Why I haven’t been creating content for a while

Quite a few people has been checking in on me recently because I haven’t done any content creation on LinkedIn, YouTube or Dataleaps blog for a while nor have I replied to any technical questions on slack, linkedin, email etc. So I am writing this piece to explain why.

Basically I am not fine. I have been suffering from a chest infection since 3rd Oct. Since then, I spent 2 weeks “powering through”, 2 weeks on sick leave and 2 weeks of annual leave coughing my holidays away. There were multiple days where I coughed so hard that I started to vomit and consecutive days where I was coughing blood.

As you can imagine, if I am coughing blood everyday, my priority is not to do content creation nor carry out free consultating for anyone. My sole priority was to survive.

6 weeks later, I am slowly getting better, I am coughing less than before and I can say a complete sentence without coughing. This experience made me realize 2 things.

1. Your health should come first, which includes physical and mental health, everything else (work, relationships, hobbies, friendships) all comes on top of health. If you are not healthy, everything else will come crashing down. So look after yourself, whatever it takes.

2. I need to cut down on what I do. On a regular basis, people ask me, “How do you do all the things you do? A day job, a YouTube channel, a blog, conferences, meetups, writing a book…” I always reply:” Because I want to, I make time to do these things.” The truth is I do the above things because I want to, but there are a lot of other things I do because I am too nice or I don’t know how to say no.

It shouldn’t take me coughing blood every day to realize this, but there are things that matter and things that don’t. If I have a finite amount of time to live( which I do, and so does everyone else), there are things that I will regret not having done when I leave this world and some other things I wouldn’t have batted an eye on.

I am currently doing an inventory check of everything I do, and I plan to remove everything that is not important to me. Personally, I think it is quite healthy to do a house cleaning of your mental space every now and then and declutter your to-do list. After all, if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

After I finish my mental house cleaning, I will return to content creation with a greater focus and purpose. Stay tuned.