On Working and Blogging

I created this blog a little more than 2 years ago, when I was on parental leave to take care of my second child. Unlike my firstborn, this little one would eat and sleep well without any major drama which gave me enough time to do other things besides household chores. A year later  I went back to work, in a new department and a new role, and I realized that my urge to write had reduced significantly.

Here are some reasons why.

Needing distance to reflect

While on parental leave, I had the time and the necessary distance to think about what had happened throughout my short career. I was no longer in the middle of events, so I had a clearer picture of what went right and what went wrong. The blogs were my retrospectives of what I had learned and observed over the years. Going back to work meant that I experienced new things, but I no longer had that clarity of completed outcomes that I could document. So nowadays, since things I hold to be true one day I might find irrelevant the next, it is very hard for me to write down my lessons learned.

Working when work is over

During the work hours, most of the time I am executing tasks that require a reaction from my side. There are things that simply need to be done, emails to be answered and meetings to attend. Not that there is no value in these things, but it rarely feels like creative work. So, when – finally – office hours are over, I find the peace and quiet to do all the creative and interesting stuff around my project that I don’t have time for during the day. Especially now that the work laptop is always on my desk, it just seems more natural to do actual work than to create content of my own.

There is life after work

Being at home and taking care of the kids is a lot of work but it is not “work” work. Writing blog posts about my experiences from my job was the only thing I did during that time that required a different level of concentration than my day-to-day errands. But now, even if I still work part-time, I find myself feeling mentally exhausted at the end of the day, so doing one more thing that requires my focus  just seems too much. Watching TV, playing games or just simply doing nothing when the day is over feels like a pretty good plan to me right now.

So, the natural question here is, why am I writing this blog post? I still find joy in doing it. I feel no obligation to “produce” something every so often. It also doesn’t need to be perfect as I’ve come to embrace my stupidity in most new things I try. Nowadays, it’s about trying to formulate half decent questions, and if something comes out of it, note it down. And that will do for now.