Getting My Time Back✦

In August 2024, I left Xiaomi after more than a decade in product, first at Smartisan and then at Xiaomi. The generative-AI advertising platform I led was doing well, which made the decision look unusual from the outside. But I had reached a point where I no longer felt I could stand behind the direction of the work or contribute to it in a way that felt honest.

I was not walking away from work. I was preparing for a different next step. I had begun planning to study in Canada, prepared for IELTS, applied to universities, and received an offer from the University of Guelph, a school I was excited about. I started learning French while I waited for my study permit. The plan was practical, but it was also a chance to step outside a life that had been organized almost entirely by one job after another.

The transition did not go as planned. My study-permit application entered security screening, with no clear timeline. I asked whether the original university could extend my offer and applied to other programs as a backup. The wait lasted long enough that the offer expired. It was a real loss, but not the end of the path. I was admitted to several other programs and chose Trent University's Applied Modelling and Quantitative Methods program because it offered a useful foundation for the life I wanted to build in Canada.

Waiting changed the shape of my days. For the first time in a long time, I had no job setting the agenda. At first I rested in the most literal way and played video games. After a while, it stopped being interesting. Five or six hours could disappear, and I began to worry that months might pass without me being able to say what I had done with them.

I did not need to turn every hour into an achievement. I did need a way to keep life from becoming formless. That was the beginning of the habits that now hold my days together.

The first habit I returned to was fitness. I had trained before, so I already knew what it gave me: a better body and more confidence. A reasonably priced gym near where I lived made it easy to begin again. The soreness after the first workout was enough to remind me that my body was responding. Over time, my body-fat percentage moved from 28% to 11%, even though my weight barely changed.

Fitness also gave the week a reliable structure. Today I train every day: strength work on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; running on Tuesday and Thursday; functional strength on Sunday. It is not a punishment or a productivity ritual. It is one of the ways I keep taking care of myself, even when other parts of life are uncertain.

French became another anchor. It began as a sensible preparation for Canada, but it became a daily practice I wanted to keep. Learning gives me a kind of satisfaction that empty time does not. It lets me enter a subject I do not yet understand, make small progress, and come back the next day.

I also started recording my time. Without work, I wanted to see what was really happening in my days rather than rely on a vague feeling. The practice helped me reduce gaming and make room for learning. Later, it showed me something more useful: workout and French were the activities that appeared every day, while coding, writing, and study came and went. They were not tasks to finish. They were the structure underneath the rest of my work.

The records also made me more honest about the parts of life I used to dismiss. Cooking, eating, cleaning, and resting are not interruptions to serious work. They are what make serious work sustainable. I still have to watch my tendency to keep coding late into the evening, or to judge myself too harshly when a day is not full. Seeing the pattern does not solve it, but it gives me a chance to respond to it.

Arriving in Canada did not produce one dramatic moment of reinvention. The change arrived through ordinary routines. My classmates replaced my colleagues. I was older than most of them and had more professional experience, but I was also learning formal statistical methods that I had never studied before. Much of the program gives theory and language to patterns I learned through product work. Other parts require me to be a beginner again and work my way into unfamiliar ideas.

The ordinary kindness of people here has made that transition easier. A bus driver once had to tell me that I could not wait inside the bus before departure because of the rules. When I boarded later, he apologised and explained why. It was a small interaction, but I appreciated the combination of a clear boundary and respect. I have found the same quality in many daily encounters: people can be direct without making another person feel small.

I am still learning how to live in a new country and how to study in a second language. That uncertainty has not disappeared. It has become part of a life that is broader than the one I had before.

I still care deeply about building products. DailyTrace grew out of my own time-recording practice. It is deliberately light: it helps people see the activities they choose to record, without turning blank time into failure or asking an algorithm to explain their lives for them. The product is not the point of this story, but it is evidence of how I now work: start with a real problem, make the purpose clear, and keep the solution proportionate.

AI coding has expanded what I can do with that approach. I do not come from an iOS engineering background, but I can define a product, set boundaries, use established standards, review implementation, and decide what is not worth adding. AI has shortened the distance between product judgment and a working product. It has not removed the need for judgment, documentation, or careful verification.

DailyTrace is the first product from this period that I can share publicly. I am also using the same approach on two other products based on problems I know first-hand. They are still private, but the work has shown me that I can keep learning, make decisions independently, and carry an idea into real execution.

That is also what I hope to bring to my next team: product judgment grounded in real user problems, a willingness to learn across disciplines, and a direct way of working with people who can face difficult questions honestly. I want to do ambitious work. I also want to do it with people who are clear about what they know, what they do not know, and what they are trying to build together.