[9/11] 2026 Goal Progress

The usual round of writing up progress on the goals I declared. This week, I got the idea on Saturday morning and just went on an overnight trip.

Health

Still in rehab. Playing with the kids is the workout

I'm still in the rehab period after my hand surgery, so I haven't made it to the gym.

That said, I had a lot of chances to play with the kids, so I figure that counted as decent exercise.

I also did a fair bit of walking.

Sleep is good. But I'm the last one in the family to get up

Sleep itself was pretty good, I think.

The problem is I can't get up in the morning. Even when I wake at like 5am, it's "well, if I'm going to stay up anyway, let me just sleep a bit more."

And the result is I end up being the last one in the family to wake up. That's been bugging me.

Quitting smoking: the count scales with my workload

Quitting is still going badly. The time-lock box fizzled out after three days again.

And honestly, it's the workload — the higher the pressure at work gets, the more my cigarette count goes up.

Man, what do I even do about this.

I guess the only way is to cut down bit by bit.

Work

Started quietly building "AI employees"

This week I started plugging away at building AI employees.

Someone shared some pretty good examples with me, so I'm thinking it might be worth copying those.

It's still very much trial and error, but what I'm building right now targets the classic project problems. The bottleneck that inevitably shows up anywhere humans gather, the things that slip through the cracks, the "we could have known that a week ago" information — pushing that to the relevant people in as close to real time as possible.

Something that handles that. An AI employee that's genuinely running all the time.

Human sleeping hours are just such a waste

Personally, I think the hours humans spend asleep are an enormous waste — in this AI era, anyway.

So the theme of what I'm building is: while people are asleep, how much of the work that doesn't interfere with what humans are doing can be handled autonomously and proactively.

The problem: the things only humans can check scale up proportionally

Our company runs multiple projects in parallel as a matter of course. So yes, AI blasts through the implementation — but the points a human has to review scale up right alongside it.

As that volume grows, the human inevitably becomes the bottleneck. And when urgent things fire off in multiple projects at once, one of them is definitely going to get neglected — I can see that mechanism now.

So I've been stripping down to what only a human can do, and I've recently gotten a sense of the ceiling on how much of that a human can actually handle. Distributing that load is what the "hiring" is really about.

The problem is fairly clear, and the means to fill the gap is progressing, so I think we're in decent shape.

And through all of it — proactiveness in humans is what matters most. More than anything, really.

Money

US stocks: up in dollars, down in yen

US stocks aren't doing great either.

I bought a fair amount converted into dollars while the yen was weak, so now I'm up in dollar terms but down once it's back in yen.

I don't remember this being an issue back when I was on PayPay Securities.

So it's like I'm trading double — the USD/JPY rate, FX, and the actual stock.

And you'd think the ones I bought in yen would be up now that the yen has strengthened, but... not really. Hmm.

I spread my portfolio too thin

I have a pretty clear picture of the future I want to see, and I've been investing in the companies that would likely be at the center of it.

But I think I spread the portfolio too wide.

Honestly, I should have kept it to one or two. That's my real reflection here.

And the returns, too. Rather than splitting 100k yen across ten names, putting a million into one probably makes for an investment you can actually feel conviction about — with the returns to match.

The crypto bot: maybe time to shut it off

Yeah, it's doing terribly.

Three months in and it's been slightly negative the whole way. I'm honestly considering shutting it off for now.

Nothing new on savings or income

Nothing in particular on either front.

Duolingo at 256 days. The VR app is stalled

I'm posting this a bit late, but Duolingo is at 256 days straight as of today.

That said, the VR app — the one for learning by realistically experiencing situations — is stalled, so I've been sitting here wondering what to do about it.

Other

Decided Saturday morning, went on an overnight trip

We were going "what do we even do this weekend," and then it was "let's just go somewhere overnight" — on Saturday morning. Planned the trip right then, stayed a night, and honestly had a great time.

Cost-wise it wasn't bad either. Even factoring in same-day booking and weekend rates, it was within what I'd accept. There's definitely more room to be smart about it, but we enjoyed it plenty.

Which made me realize: doing a trip like this every month wouldn't actually strain the household budget. So maybe we should be going on trips more aggressively than I thought.

Wrapping up

The temperature swings have my throat a little sore, so first I need to get back to full health.

Starting this month I want to restart the gym, and also get my son into his first extracurricular lesson. Basically, be more active about things.

On work, I want to hurry up and build the setup where AI employees are running even on weekends, roll it out internally, and start collecting feedback.

Ship fast. Fail early. That's what I want to be doing.