I started writing this thinking I’d write about hobbies. Then I sat there for a bit. And realized I don’t have hobbies. What I have is phases. Obsessions. Things I pick up, vanish into, drop, and come back to three months later like nothing happened.
I used to think designing meant having a clear idea and then just making it. Now it feels more like wandering around in my own head, collecting random pieces, and somehow turning them into something that works.
I like to believe my day starts at 7. In reality, it starts somewhere between 7 and “okay fine, I’m awake now.” First thing is tea. Always.
I used to think designing meant having a clear idea and then just making it. Now it feels more like wandering around in my own head, collecting random pieces, and somehow turning them into something that works. Not always clean. Not always logical. But it gets there.
Before I touch anything, I try to understand the actual project. What is this? Who’s it for? What’s the point of it existing? If I skip this part, everything after just feels off, like something that looks fine but doesn’t mean anything. So I sit with it for a bit. No design yet. Just thinking.
I don’t jump straight to design inspiration. I try to understand the topic first, the context, the space, the people it’s for. I’ve noticed that if I skip this, I end up making something that looks nice but feels empty. The visual stuff comes after. Not before.
When that happens, I don’t question it too much. I just open my tool and make something quickly, 5 to 10 minutes, nothing serious. It’s usually messy. Half-formed. Slightly ugly. But it helps. It gives shape to something before it disappears.
I don’t just pull inspiration from design websites. It’s kind of everywhere. Movies. Anime. Manga. Comics. Random magazines I found somewhere and decided to buy for no real reason. Sometimes it’s just a colour from a scene. Sometimes a layout from a panel. Sometimes just a feeling I want to capture.
I like that part a lot. It makes design feel less like “following rules” and more like connecting things that shouldn’t normally connect.
I already spend a lot of time looking at design work even when I’m not working on anything. So when I actually need inspiration it’s not “where do I go?”, it’s more “which rabbit hole today?”
The usual places first:
And then the deeper ones I keep going back to:
I don’t go there to copy anything. I just scroll. Sometimes I find exactly what I need. Sometimes I find something completely unrelated that helps anyway. And even when nothing clicks, I at least know where to look next time.
For actual photos I can use in projects, Unsplash is my most-used resource by far. It’s copyright-free, the quality is good, and it saves a lot of time when you need something real-looking without having to shoot it yourself. The hero image on this post is from there.
After all that, I go back and actually start designing. Trying things. Deleting things. Bringing them back like I didn’t just delete them two minutes ago. A lot of trial and error. A lot of “this looks right… wait no it doesn’t.”
Sometimes I’ll spend way too long on tiny details, colours not feeling exactly right, spacing being slightly off, thinking something could be just a bit better. And then suddenly it’s been hours.
For context: this website has 16 themes because I couldn’t pick one. Yeah. That happened. And they all actually work. Click any of them right now:
All 16 themes. I built them instead of picking one. Click any square, the whole page updates live.
At some point I show the work to people. Friends, colleagues, teachers. And not just designers. Designers will notice precision. Non-designers will notice confusion. Both matter. We’re not designing for designers at the end of the day.
Even if something is “good enough,” sometimes it just doesn’t feel right. So I try again. Or tweak it. Or rethink it. Not always possible when deadlines exist, but when I can, I push it a bit more.
Because I like learning while working. This website is one of those projects. I didn’t know everything when I started. I just kept learning and adding things as I went. There’s a whole story there, but that’s for another post.
Figma and Photoshop mostly. Both, depending on what the work needs, UI and layout in Figma, compositing and image work in Photoshop. Illustrator when something needs to be vector. After Effects when there’s motion involved.
Outside of those, notes and sketches when an idea shows up before a screen does. And a lot of walking, walking is genuinely a tool at this point. I can’t sit still and think at the same time.
AI image generation comes up occasionally too. Mostly as a reference or starting point, to quickly visualise a direction before committing to it. Not as a final output. But pretending it doesn’t exist would be dishonest, so there it is.
Music is always there. I don’t think I’ve ever designed in silence. This is the main one, around 112 hours. I don’t even open my liked songs anymore because if this playlist is 112 hours, I genuinely don’t want to know how big that one is.
