Salesforce consultant in Singapore (LWC, Agentforce). Building NEO-120 on the side, a habit app that starts from your Big Five. Music 🎷 Travel 🚌
Singapore
Joined January 2018
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I'm Dee. Salesforce consultant by day, mostly LWC, integrations and lately Agentforce.
I introspect a lot. While waiting for my onboarding after moving to Singapore, I spent my days in a library and picked up "The Innovation Code" by Jeff DeGraff. Somewhere in those pages, an idea started.
I began experimenting with the IPIP-NEO-120 personality model, reading everything I could about it. That turned into NEO-120, a habit app I'm building solo, with Cursor and Grok Bot as my closest teammates.
Here I share that journey: building, habits, and how differently we're all wired.
A lot of habits don't stop on day one. They stop somewhere in week two, right after one bad day.
If you run anxious, that bad day doesn't stay one day. It turns into "I'm just bad at this," and quitting starts to feel like relief.
More willpower won't fix that. Deciding the bad-day version ahead of time can. Two minutes. One page. One glass of water. It still counts.
You don't have to stop being a worrier to keep a habit. You just need a version of it that survives your worst day.
Switched one of my projects from waterfall to agile halfway through.
Every step is small now, with its own test and a way to roll it back. Go-live needs 5 clean days in a row.
The counter has gone back to zero twice.
How do you decide something's ready to ship?
Accountability partners are one of the most common habit tips out there. For some people they quietly kill the habit.
If you score low on Agreeableness, a friend checking in can start to feel like being managed. And once a habit feels like someone else's rule, part of you wants to win by not doing it.
That's not you being difficult. It's a pattern, and you can build with it.
Keep score against your own last week, not against a buddy.
Write down why you want it, in your own words, and keep it where you'll see it.
If you want someone involved, tell them the result after, not the plan before.
Same habit. You're just the one holding the rules.
Six weeks into marketing my app, I spend less time writing posts and more time in other people's replies.
49 posts on my own feed got six replies between them.
Nearly every real conversation I've had started under someone else's post.
Trait of the week: Openness. Last week I wrote about the high end. The low end deserves a word too.
Score low on Openness and people tell you you're stuck in a rut. Same breakfast, same route, same three albums on repeat.
For habits, that isn't a rut. It's a head start.
A lot of habit advice is written for people who get bored. Mix up your workouts. Try a new recipe every week. Switch apps when it feels stale. If novelty doesn't pull you, all that variety just piles on decisions you never wanted to make.
The version that tends to stick is plain. Same time, same place, same first step, repeated until it's boring, and then repeated some more. Change one thing at a time, and only when you actually feel like it.
You don't need to become more adventurous to build a habit. You need a plan that respects how much you like the familiar.
That's what I'm building NEO-120 around.
I thought people would find my app's site by googling "habit tracker" or "discipline".
The top search that actually brings them in is "ipip", the name of the open personality test it's built on.
Turns out people come for the science first and the habits later.
Most Sunday reset videos look the same.
Clean flat, meal prep, a colour-coded week, all done by 6pm. If you score high on Conscientiousness, that's a lovely Sunday. If you don't, it's three hours of someone else's.
A reset that fits looks different depending on how you're wired:
Low Conscientiousness: fix the one thing Monday-you will trip over. Just that.
High Neuroticism: write Monday's worries down once, then close the notebook.
Low Extraversion: take two quiet hours first. The chores can wait.
High Extraversion: do it with someone. Groceries with a friend count.
High Agreeableness: block one hour for yourself before the asks come in.
The goal's the same, a calmer Monday. The way in isn't.
That's the whole idea behind NEO-120. Know your pattern, then build around it.
Spent an hour this afternoon convinced one of my AI agents was broken.
Two of them had run the same calculation and come back with different numbers. I checked everything I could think of.
Turns out they'd quietly picked different start dates. Neither was wrong. I just never told them which one I meant.
Most of my "bugs" lately are me assuming something was obvious.
High Agreeableness comes with a habit problem nobody mentions.
Your habit is the first thing you give away.
