So what happened?

Our February 18^th post was MIA. Our February 22^nd post was also MIA. Then there was the February 25^th post which was also MIA!

Did you miss any of these posts? We sure did!  We had a plan of posting 2 articles every week, and we were doing well, until…the MIAs! We realized that we needed to do something, and so we did.

Before we tell you how we fixed this, let’s look at the series of events that lead to this situation.

• Tatiana was going away for a month holiday (lucky her!). As a result, she planned ahead and drafted several articles that could be posted in her absence.
• In Tatiana’s absence, Trish had every intention to write articles to post in between Tatiana’s (really, I did).
• It turns out that shortly after Tatiana left on holidays, Trish’s schedule became hectic (i.e. her schedule was held hostage by her clients), and she was very grateful to have Tatiana’s articles available to post and keep the TnT site moving forward.
• When Tatiana returned, her schedule also was hijacked by a client! So, she didn’t have time to write anymore posts either! As a result, 2 weeks of MIA posts occurred!

So in true TnT fashion, we tackled the situation head on. We had a decision to make on how to keep our site going!

We sat down and came up with several choices:

• We could go crazy and write several poorly written posts to fill the gap. But this would not have fixed the situation with our hectic schedules (yes, we do have our regular day jobs…for now!); or
• We could forget about it! We could decide not to do anything and just start again where we left off ignoring our schedule problem which wasn’t getting any better; or
• We could rebalance our blogging schedule in order to keep our site up and running. This would also help us manage our other current client schedules.

Our decision was twofold.

First, in order for us to manage our schedules, we reduced the number of articles we post per week down to 1 for the time being. Once our schedules have settled down, then we can go back to our regular routine of posting twice a week.

Second, we also decided to change our approach in writing articles. We meet every Friday (as we always have), and our top priority is to draft a post together that will be scheduled for the following Wednesday. We do this before we being anything else! Only once the article has been drafted, then we continue with other research and work related to our site. “So, where did you think we got the ideas for posts? We’re not doing this on the toilet!” (This is Trish here: those were Tatiana’s words, not mine. Now you can see why I edit!).

The decisions we made were all about leveraging each other’s strengths and learning to accommodate our other lives!

• Trish’s strength has been to edit the posts (and filter Tatiana) before scheduling them for public viewing! (Tatiana actually wanted to say “Trish’s role has been to clean up the garbage that Tatiana writes”. As you can see, I’ve cleaned that up!).
• Tatiana’s strength has been finding topics to write and getting the ideas captured for the posts (Tatiana’s unedited version: “to spew out a lot of garbage”).
• Another of Trish’s strength is to do the technical writing, while adding Tatiana’s sense of humour to the experience.

The whole point of this article is to let you know that if you have issues or problems in a partnership, regardless of what it is, you need to get them resolved right away! As a result of us doing this, we both now have a balanced schedule and are not having feelings of guilt for MIA posts, since we take our commitment to each other and to our site very seriously.

By the way, this was a very therapeutic post to write! We actually laughed and had a lot of fun writing this. And yes, we’re still friends – that was never an issue or up for discussion. Our relationship has always been way beyond that!

Cheers!

P.S. Trish here again: Yes, I still did edit this post after the initial draft version I wrote with Tatiana. But as you can see, I left some of her “style” there for your entertainment.