Designing, for me, isn’t a clean process. It’s a mix of understanding, random inspiration, too much scrolling, small frustrations, tiny wins, feedback, and a lot of music.
Some logic. Some instinct. And occasionally, walking around like a confused design dinosaur trying to solve problems that didn’t exist five minutes ago 🦖
But somehow… it works. And I’m okay with that.
I like to believe my day starts at 7. In reality, it starts somewhere between 7 and “okay fine, I’m awake now.”
First thing is tea. Always. Around 7:30. It’s less of a habit and more of a system requirement at this point. Without it, nothing really boots up properly.
Mornings are a bit inconsistent, honestly. Some days I eat breakfast at home like a responsible person. Other days… I just don’t have the energy. On those days, I either grab something on the way to the metro or just accept my fate and leave hungry.
By 9:15, I’m out. Slightly rushed, slightly late, but still within acceptable limits.
The walk to the metro is where my brain starts doing its thing. Music is already playing. It’s always playing. I don’t think I’ve designed anything in silence in a very long time. Walking + music = thinking mode unlocked.
Sometimes I’m thinking about work. Sometimes about random ideas. Sometimes I’m just walking with dramatic background music like I’m the main character in a very low-budget film.
I reach the office around 10.
10:30 is stand-up. Quick, simple, no drama. Just what we did, what we’re doing, what exists, what doesn’t.
Now here’s the thing.
If I didn’t eat anything in the morning, this is the moment where my body starts negotiating aggressively. Like, suddenly nothing matters except food.
So either I’ve already survived on something from the road… or I look at my colleagues and it’s kind of an unspoken agreement.
“Yeah, we should go eat.”
And I go with them. Immediately. No hesitation. Survival first, design later.
Work starts properly after that.
I can’t really go into full detail about everything we do, but it’s a sexual health startup, which makes things interesting in a way I didn’t expect. A lot of it is about how you communicate things clearly without making it awkward or clinical or boring.
Design actually matters a lot more here than I thought it would.
But the bigger thing is the people.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’m learning from everyone. Not in a big, dramatic “mentor changed my life” way. It’s smaller than that. Someone’s workflow. Someone’s feedback style. Someone’s way of thinking about users.
It’s like collecting small pieces from everyone and slowly building your own version of how to work.
And weirdly, there’s no one I feel like I can’t learn from. That’s… rare, I think.
Somewhere in between, lunch happens.
There’s no strict timing. It just appears when it needs to. Sometimes it’s a proper break, sometimes it’s quick, sometimes it turns into random conversations that go way off track.
Then back to work again.
Designing, adjusting, overthinking, fixing, undoing, redoing.
If I get stuck, I walk. A lot. I can’t sit still and think at the same time. So I just move around like a slightly confused but determined design dinosaur trying to solve layout problems 🦖
Music is still playing, by the way. Always.
And sometimes, not every day, but sometimes, around 4pm there’s a window. Work is caught up, the next task hasn’t landed yet, and someone just casually asks if anyone wants to play. It’s a startup. Things are a bit more flexible like that. Nobody makes a big deal of it. You just go, play a round or two, come back. It’s one of those small things that makes the environment feel a lot less stiff than I expected a “real job” to feel.
Around 6:30, we have another check-in.
It’s more of a wrap-up. What got done, what didn’t, what exists in a half-finished state.
After that, I finish whatever is left, mentally close all the open tabs in my head, and leave.
I reach home around 7:30 or 8.
That shift from work to home feels… nice. Quiet in a different way.
I talk to my parents, just normal conversations. Then dinner.
After that, I play games with friends, talk to people, just exist online for a bit.
And then comes my “me time.”
This part is very unstructured. I just… drift.
Scrolling Instagram, watching YouTube, sometimes anime, sometimes a random show, sometimes just lying there with music playing and doing absolutely nothing. It’s not planned. It’s not productive. It just happens.
And I think I need that.
Sleep, however… is a different story.
Never on time.
It’s always “just 10 more minutes,” which somehow turns into a whole extra hour. Or two.
In fact, I’m writing this at 3:57 AM. I have to wake up at 7.
So yeah, today will probably start the same way. Slightly tired, slightly chaotic, tea will fix everything (hopefully), and the cycle continues.
