🛠️ A Career Parent's Digital Toolshed for Consistent Content Creation

This final part of this series is a peek into the practical side of how I stay focused, creative, and sane (most of the time).

I like to see it as a toolshed for my mind with three areas:

• digital tools

• philosophical frameworks

• consistent routines and rituals

It’s a work in progress, and it’ll evolve as I get more traction on what I’m doing, but it’s gotten me this far!

C’mon. I’ll show you around.

📱 1. My Digital Toolbox

These are the main ones I use daily or weekly (oooh a table…fancy!):

For content creation and distribution, I use Beehiiv as the main hub to post my thoughts and ideas. I use Medium and Substack to distribute and refine the thoughts that originate from here, and I back them up regularly in case anything happens to my accounts.

(Side note: That’s a thing that I don’t talk about often, but digital archiving and maintenance are essential. We’ll put a pin in that for now, though.)

Next area of the shed: a little peek into how my mind works.

🧠 2. My Mental Frameworks

I talk about these on the regular already, but these are the main perspectives or philosophies that pretty much guide how I think and execute:

• “Default for Action (the first penguin maneuver).”

  The first penguin to dive in might get eaten by a polar bear, but he also gets first dibs. That’s the mentality I strive to maintain.

  When in doubt (and there’s more than enough of it these days), I take one small step.

  Even if it’s just jotting an idea down or speaking up in a meeting or asking that dumb question, I prefer to be the one to put it out there (cuz everyone is thinking it anyway).

  The polar bears are usually busy with the Coke so…there’s that.

• “Systems over willpower (easier to ride the raft than swim against the current).”

  I have one wife, two kids, two dogs, and four cats. I don’t have time to think about exactly what I have to do every single moment of the day.

  I create environments and routines that do the work for me.

  Most of the time, I put myself on rails and just go. Room after room, I need a routine and system to maintain them because each one serves a different function for a different part of my family.

  Without these, I’d have a house, but definitely not a home.

  And I certainly wouldn’t have the space (mentally or physically) to create anything meaningful!

• “Leave it better than I found it (my OCD).”
  Whether it’s a room, a relationship, or a rough draft, if I interact with it, it needs to be a little cleaner, a little happier, or a little easier to read.

  As I mentioned in the previous point, I have frameworks that serve this very purpose. I may not be successful with every go-around, but these two points together maintain the momentum and upward trend.

  This is how I keep my home looking the way it does at night as it did in the morning…that and it guarantees that none of us get food poisoning.

• “Creative output, the byproduct of creative intake (always a party).”

  Dropping all pretense of being the “good Chinese student” was the best decision I ever made as a teenager.

  It lead me to prioritizing reading, reflection, and surrounding myself with thoughtful people, not just the ones who expected me to fit into stereotypes, but ones who were on the journey of discovering and defining their own identities.

  Whether they were American Born Chinese (ABC’s) like me or not, if they were creative or imaginative with a slant towards finding the fun in everything they did, they were the ones I wanted to emulate.

  These are the people I draw inspiration from to this day.

The Digital Heirloom is one of identity, intent, and iteration that is unfettered by labels, expectations, and obligations.

If you don’t know who you are from an internal perspective, then you’ll be much more sensitive to external influence.

There’s one more area of the shed, and it covers my methods for checking in with myself.

You could say this is the space where I maintain all the tools I’ve mentioned so far.

🔁 3. My Ritual Sacrif, uh, Routines…

Rituals aren’t just routines, they’re meaningful foundations.

My tools and frameworks just don’t work well if I get rusty emotionally, physically, and mentally.

This area is the most important to me with the following routines:

• Daily Tai Chi practice, exercise or morning stretch 

  This sets the tone for my presence. While it’s nice to hit the ground running, as a 9-5 parent, I’m more than likely to trip and fall flat on my face if I’m not ready to tackle the day’s chaos.

  I’ve been doing Tai Chi for almost thirty years now, and it’s probably what’s keeping me from rapidly aging into an old fart…that and my tendency to do pull ups every time I see the bar in the door frame.

  The 100 pull-ups a day challenge that I started 18 months ago is also still going…

  Physical exercise builds strength, flexibility, and stamina. Don’t neglect it.

• Weekly content review

  Every weekend, I look back at the notes and recordings I made to ask the following questions: What resonated? What was insightful? What can help my family and community?

  Regardless of what life throws at me, the weekly posting is the bare minimum.

  The atomic formatting has been much easier to maintain, but I also now know that I’m capable of publishing daily.

• Regular reading and coursework

  I like to keep a few books in progress, and I’ve averaged around a book a month since I started writing. I’ve always enjoyed it, but being a 9-5 parent gives precious little time for dedicated sessions.

  Lifelong learning isn’t just a slogan, it’s something I actively push on. Kieran Drew’s “1% Writer” and Erica and Rob’s “Hooked On Hooks 2025” are the current ones I’m chewing through.

  Don’t skimp on feeding the mind. There’s no excuse with digital access.

  It’s ok to keep it lean and hungry, but don’t starve it!

• Nightly bedtime check in for the family

  Before I dive down here to write, I always put my wife, kids, and pets to bed.

  Or at least I try. The cats don’t really sleep at night. They’re usually trying to smother us if they manage to get into the room!

  Ironically, this is my ramp-up period towards the time I have to work on myself.

  Recently, I’ve started enforcing what I call the “Pumpkin Protocol”.

  Past midnight, I turn into one. I’ve paid for neglecting sleep, and it’s become far too risky at middle age to sustain any longer.’

  So yeah, two bookends to this routine: one for family and one for me.

That’s it for this area…these are the rituals that keep me dialed into myself and my purpose.

🚀 When All’s Said and Done

I don’t have a glorious budget from my engineering career or extra hours in the day to do any of the writing that I’ve managed to pull off...this toolshed has come a long way from when I started cobbling it together years ago.

Over this series, I hope you realize that all you really need are:

• A clear philosophy/concept/direction AKA a mission statement of some sort

• Repeatable systems and frameworks that you develop specifically for your life situation

• A virtual toolshed, both digitally and mentally, to help guide your actions

That’s how I stay creative as a 9–5 career parent who is exploring all that digital creation has to offer.

P.S. If this three-part series resonated with you on your journey, I’d love to hear from you.

Nothing I’ve shared here is set in stone or anything like that, and it will certainly evolve as my situation changes. Right now, I’m pulling back on a few things because of coursework, focusing more on health, and a general restructuring because it’s already halftime in 2025.

So let me ask you: What are your systems for “creating while living”?

Or the opposite end if that’s where you are:

What’s holding you back from doing it?