Today marks my 53^rd blog and the one year anniversary of this blog!

On the 7th July, 2023, I quit my job as a school teacher on the north east coast of Tasmania. It had been an extremely intense year and a half where I had spent so much time doing reflection as opposed to being holistically reflective. I knew what I was in for when I signed up to Teach For Australia’s Leadership Development Program, but I didn’t expect my experience within it to be as tiring as it was.

It provided me with a snapshot into the lives of teachers around the world. Although I was under different circumstances to most (studying a Masters in Teaching whilst teaching 0.8FTE simultaneously), it highlighted the countless hours of effort, work, and energy that teachers put in every day. And, yes, I’m including the weekend in ‘every day’ because you spend so much of your time planning, especially in the first few years.

After I quit, I knew that I would initially take some mental downtime to allow my brain to relax and, inevitably, allow my body to get sick as it was in ‘go’ mode for the past year and a half. That said, I know my brain and I wanted to start this blog as a project for me to focus my energies on. I love Excel, Maths, Economics, and problem solving, but I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted this blog to be about.

About 2 months prior to leaving my job, I had started keeping a journal. My first entry was an ‘intention’ page where I set out my intentions for this journal. Here’s a picture of it:

If you were to read my first blog, you’d be able to see the strong correlation between the two. Thing is, I had never really kept a journal. I felt as though my brain wasn’t wired that way. When I’m unsure how to approach something, I get back to my life skills and university education – think about the project and draw out a plan. This is how I came to my intentions.

As you read the first few, I’m definitely finding my feet. There’s quite a theoretical foundation to it, unsurprisingly as for the previous 1.5 years I essentially had a piece of university assessment due every 2 weeks. I knew that it wouldn’t last forever, but I was unsure of how to write. As I had discovered YouTubers over the years, I’d seen how their approach to their content had developed and they had, seemingly, found their groove. I was attempting to develop mine, but always waited for it to naturally present itself.

Another reason for keeping this blog was a way to signal to prospective employers the way my brain processes information and how I can finish projects. It just so happens that I wanted to develop more skills in Excel whilst presenting that information. I never had the intention of actively promoting or advertising this blog, but it’s amazing the impact that it had on my mental state over time.

I set myself the goal of producing one blog post a week. I believe there was one week where I was overdue by a few days, but I made up for it (to myself) by having another post ready by that following Monday. For some reason, this time limit presented my brain with that expectation. An expectation of not letting someone down. Who, though? You. The reader. The follower. The one who desires this. Isn’t that an interesting thought given that I’m not, really, writing this for anyone. At least not within an actual time constraint? I believe that I have 3 people who are following me at this point, but if my statistics insights are accurate, I would describe these people as Zombie followers (people who are there, but are not active/viewing).

Over the course of the rest of the year, I realised how tired I was becoming. I put it down to a mixture of a few things: my body and mind coming to terms with no longer teaching, building stress around not finding employment in the area that I felt strongest, and feeling like I had to present impeccable material on a weekly basis. Even though I thoroughly enjoyed the process of creating a new idea, building the solution, then presenting it in a manner (that I thought) an audience would understand, I was definitely feeling the time pressure.

During some months, it felt as though I was on autopilot mode and didn’t feel like I could properly read and reflect on what I had written. If I read back through many of those posts, I am more than certain that I would come across some spelling, formatting, and grammatical mistakes in them. However, I wanted to push myself to complete the content for the week so that I was content for the week. Honestly, I’m glad that I stuck it out because I was able to push through those autopilot modes and was able to create something useful (for at least myself anyways).

There have been more than a few instances where I have been able to utilise some of the techniques and solutions that I have developed over the past year. If you’ve been following the blog, or have checked out my resume, I have been working a few different jobs over the past year. I have been able to use some of those Excel/Google Sheets solutions, specifically in projects that involve: time scheduling (how to optimise workers around costs), implement conditional probabilities of outcomes and decisions that arise from these probabilities, develop an Excel function to provide decisions based on numerical analysis, and provide inputs to a solution that could be solved using a SARIMA model.

I’m not sure if I’ve said it in a previous post, but I keep something that my Mum told me when I was 8 or so close to the heart. At best I’m paraphrasing, but she once said to me, “there’s no harm in having learned something. You never know when you’ll use that bit of knowledge. When you’re 25, you’ll be in a situation and all of a sudden you’ll remember it and know how to use it.” Truly some insightful and wise words.

I remember this has played out a fair few times in my life, but one such instance was when I was a Customer Support Office and I decided, on my break, to learn about binary tables. A colleague looked at me, giggled, and asked, “why would you ever need to know that?” I remember sitting in a computer science lecture, about 3 years later, as the lecturer started talking through the logic of those tables and thinking back to that brief interaction. I see this past year like that interaction — I have been able to build up my skills, albeit quite selective, yet in a manner that has allowed me to reference these previous understandings and apply them to new contexts.

If you’ve been with me from the beginning, thank you. I truly appreciate your time. If this is the first thing that you’ve read of mine, I appreciate your time. It seems like there’s a conception that everyone has a story to tell and that they deserve to be heard. I’m not commenting on that, but I am just stating how appreciative I am that someone has taken time to read and digest the things that I have experienced and written.