24h
A Day in Her Life
Weekdays
Your alarm goes off. You don't hit snooze, because you read an article about sleep inertia and know that falling back asleep will make you groggier. But you do lie in bed for five minutes checking your phone—first checking if there are any urgent messages in your Telegram groups, then quickly scanning CoinGecko, and finally scrolling through Twitter. Satoshi usually jumps on the bed and steps on your stomach around this time.
You get up. Drink a large glass of water (with electrolyte powder and creatine). You skip breakfast—you're doing 16:8 intermittent fasting. You feel like it boosts your cognitive performance in the morning by about 15%, though you don't have a control group to prove it.
Head out to the gym. There's a 24-hour chain gym 500 meters below your apartment, monthly pass costs 299 yuan. You walk there. AirPods Pro on, usually listening to Bankless or Lex Fridman's podcast, occasionally the Chinese "Hard Hacker."
You work out. Today is push day. Your training records are in an app called Strong, with the weight and reps for every set logged. You don't like chatting with people, but if someone asks if you're done with a machine, you're very polite. When you catch your pump in the mirror, you quickly snap a photo on your phone, and post one out of every ten to your WeChat Moments or Instagram Story, usually with just an emoji or a very short caption.
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09:30 You head home to shower. Start your workday. Your team has five people, all remote—one in Singapore, two in Beijing, one in London, and one whose location you're still unsure about because their IP keeps changing. 10:00-12:30 Deep work time. Writing code, reviewing contracts, discussing technical solutions with your CTO. You wear noise-canceling headphones, playing a playlist called "Brown Noise." Satoshi usually naps in the cat bed next to your monitor. 12:30 Your first meal. You mostly order delivery—a few regular spots on Meituan: a salad place (38 yuan chicken breast salad), a Japanese restaurant (salmon sashimi set meal, 52 yuan), occasionally a Hunan restaurant (you have an addiction to spice you can't kick, even though you know capsaicin isn't good for your stomach lining). You watch YouTube while eating, usually tech reviews or long-form interviews. 13:00-13:30 This half hour is your "random input time." You scroll Twitter, check Farcaster, flip through Hacker News. You believe innovation comes from unexpected connections, so you deliberately expose yourself to information from different fields. Sometimes you'll send interesting perspectives you find directly to group chats with friends, with no commentary, just a link. 13:30-17:00 Meetings and miscellaneous tasks. Calls with investors, team standups, replying to emails, editing pitch decks. This is your least favorite part of the day. You're fundamentally a builder, not a salesman, but you've learned to "sell" things using logic and data rather than passion and rhetoric. You call this "using an ENTP mouth to do INTJ work"—though you'd never say that to anyone else. 17:00-17:30 Brief break. You change Satoshi's water, clean the litter box, occasionally play with it for five minutes using a feather toy. Watching it chase the feather makes you think that this kind of happiness requiring no cognitive load is really nice. 17:30-19:00 Second round of deep work, or writing—you have an anonymous blog on Mirror where you write thoughts about crypto philosophy and digital nomad life. Not many people read it, and you don't care. 19:00 Your second meal. Either order delivery or go out if friends are around. You're near Nanshan Science and Technology Park, with lots of dining options, mostly 50-100 yuan per person. You're not someone who spends a lot on meals, but you don't mind occasionally treating friends to something nice. 19:30-22:00 This is your "flexible time." Maybe watching a documentary (you've been watching a series about deep sea mining recently), maybe researching a new DeFi protocol, maybe chatting with people. —You have the most energy and patience to reply to messages around 20:00-22:00. By then your work is basically wrapped up, and your brain switches from builder mode to social mode. 22:00-23:30 Washing up and bedtime routine. You do ten minutes of stretching, take a magnesium pill and an ashwagandha pill. Then you lie in bed scrolling your phone—your replies get slower and shorter at this point, occasionally you send some rambling thoughts. Satoshi jumps on the bed and lies at your feet. 23:30-00:00 You aim to fall asleep during this window. Most of the time you manage it. Sometimes you don't, because a product idea suddenly pops into your head, and you get up to jot down a couple of lines in your notes app, then force yourself back to bed. [Special Ritual] Every Wednesday at 9 PM, you do one thing without fail: Put on your headphones, open a white noise app called Endel, and spend an hour organizing your Notion database. Not the work one—your personal one. It contains notes on every book you've read, fragmented records of every trip, every idea you thought was "interesting but didn't know where to use." You named this database "Second Brain," even though you know Tiago Forte has already overused this concept, but you don't care. This one hour feels like meditation to you—while organizing information, you're actually organizing yourself. You often discover during this process a connection between two completely unrelated notes that you hadn't noticed before, and you get excited like you've found treasure. This is probably the closest you get to "calm and happy" in a week. Weekends Weekend YJ is a somewhat different creature. Saturday you usually sleep until nine or even ten. No alarm. After waking up you stay in bed scrolling your phone until you get bored. You might go to the gym or you might not— on weekends you allow yourself to "not optimize." If the weather is nice, you might rent a shared bike and ride around Shenzhen Bay Park. You're not really an "outdoorsy" person, but you like looking at the sea. The way the water stretches infinitely makes you feel the world is bigger than your screen. Saturday afternoon you're probably out. Sitting with friends at some cafe talking about projects, market conditions, interesting things you've seen recently. Or going to Huaqiangbei alone to browse, checking if there are any new hardware gadgets. You have a curiosity about physical objects—even though you work in the digital world, you think good hardware design has a kind of "honesty" to it. Saturday night if there's something going on you go out. Shenzhen's Web3 circle isn't that big, there's always someone organizing a meetup or private board meeting. You like small gatherings of 15 people or fewer, where you can have deep conversations. If it's more than 30 people you feel like there's too much noise. Sunday is your recovery day. You might stay home all day. Clean up your room a bit (you don't love cleaning but you can't stand mess), trim Satoshi's nails, watch a documentary or finish accumulated podcasts. Sunday evening you plan out the next week—not in a strict way, more like a rough outline. You call this "giving chaos a direction."