If I had to describe the whole day, it’s not perfect. It’s not overly productive every second.
It’s just a mix of routines, randomness, small learning moments, music constantly playing in the background, and trying to figure things out one day at a time.
Somewhere between tea, deadlines… and very questionable sleep decisions, it all kind of works.
I started writing this thinking I’d write about hobbies. Then I sat there for a bit. And realized I don’t really have hobbies. Not in the “I do this every Tuesday at 7 PM and I have a dedicated corner for it” kind of way. What I have is phases. Obsessions. Things I pick up, vanish into, drop, and come back to three months later like nothing happened.
So this is not really a hobbies post. It is more of a where does the time actually go post. Let’s find out together.
When I was younger, I collected everything. Stamps. Coins. WWE cards. Cricket cards. Full binders, neatly arranged, flipped through like they were important documents. Then Pokemon cards. Before it became what it is now. Before people were reselling packs for rent money. I just liked them.
That habit never really left. It just changed form. Now I collect comics. Manga. Different series. A lot of them. Random ideas. Screenshots of things I will probably never look at again. We don’t need to unpack that last one.
It started with comics. Then manga. Then more manga. Then manhwa. Then light novels. And somewhere in the middle of all that reading, I started getting ideas. Not because I thought I should write. Just because I had things I wanted to see exist somewhere.
It actually relaxes me. Genuinely. I can just sit down and let things out without thinking too much. And then I start thinking too much. Rereading the same paragraph five times. Questioning every word choice like I am submitting something to an awards panel. And then I disappear from it for two days. Then I come back. Reread it. Think okay this is actually kind of nice. And sometimes I post it.
I write novels, actual multi-chapter stories. Here are two of mine:
Okay this one people don’t see coming. I am into origami and paper art. Just sitting with paper and making things. It’s weirdly satisfying. I made a full wearable Iron Man suit out of paper. By hand. That I can wear. Is it practical? No. Did it take forever? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely.
Games take up a lot of my time. Some are just for playing with friends. Valorant. Marvel Rivals. Easy to jump into, easy to get people on. Not my all-time favorites, but accessibility matters. I’d rather play something average with friends than something great alone. (That was almost profound. Moving on.)
Lore-wise, both Genshin Impact and League of Legends are genuinely some of the richest out there. If you watched Arcane, you got a small taste. It goes way deeper. Story-wise, my all-time favorite is Detroit: Become Human. That game does something to you.
Gameplay-wise, nothing touches FromSoftware. Dark Souls. Sekiro. Bloodborne. Elden Ring. That style just clicks for me. And if I had to pick one game that does everything combined, it is Elden Ring. I have completed it seven times. Seven. I think that says everything.
Also: Danganronpa. Still waiting on V4. Quietly. Patiently. Sort of.
I have been watching anime for a long time. Before it was mainstream. FMAB is still my answer if anyone asks for one. But the honest answer is I cannot pick anymore. Code Geass for writing. Fire Force for animation. Horimiya for romance. Fairy Tail when I need comfort. Psycho-Pass when I want to feel unsettled in a good way. Spy x Family for when I need something warm. And A Silent Voice is the movie that made me cry the most out of anything I have ever watched. Nothing comes close.
And then there is JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure by Hirohiko Araki. Each part has a different protagonist, a different era, a different tone. The art style technically changes too but it never feels like a different artist, it feels like Araki evolved his own genre of art. You could not mistake it for anything else no matter which part you are looking at. They all share the same universe and a bloodline running through them across Parts 1 to 6, but each one feels like its own thing entirely. That is the whole thing with JoJo. It keeps reinventing itself while staying unmistakably itself. If I had to pick two: Part 5, Golden Wind, for the aesthetic and Giorno and the gang and that soundtrack. And Part 7, Steel Ball Run. Which is actually a full reboot, a completely separate universe from Parts 1 to 6, set in 1890 America with a cross-country race as the backdrop. The characters are new, the world is new, but the DNA is the same. Gyro and Johnny. The Spin. The way it escalates. 95 chapters that build into something genuinely unlike anything else in manga. And the anime adaptation just started airing on Netflix. Episode 1 is out. I have been waiting for this for years and it feels exactly as magical as I hoped.
