If you have read my articles for past few months or weeks you might have noticed that I have been posting more guest posts lately. The reason behind this is the obvious, the pressure of day job!
I work for a financial company, developing their software applications. Every year we undertake slew of projects involving existing application enhancements along with occasional system overhauling projects. Typically projects which requires a system overhaul runs throughout the year and comes to completion by October/November time frame. As the rollout day nears our work pressure increases in terms of testing and release activities.
Since in my capacity as subject matter expert I get involved in many such large projects, every year around this time my phone rings round the clock with co workers and developers asking for advice and communicating the status reports.
The saga this year started during last week of September and is expected to continue till mid November. I don’t get enough time to write these days. I am grateful to all those who have submitted their guest posts and it is because of them that I still am a good boy in my leader’s eyes (after all that is most important). I hope my readers are not too disappointed either.
Last Saturday night, after thinking through a post idea, I almost had the skeleton of a new post figured out. Before I sat on writing, my wife threatened to stop talking if I didn’t watch a DVD she brought specially for me from the library, it was about a Chinese martial art movie (my favorite) which ran for more than 2 hours.
On Sunday morning when I again started writing the post, a critical issue got reported during testing of a project at work. Yes, people at offshore location work on Sundays when there is a war against the timeline. I had to rush in to office immediately and after series of calls and meetings a solution is reached. All it ensured was I didn’t write more than 200 words for this blog throughout the weekend.
Not only on writing new articles, I am struggling to keep up with reading and commenting schedule. My Alexa rank was once slightly higher than 52K before backtracking to 55K in last one week.
Now at 1 AM in the night with only 5 more hours to start a new day, I can’t think of writing on a new finance topic or completing the unfinished one. I will complete that post pretty soon, well, I hope so..
Last week I completed my 100th post at OCAAT, planning for a look back article. I will write about September blog statistics pretty soon. A lot to talk about on this aspect. If you haven’t noticed my RSS subscriber count and Facebook fan count, please check the right side panel. I have interesting things to tell about the growth.
Sad to say but, I didn’t win the Plutus award for ‘Best new personal finance blog’ even though I was in the race for the finals. Congratulations to Paula @ Afford Anything for winning that prestigious award. A big high-five to Retire by 40 for winning for the ‘Best retirement blog’ category, great work Joe! You made yakezie proud.
I have used busy bee picture in great anticipation that it will bring a lot of traffic through image search. The picture I used on a post about writing better emails brings good traffic each day, as it’s listed on first row in Google image search with “emails” as the phrase…every bit counts.
The one thing that I missed badly is financial blogger conference, a meet up of personal finance bloggers. I missed a golden opportunity to meet my idols in blogging. I missed a chance to see and talk to fellow Yakezies. Eagerly waiting for the next year’s edition.
I know exactly what you are going through. September 15th was my deadline for business tax extensions, October 15th is the deadline for personal tax extensions, and October 31st is the deadline for payroll tax returns. It’s been hard to balance everything, but with a lot of effort (and a lack of sleep) I’ve been able to keep writing and moving forward with everything. Although, I did miss a few carnival deadlines last week, which was pretty stupid since that’s the easiest thing I have to do on my calendar
we are going through the same phase. I think I read somewhere that you get over time, good for you. I am not privileged that way.
I get paid straight time for anything over 40 hours, but that’s standard practice (in my experience) for CPA firms. It’s really not that big of a benefit when the pay isn’t up to standard to begin with, though. But I can’t complain; I have a job and can pay all my bills on time, so I just have to suck it up for now.
Thanks for the mention! I am swamped these days too. The day job, baby, blog, cooking, errands, etc… I am exhausted! Hopefully things will calm down a bit in the Fall, but…
I will get respite by November. I want to come back to 5 posts a week schedule soon.
Hang in there SB. I’m feeling swamped right now also, and I don’t even have to deal with a needy staff or a busy job. Think of how far you have come and set some exciting goals for 2012.
40 hours after publishing the article I finally got time to respond to every ones comments..good idea Hunter about setting goals
Hang in there, things will quiet down again.
Yes Andrea it will for sure, but another month it is
Don’t worry we will still be here when you are back to post again 🙂
I feel the same way at the beginning of the quarter in my job so I know how it is.
Thanks Latisha! appreciate this
Good luck OCAAT! As FSYA said, we will be here when you get back. 🙂 Don’t worry.
Thank you these comments are blogger’s fuel