A friend needs a hand moving. Someone wants a quick call. The family chat floats Saturday lunch. Every yes is a kind one, and the run you planned slides to "tomorrow."
That's not weak willpower. Being easy to ask is part of how you're wired. Most habit plans just assume nobody else needs you.
What helps is giving the habit a time and a name you can say out loud. "Can't at 8, I've got a run." If promises to other people are easier for you to keep than promises to yourself, make the habit feel like one of those.
You don't need to start saying no to everyone. Your own plan just needs to sit in the calendar the same way theirs do.
I'm teaching an AI agent to reply on Reddit like me.
The hardest lesson so far isn't tone. It's that echoing someone's own words back at them is the fastest way to sound like a bot.
Real people don't summarize you. They just answer the part that got them.
Turns out that's a good rule for humans too.
Miss one day and the whole week feels ruined. The scoreboard might be the problem.
Miss Monday. Write the week off. Restart next Monday. Quit a few cycles later.
That's not always low discipline. When you count in weeks, one miss is a huge chunk of the scoreboard. So the miss tells a story: this week failed. Then you're back to square one.
A few scoreboard changes that help more than more motivation:
Count in a bigger window. "12 workouts in October" instead of "3 a week."
Write a floor version before you need it. On messy days, that still counts.
Treat "never miss twice" as the real rule. One miss is life.
Drop the word restart. There is no restart. Just the next session.
The all-or-nothing voice sounds like high standards. In practice it just makes you do nothing more often.
I assume everyone around me is honest, has good intentions and will do their part.
Partly because I believe it. Mostly because I'm lazy. Checking every person and every promise takes energy I'd rather not spend.
So I run on trust until something goes wrong. Then I switch on all at once, replay everything and see what I missed.
Does the Big Five have an answer for this? It kind of does. Assuming the best about people is the Trust facet of Agreeableness. Not wanting to double-check is a lower score on the Deliberation side of Conscientiousness. Waking up only when things break is how those two play out together.
It's not a flaw to fix. It's a default worth knowing, so you can decide which things deserve an early check instead of a late scramble.
I took the IPIP-NEO-120 to see my own facets, and that's the trade I found in mine. What's yours?
High Openness is great until your phone has four habit apps and none of them lasted a week.
Curiosity isn't the problem. Starting twelve things is.
One that fits your traits beats three that look exciting.
I built NEO-120 around that: map the Big Five, then pick one Spark that matches how you actually work.
Unpopular opinion: most habit advice is written by high-Conscientiousness people for high-Conscientiousness people.
If streaks and 5am alarms never worked for you, maybe nothing's wrong with you. The advice just wasn't built for you.
Two people both want to move more.
Hand them the same plan (6am, solo run, keep the streak) and one of them sticks with it. The other quits by week two and decides they "lack discipline."
Sometimes it's not discipline. It's Extraversion. One needs people around. One needs nobody watching.
The goal was fine. The way in didn't fit.
A few months ago NEO-120 was just me, a library table in Singapore, and an IPIP-NEO-120 PDF I couldn't stop reading.
Now my mornings start with a standup. Cursor for the code, Grok Bot for everything after it: posts, outreach, figuring out why nobody's clicking.
It's the best team I've worked on. Sure, since the Grok Bot integrations it's burning more tokens, but I'm teaching it as best I can to adapt to the flow. I still decide what ships.
Never assumed building could be this fun when I started working 7 years ago :)
Habit advice loves "just start."
That line works fine when your nervous system treats an unfinished task as a to-do. If you score high on Neuroticism (low Emotional Stability), unfinished stuff often registers as a threat. Your brain keeps scanning it after you've closed the laptop.
So the 5-minute wind-down turns into another open loop. The journal becomes a worry dump. Sleep tips that assume calm just add one more thing you failed at.
What tends to fit better:
- close the day with one named next step, not a blank "figured it out" promise
- park the worry on paper once, then put the paper away
- treat the scan as a pattern, not proof you're broken
You're not failing at rest. You're wired to notice risk first. Work with that, don't shame it.
That's the pattern NEO-120 is built to map.