Life is generous for surprises of all flavors …

That’s how the last Getting back to blogging post starts. It was published on Feb 20th, 2022. On that day I was sure the storm is over and had no idea about upcoming challenges. 

Russia-Ukraine conflict which started on Feb 24th, 2022 has put many lives under stress test, including my own. I don’t want to talk or write about the conflict because I don’t know a lot, and neither I have possibility to validate any of the controversy communicated in the news. For now, I just want to acknowledge that this big change triggered another chain of events in my life where I had to make many choices and take actions. As a result, my fragile blogging beginning was dropped and abandoned, again. 

Luckily, it wasn’t forgotten completely. I was thinking about writing from time to time, and even had some interesting ideas for blog posts, but I didn’t have enough courage, energy and time to write. I even felt guilty sometimes and ashamed of not writing anything because I was aware of broken commitment to publish a post per week.

So here goes an interesting leadership lesson I learned after initial shock had passed.  Conscious reset of priorities is necessary at extreme conditions like this, or when the context you operate within changes significantly. I found that the following steps are important for proper reset: 

1. Acknowledge the changes.
2. Start/stop/continue. Figure out what you should start doing, continue doing, and stop doing.
3. Make priorities for things left on your plate explicit. Any prioritization technique would work.
4. Accept it and communicate to others involved.

I did it for many things at my job and in my life to some extent, but definitely I could do better with blogging. Today I realize that blogging wasn’t the top priority at the moment, but I didn’t accept it then, didn’t give myself permission not to write, and haven’t communicated about it anywhere. 

Now, it’s almost four months passed. New lessons learned, I moved to another country, I feel myself in a much better position today, and ready to give another try to blog. The little blogger within me was knocked out, but luckily there is no referee who would count to ten and stop the fight. Luckily, I can start blogging again.

It was great to go back and reread blogging experiment post to remind myself those five why’s behind this blog:

1. I got curious about the blogging world and the technology driving it. There are lots of tools and practices helping people to deliver useful content to the audience and I’d like to learn them.

2. Automattic creates lots of great products but there is always room for improvement, so by using our own products as a customer I’ll be able to provide valuable feedback to internal teams and make publishing on the web even better.

3. I want to join the community of bloggers and hopefully make some new connections across the globe.

4. Share my knowledge, thoughts, and experiences with readers at the highest quality I’m able to provide.

5. I’m curious how far I can get in the long term doing baby steps every single day.

Blogging experiment post