Best Money Spent

Besides forcing friends to listen to my Spotify playlists, I also love to share new products that I found and urge them to try.

"It's very sweet, but also annoying."

So I figured why not just write posts instead, then I don't need to explain why I am so excited about the products over and over again to different friends, I might reach a broader audience as well.

Amazon Echo Dot 

I wasn't really sold on the idea of smart assistant devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home. It sounds fancy that you can control them with voice commands, but everything they can do can also be done on our phones, no?

Nevertheless, I bought an Amazon Echo Dot when it was on sale. And boy what a surprise that I fell in love with it immediately.

I used to play music on my bluetooth speaker through my phone a lot, like, all the time. Whenever I wanted to change the volume or switch to a different song, which happens pretty often, I had to pick up my phone, unlock it, find the song that I wanted to play and put the phone back to wherever it was. Now I can free my phone, directly play Spotify through my Echo Dot and control everything though voice commands!

Another primary use case is to turn on/off the lights at my place. I have three lights in my bedroom alone and the switches are all at different places. I hated it when I am done reading in the bed and have to get out of the bed just to turn off all the lights before I go to sleep. I bought a few smart plugs which can be connected to Amazon Alexa and now can happily ask Alexa for the favor.

Spotify Premium, Google Photos

I probably trust the cloud storage providers much more than I should. Over these years I've been slowly migrating all sorts of data to the cloud. My phone and computer used to be cluttered with tens of Gigabytes of music and picture files, and nowadays they are almost completely gone from my local devices.

I've tried many different music and photo services - netease music, douban fm, pandora, apple music, flickr, tumblr, to name a few. And I happily settled down with these two - Spotify is amazing in many ways, I particularly like their recommendation algorithms. I also have almost migrated all of my photos, circa 30000 of them, to Google Photos. Obviously they helped save tons of disk space, but most important of all, they gave me this mental clarity, and this confident feeling knowing that all my data are in a safe place.

Storage Baskets

I used to tidy up my place every week or two but it'd rebound very quickly and the room would become messy again. The weekend after reading The Life‑Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, I carefully went through all my belongings, throw away a few bags of unused stuff and donated over 60 clothing items. Then I went to Ikea and bought 10 storage baskets. It was one of the best money spent, I reorganized everything left by category and put them in different labeled baskets. Even though each basket is messy inside, my place became so organized and it never rebounded.

These baskets made my place look better, thus making me feel better, they also saved me a decent amount of time as now I always know where to look for things. 

These recommended items are definitely not for everyone, but I hope this post can more or less inspire readers to think about what values a particular item is bringing to your life and learn from it so that you can make better purchasing choices in the future.