Category Archives: Personal Development

🕒 10 Modern Time Management Tips for Busy People

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In today’s fast-paced world, time often feels like it’s slipping through our fingers. Between digital distractions, packed calendars, and the pressure to always be “on,” it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But time management isn’t about squeezing more into your day—it’s about organizing your time around what really matters. Whether you’re working from home, raising a family, or managing multiple side projects, these ten modern tips can help you take back control and move through your day with intention and focus.

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My Experience Attending the Le Wagon Data Science Bootcamp in Tokyo

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For quite some time, I had been considering enrolling in a data science bootcamp. Working in finance, I’ve found that more and more of my responsibilities involve programming—particularly in Python and SQL. As AI continues to evolve, I felt it was the right time to skill up and explore how I could integrate AI and data science into my professional development.

Living in Tokyo, I was looking specifically for an international bootcamp with in-person or hybrid offerings. Options were surprisingly limited, but Le Wagon stood out. Not only do they have a strong international presence, but they’ve done a great job promoting their tech community locally through Meetup events and free workshops. I attended a few of their free sessions and was impressed with both the content and teaching style—clear, practical, and beginner-friendly.

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Preparing for the GMAT Exam (Post 1)

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Hello Readers, this is post number one of my experience in preparing for the GMAT exam. Just to give you some background, I took the GMAT exam for the first time 12 years ago during my last year of university but I opted to cancel my score which was a big, big mistake. A lot of time has passed since my first attempt but I recall that the questions that I was seeing at the end of the exam were easy, leading me to think that I had done very poorly. It was a bad decision to cancel the score and there are a lot of articles out there including this one from Manhattan Prep that argue why you should not. My second attempt was three years ago and this time I did not cancel my score just to receive my extremely underwhelming result of 470…….
So what went wrong? If you check out other posts on this blog page you, can see how I have been taking other arguably challenging exams so why did I perform so poorly on the GMAT exam? There are a lot of posts out there from test takers who got their desired scores and got accepted at their target business schools. This is not one of those posts but I am hoping that this gives you some insight as to the bad habits that you should avoid when preparing for this exam.

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Does Mindfulness Work?

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Mindfulness has been a buzz word in the past years, there are a lot of definitions out there, however the one that I like is the one that refers to mindfulness as the ability to focus on the present moment experience without evaluation. I started practising mindfulness three years ago and I have had a very positive experience. It has had a very strong impact on my professional career and on my personal life, but most importantly, it has allowed me to better understand how my mind works.

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Trying Out a ‘Shut Up & Write’ Event

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Have you been struggling with writer’s block recently? You have that piece that you are working on and the harder you try to think the harder it is to get words? Then you might want to try attending a Shut up & Write session. I joined a meeting for the first time a few months ago and it has been a great experience. If you need to write regularly, have an urgent deadline but get stuck, or like me, you love procrastinating and get easily distracted, you should try Shut Up & Write. This is a group that I recently discovered and my experience so far has been extremely positive. For those of you who are just hearing about this group for the first time, Shut Up & Write is a community of people around the world who host chapters where members meet together, update each other on their writing projects and get cracking on with their work. Events are free and hosted online and in-person.

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Entering Speech Contests in Toastmasters (Part 2)

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In my previous post, I wrote about my experience in competing for the first time at a speech contest. The post was focused on my experience in drafting the speech and the help that I received from club members in fine-tuning different parts of the speech. In this post, I would like to focus on another point that is equally important as the speech, the delivery. You can have the perfect speech scripted, but if you are not able to deliver it well, you will struggle to impress the judges on the day of the competition. In this post I will be sharing some tips that I picked up as I was preparing for the speech contest.

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Career Development: Levelling up with the right qualification and experience

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An important piece of advice that I received when I started working as a new graduate was about how I needed to continue investing in my personal development if I wanted to be successful in my career. One manager at my first firm went as far as telling me that he spent 10-20% of his income every year in his personal development during his early career. In my case, I didn’t have a fixed monetary amount but every year I made a conscious effort to have some additional personal development goal outside of work. Very often this was in the form of attaining a professional qualification. Before you continue reading, I want to make my view clear, I’m not professing that going out there and collecting degrees and letters after your name is the winning tactic. Ultimately, your success at work will depend on how well you can do the job and communicate your contributions to key stakeholders. What I am saying is that especially in a very rapidly evolving job market like the one we are seeing today, failing to grow your skillsets might not just stop you from getting that promotion but might even be detrimental for your career and job stability as a wide range of jobs become obsolete due to the development of new technologies.

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Quantic: The Accounting Module

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I have recently completed the Accounting module which is the EMBA’s first module so in this post I will share some thoughts about my learning experience. In past posts, I gave a general overview about the EMBA but now that I have taken and completed a course, I can share more concrete details which I hope readers find helpful.

What does the Accounting module cover?

As the module’s name suggests, the course covers general accounting concepts such as ledgers, credits and debits, key financial statements, ratios and some aspects of managerial accounting. The unit also covers some non-accounting concepts such as general explanations of financial instruments such as stocks and bonds. It is quite a lot of material to cover over five weeks, especially if you are new to these concepts. I did a management degree for my undergraduate studies and these are concepts you would normally cover in 1-2 semesters.

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Two Months Into My Quantic Journey

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Last month I posted about having enrolled for Quantic’s Executive MBA. While only a couple of months have passed, my experience so far has been very positive. Just to share some background, I decided to pursue this degree as a way to get a good general grasp of the business skills which are required in running a company. My education so far has been skewed towards Finance (specifically the area of financial engineering and risk) and I felt that I lacked a broader understanding of how companies operate, something which I believe is important, especially for senior managerial positions. The second appeal was purely a desire to expand my network and to build up connections outside of my industry. As I wrote in my first post, I was initially apprehensive in enrolling and turned my offer down as I considered $9,600 to be too expensive on a relatively new course which is mostly based on an app. I eventually decided to take a gamble as the degree has been gaining more and more momentum and having not found a suitable alternative, I enrolled. I did not want to give up my day job for a full-time MBA and I did not want to commit in paying the fees charged by traditional business schools.





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