Fiancé and I just had a s***show of a week dealing with our new faceless landlords. One problem after the other revealed their ugly little heads each day last week as we “moved into” our new residence.

We either received minimal help or nothing at all. The litmus test of a terrible work culture is where multiple people clearly and definitively don’t care. Each person only cared far enough to say, “That’s not my job”. We learned some lessons about searching for a home that we had thought were locked down.

Continue Reading Can you do anything if I complained to you?

Looking through Twitter, I came across an incredibly well timed post by Greg Storey reflecting on another post by Julia Evans.

Honestly, considering where I’ve been with this blog and if I hadn’t known better, I thought they were both writing to me directly!

Just this week I wrote about how I kept coming back to the word “value” and how difficult it was to identify an audience for my blog as a result. As Julia states, “it’s hard to identify which things you know will be useful to other people!”. Yesterday I decided, at a minimum, I could find value for myself.

Continue Reading Struggle

Throughout the day I had moments, pauses really, where I considered what topic I was going to blog about. I had considered some “useful” evergreen topic like “call instead of email your clients”. Snooze.

I had also considered blogging about something from today’s work like “rebuilding forms for portals”, or “learning to structure product backlog meetings”. However, there’s nothing really of value that I can give anyone writing on those topics through this blog.

At lunch, I received an email for a podcast that I’ve been following. Thought it might be cool to recap on Product Management: What is the job, really? – Christian Idiodi, but I can’t imagine anyone that reads this blog would find value from that.

Continue Reading Decisions

I’ve been struggling for some time to write posts. This blog has suffered from a lack of direction since its inception over two years ago. As a result, I’ve allowed myself to become repeatedly stuck. This post is a first step in attempting something new. I want to try writing a post every day. At the very least, I want to make a solid attempt.

Sure, I’ve really found my voice through blogging. I’m close to hitting 100 posts. It’s been great exploring ideas, constantly wondering, “should I blog on X? Or maybe Y? How about Z?”. Thinking about writing a post has helped me articulate my ideas in a way that I didn’t realize I needed to do.

It’s important for me to feel heard. Lately, I just haven’t been feeling like that’s been true. So, I’m going to try blogging until I feel that I can articulate myself well enough that others want to listen.

Just 15-20 minutes

I recently heard that “anyone can write a blog post in 15-20 minutes”. I would argue that it takes hours upon hours. Although, I add the amount of time it takes for brainstorming, reading, and active listening. Then there’s editing, adding images, writing the accompanying social media post. The entire process of writing one single blog post can seem seriously daunting once you add all the parts.

However, I understand the need to aim for 15-20 minutes. It’s a goal, not a requirement.

I’m currently sitting at a very distracted 30 minutes (45 on editing). However, I’m going to keep scheduling myself 15 minutes at the end of each day. Honestly, it just might be a matter of building a habit that I need to do.

I already go “running” (really terrible jogging) every morning for 30 minutes. I also read a career progressing book for 20-30 minutes a day. Those things have been invaluable over the last year as I try to better my life. Why not blogging every day?

Keeping the idea Focused

As much as I would love to riddle off all the different tasks I’ve worked on and completed in a day (both work and personal), no one wants to read that. I foresee my biggest struggle as keeping each post on point.

Seriously, keeping these blog posts focused and on target is going to be difficult, but I have confidence that I can make it work.

I’m telling myself that “blog posts don’t need to be perfect, they just need to be“.

Finishing Thoughts

I realize I need to build my every day rhetoric repertoire up again. This means I need to build my confidence up in good measure. I need to have the tools to combat regular everyday situations and I can’t do that if I haven’t processed through each day’s events.

If you read along with me, great. I’m glad to have you. Hopefully, you try blogging for yourself if you haven’t already. I’ll try my best to post something every day as I see fit to do so and I would love to hear from you.

All the best.