It Is That Time Of The Year, A Personal Talk

 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.