In 2018, I was a banking reporter in Hong Kong, covering private wealth and financial services. My days were a revolving door of interviews, quarterly earnings, and after-work drinks at the bar downstairs. On paper, I was living the trajectory my parents raised me on. In practice, I couldn't remember the last time I made something just for me.

The turning point wasn't dramatic. There was no rage-quit, no cabin in the woods. I just got a 1.5% bonus after outperforming my entire team, did the maths, and thought: if this is the reward for giving everything, what happens if I give less?

So I scaled back. I closed my laptop at 6pm. And then I had to figure out what to do with all these empty evenings.

I started cooking. Indonesian dishes I grew up eating but never learned to make. Mapo tofu from YouTube tutorials. Recipes that took 30 minutes and left me with something I could share over dinner. Then came calligraphy, bullet journaling, painting in a tiny 3x5 sketchbook during lunch breaks.

None of it was serious. None of it was optimised. I just wanted to feel like myself again.

Bite-Sized Creativity is the book I wish I'd had back then. It's about building a creative life on top of your 9-to-5 (not instead of it), using the small pockets of time you already have. Thirty minutes between dinner and bedtime. A lunch break reframed as a quest. The ten minutes before a meeting where you sketch instead of scroll.

What's inside:

The Corporate Letdown: How I realised that doing the bare minimum at work produced the exact same result, and what I did with all the time I got back.

First Steps into Creativity: The Creativity Ladder: from watching YouTube tutorials to developing your own style, and why replication is an underrated starting point.

Bite-Sized Creativity: How to find creative time in a packed schedule (lunchtime quests, in-between moments, scheduled blocks) and how to manage your creative energy so you don't burn out before you begin.

Making Bite-Sized Creativity Last: The four creative saboteurs that will try to stop you (spoiler: they're all in your head), the plateau that feels like failure but isn't, and how to keep going when the novelty wears off.

Life Outside Creativity: Why physical health, social connection, and rest aren't distractions from your creative life. They're the infrastructure that holds it up.

Creative Seasons: Creativity ebbs and flows. Some seasons are for painting, some for writing, some for lying fallow. The trick is knowing which one you're in and not fighting it.

This book is short. About 10,000 words. It's bite-sized on purpose. I didn't want to write a 300-page manifesto about creativity when the whole point is that you can start with 30 minutes. It includes six original infographics and is drawn entirely from my own experience of building a creative practice while working full-time.

I wrote this for anyone who's ever thought, "I'll be creative when I have more time." You already have the time. You just need a different way of seeing it.