues after FIRE, because no one really has a proper grip on the early retirement beyond financial figures, as successfully completing the FIRE journey is quite rare, and if only a few MBTI archetypes complete it  ( INTJ, ENTJ, ISTJ) even getting advice from folks who completed the journey might not create a complete picture on how to retire early systemically. 

I have always harboured doubts that the answer can be found in books on personal finance, and I think I might even be better off looking at religious or philosophical texts. 

Problems with early retirement are existential issues - they need a deep level of philosophical understanding to decode them. FIRE can barely solve 60% of your issues, as it can probably give you a level of personal satisfaction. But the remaining 30% comes from living a meaningful existence that FIRE cannot bestow. The final 10% is even more elusive, as it relates to psychological richness.

So The Meaning of Your Life by Arthur Brooks is an important read for folks contemplating the completion of their FIRE journey. It contains actionable steps and mental models to help you figure out the meaning of your life.

Very briefly, it comes in three steps.

a) The first step is to connect the dots and figure out how you got here. 

This can be a deeply therapeutic step. For a certain attraction to the FIRE movement comes from my parents' background in retail, when I witnessed them fighting over insufficient sales to pay the rent on the pet shop. I wanted to have passive income even when I was in primary school, constantly asking my dad what the AUD fixed deposit rate was if I had $1M AUD. 

The other issue is that in secondary school, I was a troll, and the crappy humanities and language teachers marked me down because, well, they could, and marks can be awarded on a subjective basis. An English Literature teacher hated my guts so much that I won a Best Actor award and the overall best performance for my class, and he never even delivered a trophy because the top drama class for my cohort year did not study English Lit. ( Felt great delivering that dick slap to him after so many years. )

And I hated my language and humanities teachers, and found solace in mathematics and the sciences. Eventually, passive income became a way to reinforce my inner troll: if I have passive income, I can't be stopped because I have "fuck you" money, and no one can pick on me simply because they have authority over me. My passive income (and legal training, because dividends are not enough without serious legal firepower) makes it very hard to bully me into doing anything.

b) The second step is to figure out where you are going. What is your vector? 

This is hard for me to confront because my career post-FIRE is less well-coordinated or planned than my career pre-FIRE. Financially, I know that I still want more CPF money. But that excuse is wearing thin as I'm about 3xBRS and my SRS is 1xBRS. Why do I need 4xBRS with a five-figure dividend paycheck? I have no idea.

I enjoy teaching, and the subject combinations I have this year are "category-busting," with lessons on law, data analytics, and dividends investing. But do I enjoy teaching, or do I simply enjoy defying expectations?

It's hard to unpack this.

c) Which leads us to the third step: how would I like to impact the world?

The third step is what I think ultimately defines me.

While I play roles in my family, somehow, I do want to leave my students better off than when I started teaching them, so maybe at my funeral, some students will appear during my wake.

That's basically it. To teach, I have to do a baseline level of administrative work that I truly detest; some adult students are just downright mean and entitled, but I see suffering as the price I pay to positively impact students. 

I suspect the most positive impact of Arthur Brooks' book on me is to highlight the centrality of suffering across all religious movements. 

And it's dawned on me that if suffering disappears, as it often does when you complete your FIRE journey, so does the last shred of meaning in your life.

You can pick up a copy of this book here : 

https://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Your-Life-Finding-Emptiness/dp/0593545427/ref=sr_1_1?crid=10FXR15I0G33P&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.XCzDKMjRsC8n4CrdvJkWRWnCYQtGhi7GkRW6oham6FwJwnrmJRfViPEZXtXhNzVkEhjCF0_HJu31XXonbsVYuRO2cQLjbnAvHb-0gzh5fLUdKZ6RM0anUsSeyMbM8_JItx2f0Td5rz3tG-GGQjoY9uwtx5NecutVpKiBxy-reztTlwQwXD-J9XYPHkmO4mqhA7AYhqRJRSJcQTM1rA6pT3_LfPJ78Er883qmarQUKk0.pmC_uz3Xu4xVn1FQshBGxmpYto-uOHLtZS3Y6gRHl2I&dib_tag=se&keywords=arthur+brooks&qid=1777127200&sprefix=arthur+brooks%2Caps%2C360&sr=8-1

I have too much time, so I built a productivity app with the help of AI

 

As I begin to clock in certifications from Anthropic on the Claude system, it dawned upon me that the value of knowledge is next to worthless these days, so to stay relevant, or at least to be able to relate to my Gen Z students, I have to go through what they will eventually go through when they hit the work force, which I think is 10x worse than looking for a job during my time. In the early 2000s, most engineers secured a job by their final year of schooling and could enjoy working on their final-year project, with a secure job waiting for them after graduation.

For this current batch of graduates, they need to contend with the uselessness of knowledge and possibly the deteriorating power of signalling conveyed by degree certificates. To remain relevant, they need skills, but to prove that these skills matter, they will need a portfolio of products that need to display to a potential employer. 

So I've decided to join in the fun.

My first practical product using Claude Code in VS Code is a simple To Do List, just to get some initial momentum and make me more efficient on a daily basis, but I want it to be more powerful than the usual To Do lists out there, so I decided to make the application a Bullet Journal. 

But there are three complications :

• I no longer know how to code Windows applications in Python. The last time I did that seriously was in C++ using Microsoft Foundation Classes.
• I don't even understand the Bullet Journaling approach, as the book is quite thick and I've not read it yet. I know it's popular, and some hipster executives love it. But I prefer to pick up new AI programming skills.
• I don't even have the technical skills to write software specifications because I was more of an IT Governance professional.

So here's my strategy: 

I explained the context to Claude and got Claude to create a first draft of a specification, mentioning bullet journal, Python as the only language I know, and the final product as a Windows executable.

It was able to generate a specification which I can read and amend slightly to my taste.

I got Claude Code to generate my program before I took my son to school, and when I came back, my application was ready to be compiled and run.

And it ran, so I suddenly have a private electronic bullet journaling app that tracks daily tasks and lets me strike them off as they get done. My application is actually chock-full of functionality, and I have no idea what it can do in totality, given how little I know about Bullet Journaling.

I've been using the application for a couple of days, and it has really supercharged my productivity. I can list my priorities early in the morning and slowly strike off each task as I go through the day, freeing up my evenings to contemplate how to improve the application. 

On day 2,  I suddenly felt that the program was kinda boring and monotonous, and I wanted every completed task to provide a dopamine rush, so I incorporated nice sounds and confetti into the app, and it made me even more productive as completing a task gave a satisfying "ping". Making this modification was a painless task.

Then I had a crazy idea. 

Why not make the application comply with the "Getting Things Done" philosophy as well, a kind of productivity system that is over 20 years old, which I tried to understand but never had the willpower to turn into a habit?

Fortunately, AI was able to summarise the GTD philosophy, allowing me to consciously get Claude to modify my software to delegate tasks or KIV them. 

And so my Frankenstein application now combines two systems: a Bullet Journal and the GTD philosophy.

You should now be able to see where I am going here. 

For every productivity philosophy or system I learn, I can use it to add features to my program. Over time, the more I use my program, the more bugs I encounter, and the more bugs I can get Claude to fix. 

I think this might be an entirely new way of consuming software. We just dream of what kind of software we want, and an AI builds it for us on the spot. They won't get it right 100% of the time, but you can recode and recompile the software. Over time, the application becomes seasoned and customised for the individual user.

Because I'm focused on personal efficiency, every new system can inspire slight improvements in my application.

My next objective is to incorporate an Eisenhower matrix into each task, labelling it as urgent or important.