Wow – nearly three months have passed since I last wrote a post. I knew it had been a while, but not quite *that* long. The longest silence ever. And this in the same year when I pledged to write 50 posts before 2015 was out. Well, that worked out well then, didn’t it??
To be fair to myself, when I made that pledge back in January I had no idea I’d be returning to full-time employment. And I didn’t predict the impact that would have on my ability (or inclination) to blog.
When I started blogging back in mid 2010, I was freelancing part-time while I worked out what I wanted to do next. Those of you who have been paying attention knew what happened – I went on to do a PhD. Both as a freelancer and PhD student, my time was more flexible, and blogging didn’t necessarily feel like an extracurricular activity that I had to fit around a “day job”. Plus, not being tied to a particular institution made me feel freer to share publicly what I was doing and thinking. Although it’s totally a matter of self-censorship, rather than anything my employer has said to me on the matter, the fact remains that blogging about the day job feels a bit too personal. I can’t easily anonymise my experiences by saying “a client of mine” or using other distancing rhetorical devices.
Furthermore, I’ve found that entering a management role (and a newly created role at that), with all the meetings to attend, staff to manage, policies to develop and strategies to implement that such a role entails, has been very absorbing: temporally, cognitively, emotionally. Frankly, at the end of the week, Netflix has been a much more attractive prospect than spending the weekend reading the literature and blogging.
This doesn’t mean I’m hanging up my blogging spurs just yet. Maybe once I get a bit more settled in the role, my mojo might come back. Maybe I’ll keep the blog posts for reporting on conferences or places I visit on my travels. Or when the inclination to return to the literature comes back. We’ll see. . . .