There is something about how a mystery is structured that just works. The way information is revealed. The way you are constantly trying to stay one step ahead and usually failing.
It started with Arthur Conan Doyle and the original Sherlock Holmes stories. Something in those that has been impossible to replace for over a hundred years. Then BBC Sherlock. Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. The modern setting works completely. The first three seasons are near perfect. We don’t talk about what happened after.
House MD is the same energy applied to medicine. Every episode is basically a mystery. He is also just Sherlock Holmes with a cane. Monster is one of the most unsettling anime I have watched. Slow, deliberate, and genuinely disturbing in a way that sticks with you. Detective Conan is a different scale entirely, thousands of episodes, one mystery after another. The Apothecary Diaries is smart and elegant in a way I was not expecting. Id: Invaded is weird and clever and does things with its premise that are hard to explain without spoiling. And Hyouka is quiet and restrained and somehow one of the most satisfying things in the genre.
I really like zombie stuff. Games, shows, movies, comics, if there are zombies I have probably consumed it. The Walking Dead. The Last of Us. Resident Evil. World War Z. And it is not really about the zombies. It is about what people become when everything normal is gone. Who they decide to be when nothing is telling them who to be anymore. That is the actually interesting part.
Time travel done well is one of my favourite things in any medium. It can go very wrong very fast. One inconsistency and the whole thing falls apart. But when it is done right it makes you question things you did not expect to question.
Steins;Gate is my favourite. Starts completely unhinged, this guy calling himself Hououin Kyouma running a “Future Gadget Lab” in Akihabara, ending every phone call with El Psy Kongroo like some kind of mad scientist mantra. And then it shifts. Slowly at first, then all at once. The time travel mechanics are airtight, the emotional weight that builds around them is devastating, and by the end it does something to you that is hard to explain without spoiling. It earns everything.
Dark is the gold standard for complexity. Three seasons, multiple timelines across multiple generations, and somehow every single detail connects if you pay attention. I watched the last run entirely in German. Orange does something completely different with the concept, letters from the future, and somehow it is one of the most emotionally heavy things in the genre. Erased had me gone in six episodes. Tokyo Revengers is the loop where everything keeps going wrong and somehow you keep watching anyway. Dr. Who is infinite time travel, infinite consequences, infinite timelines. Predestination you should just watch without knowing anything. Terminator turned the grandfather paradox into an action film. And Loki handled the multiverse better than most of the MCU films actually did.
Time travel as a concept is my favourite fictional device. It can always go bad if you are not careful. And when it goes wrong it really goes wrong. But I love them all.
This one deserves its own section. After school, before anything else, there was Beyblade. We would find a spot, set up the launcher, and go at it. Everyone thought their blade was the strongest. Everyone had their own technique. Everyone was absolutely convinced they could summon their bit beast if they believed hard enough.
I genuinely felt like I could call Pegasus. Not joking. Not even a little. That launcher would pull back and something about the sound of it spinning just felt like something was happening. It did not show up. But we kept going anyway. Those afternoons after school were just different. No phones, no streaming, just blades and very serious trash talk between kids who were way too invested in spinning tops.
This is random but also kind of not. Two of my all-time favorites: Ben 10, Benjamin Kirby Tennyson. Spider-Man, Peter Benjamin Parker. Both named Benjamin. Both voiced by Yuri Lowenthal. I did not plan this. It just happened over years and one day I noticed and now I cannot un-notice it.
Ben 10 was just childhood. Spider-Man started with a comic my dad bought me when I was a kid. Then the movies. Then collecting the comics. Then everything else. Yuri Lowenthal voices a lot of my favourite characters across a lot of different universes. Spider-Man. Yosuke in Persona 4. Simon in Gurren Lagann. Dainsleif in Genshin Impact. Superman and Clark Kent. Iceman from X-Men. Fred from Big Hero 6. The list keeps going. At some point it stops being a coincidence. The man has been following me since I was 5 years old, jumping from universe to universe. At this point I think he is just my narrator and I did not get a say in it.
