This week I’m celebrating two anniversaries:

  • this blog became three years old,
  • and I quit smoking one year ago totally.

Blog

A few weeks ago, I got the notification that the domain name registration of this website is ending soon. I just realized that I started my blog almost three years ago. Let’s recap!

Beginning

I wanted a simple blog:

  • easy and does not consume too much time to start with,
  • free or cheap,
  • no need for frontend knowledge,
  • on the other hand: let’s be geek enough to use markdown and git.

The tools I choose are Jekyll, GitHub, and GitHub Pages the free hosting of public Jekyll repositories. I only paid for the domain name, but that was marginal.

Now I know it was crucial to follow KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid): no fancy theme, no images, and no Death Star with the first step.

Form a goal

I set my goals with the blog even before writing one line of code. The plan was written into my personal goals Trello project and tracked monthly.

It helped me a lot to maintain focus, not give up when I had no time, and celebrate the steps and achievements I had through this journey.

Recap and celebration

Three years and 18 posts later, I can confirm that the blog fulfilled its duty:

  • I learned a lot while writing the posts. Forming sentences from my thoughts needs deep knowledge of that particular topic.
  • I went public - at least a part of my life.
  • I could practice technical writing and the English language (with the help of Grammarly).

That was great, and more to come, but let’s stop now for a second and celebrate with a hot green tea!

Smoking

I have wanted to quit smoking since around 2016. I tried and tried multiple times and ways. I was sad, angry, disappointed, and a mixture of these each time I realized I was still smoking.

Mindset change

I formed a goal to define a few questions and visualize them:

  • what do I want,
  • why do I want it,
  • best and worst-case scenario list,
  • and how I would celebrate it once it’s done.

There were ups and downs, but I learned from the failures step by step, and next time I used that experience to avoid some dangerous situations.

For example, I realized that if I’m drunk, I lose focus, so I banned alcohol for 1,5 months to be present and mindful of this important goal of mine.

Also, I needed to deprioritize other goals to have any time and focus for quitting. Especially sleeping!

Conclusion

At the end of the day, it is a project like any other: goals, deadlines, tasks to do, lessons learned, endurance, and finally: the outcome.

Celebration

As I showed before, I assign a celebration for each personal goal.

I like trains, so I bought a ticket for a night train trip to Berlin to meet friends I haven’t seen for a while.

Future plans

I don’t have the resources, and I don’t want to do something bigger with this blog, but I’ll continue occasionally writing cause it’s beneficial for me. I hope it’s good for you too.

See you!