So… I Decided to Start a Blog.
An introduction to me (Tracy) and why I decided to start writing a blog. (November 2020)
If there is anything 2020 has taught us, it’s that we need to learn to change, adapt and overcome. Sometimes quite quickly. Like most of you, I was living my life, as were my wife and kids. Then suddenly, BOOM! You’re working from home now. Oh, and by the way, your kids are being sent home to do complete their schooling virtually now too. We got through several months doing okay… muddling through with each other. Enjoying daily walks and lunches together, and then summer rolled in. No routine for the kids, but I still had to work. And then my other half got sent home to work too. Now, we had two adults working from home (a home we had just moved into only months earlier), and now our sunroom was a double work-from-home office.
Did I also mention that I’m an adult learner? While all of this change was going on, I was still taking University classes, working toward my Bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems. To say we had a lot on our plates was an understatement. Then being cut off, essentially, from what little we had in the way of support systems was a shock to the system too (for the kids as well as the adults). They had no break from us, and we had no break from them. This was the first time in our lives that we had all been together 24/7, and it was a lot. Like most of you, we struggled. Both individually, and as a family unit.
When I was younger, I had dreams of being a writer. I just never knew what to write about. I enjoyed assignments in school, but I was usually directed on what to write about. I was often stifled when it came to being creative and coming up with my own ideas. I don’t think I was very good at nurturing that creative part of my brain. For me, it was all about academics and getting good grades. I was fabulous at coloring, and enjoyed it very much, but I what I was truly good at was staying within the lines that other people had laid out. I think I’m at the point now, where I’m ready to (figuratively, and maybe even literally) draw my own lines, and set my own course.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve started using an iPad. I wanted one so very badly, but once I got it, other than playing games on it, I wasn’t sure what else to use it for. I started doing some coloring on it, and I found myself looking for tools other than the cheap stylus’s that were available almost everywhere. They did the job, but very poorly, and it wasn’t very engaging. I started looking for different ways that I could draw or write on my iPad. I went through the 53 Pencil, the Adonit Jot, the Adonit Pro, and the Adonit Snap… and in the end, I didn’t really care for the feel of any of them. I thought that the time, I wish I could write reviews on these, so that other people would know their pros and cons before going through what I did. This sent me down another rabbit hole to try to find more ways to use that new Apple Pencil.
What this introduction all boils down to is that I’ve done a lot of researching over the past couple of years. I was looking for books, programs, tools to help me be a more organized and productive individual on both a personal and professional level. On that journey, I’ve found a lot of things that work well for me, and a lot of things that didn’t work quite as I had expected. Then there were other things that just didn’t work at all. I figured, if I was going through that process, there have got to be others out there going through something similar! My thought was to save you all some of that research, and share what I’ve learned with you. To help you get to that “better place” sooner, rather than later.