I have always been pulled towards science and technology. Not in a “I know everything” way. More like curiosity. How things work. Why they work. What could exist next. Sometimes it starts small. How a screen responds instantly. How something invisible like code turns into something real you can actually use. How we went from nothing to all of this. And then it gets bigger. Space. Time. Consciousness. The idea that we are just here somehow, figuring things out slowly.
I also just like making things work. And breaking them. And making them work again in a different way. I did a lot of questionable experiments growing up. Put motors directly into plugs at one point. The kind of thing you look back on and think, okay, that could have gone badly. But at the time I was just curious what would happen. One of the things I actually built that I am proud of was a kind of light show. A cardboard box, some remote control car parts, string fairy lights, and a bunch of random components wired together into a board. It would display different things, cycle through messages. Built entirely from parts I had around with no tutorial, just figuring it out by trying things until they worked. That is honestly how I learn best.
Sometimes I imagine sitting in a room with people like Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla. Not formally. Just talking. Leonardo never stayed in one lane, art and science and engineering all connected in the same mind. Newton would sit quietly and then say something that changes how you see reality. Tesla was probably already thinking about things that did not exist yet. I would not know what to ask first. Maybe just: how did you think?
The idea that keeps coming back to me is the polymath. Someone who does not stay in one thing. Design and technology and writing and science and art and whatever else is interesting. Not mastering all of it. Just being curious across all of it. Connecting things other people keep separate. I am still figuring out what that looks like for me. But staying curious in the same direction feels like the right move.
Earlier this year I did a Taro Sakamoto cosplay from Sakamoto Days and went to Comic Con. It was on my bucket list. And it was genuinely one of the best experiences. Everyone was stopping me for photos. I felt like an actual star for a day, which is a weird and completely fun feeling.
The moment I remember most is a couple who came up and told me I was acting like Sakamoto too. Not just dressed like him. Actually carrying myself like him. I will take that.
I like Star Wars. And at some point I walked into a Lego store with no real plan. I walked out with some Star Wars Lego pieces, a Darth Vader keychain, and a Lego passport. No big reason. No occasion. Just felt like it.
I watch a lot. Harry Potter growing up. Star Wars obviously, and actually my online name Yota came from Yoda. I was around 5, typed it into some game, probably spelled it wrong, and it just stayed. At some point more people started calling me Yota than Sayon. I genuinely cannot tell if I misspelled it on purpose or by accident but at this point it does not matter. The classic superhero era: Tobey Maguire Spider-Man, Blade, X-Men. Hellboy. The Mask. The Truman Show, which hits differently every single rewatch. Saw series and Final Destination. Inception is one of my all-time favorites, the architecture of that story is insane.
And A Silent Voice. That one made me cry the most out of anything I have ever watched. Movie, show, anime, anything. Nothing else comes close. There is something about how it handles guilt and redemption that gets to you in a very specific way. I was not fully prepared for it the first time.
I randomly watch and learn stuff about paradoxes, the universe, quantum mechanics, time, space, weird physics quirks. Not in a structured way. Just whenever I find something interesting. The Bootstrap Paradox. The Fermi Paradox. Black holes. The simulation hypothesis. The nature of time. I will be watching a random video and then two hours later I am deep in a thread about whether free will is real.
It actually feeds directly into my writing. The ideas, the what-if questions, the weird corners of possibility. A lot of the concepts I write about come from these rabbit holes. It is not research exactly. It is more like collecting fuel and not knowing what it is for until the story needs it.
This one I did not fully realize until I saw the numbers. Turns out I listen to 616% more music than the average listener in India. My total: 1 day, 21 hours, 51 minutes. India average: 6 hours, 24 minutes. I don’t have a defense for this. Music is just kind of always on.
All of this. Writing when I feel like it, then not for a while. Reading manga at 2 AM. Folding paper into things that have no business existing. Completing Elden Ring for the seventh time. Watching Dark in German for no reason. Walking into a Lego store and walking out with a passport. Dressing up as Sakamoto and having strangers ask for photos. Falling into YouTube rabbit holes about time paradoxes at midnight. Wiring fairy lights to remote control car parts just to see what happens.
It is not structured. It is not scheduled. It is just drifting between things based on whatever I need that day. And somehow it all connects. Stories. Characters. Worlds. Ideas. Paper. Pixels.
That’s where my time goes when no one’s watching.