(gentle music)
- Good morning everybody.
I thought I'd bring you along today
for a typical day in my life
as a creative director at a remote tech company.
And this morning, actually,
is not starting out very typical
for over the past few months
it's been way too hot to sit outside lately.
But today it is a balmy, only 17 degrees,
feels probably more at 20 Celsius by the way, obviously.
So I'm having my breakfast and my coffee outside
because I'm gonna start my day
with doing some, like, strategy work.
That is something I find really hard
to make time for in the afternoon.
So I'm gonna make use of this, like,
quieter morning time before all my meetings start
because I live in Spain.
Most of my teams in the US, so yeah,
I don't really have meetings till the afternoon.
So I'm gonna make use of some time outside to do that.
I might need to get some sunglasses.
It's like surprisingly glittery out here.
Anyway, what is also typical about today
is that I started later than I'd like to,
it's like nearly 10:30 now
and I'm only just having breakfast.
Got up, did a little workout on Apple fitness plus.
I don't know, these days,
I always tend to start my mornings
a little later than I'd like,
but I tend to work until like 7:00 or 8:00 PM.
So, you know, make up for it in the end.
(upbeat music)
Because I do work in a different time zone
from most of the team,
I usually start my mornings with, like,
a check-in in Slack and Basecamp
catching up on anything that happened when, like,
after I've signed off for the day yesterday.
So yeah, that's what I'm doing right now.
And then I'm going to stop procrastinating
and get into strategy stuff I was talking about.
I have a friend with me now too.
My cat was meowing to come outside.
And so, this is Seb, and he's on a harness
because we live on the eighth floor
and I am very nervous about them,
either of the cats jumping up on the ledge of the terrace.
And so this is what we do.
Yes, I am a crazy cat lady, but he's having a good time.
(upbeat music)
Wow. Okay, so the sun came out.
It is now getting too hot out here.
So I'm about to take the work back inside again.
(upbeat music)
Please excuse the vacuum cleaner
that you can hear running in the background.
The Neato is doing its thing,
but it's been a productive day so far.
It's about 15 minutes until I start
entering into meetings for the afternoon
and I've written up,
it's turned out to be, like, a four page document,
strategy document, with, like, a three pillar approach
of what we need to do to level up our brand.
I've sort of been documenting where we are now
and where we need to get to
and it's just been really good to take this time
to sit down and think this through.
My next step from here is to basically
map the path from that,
where we are and where we need to get to.
And we use a framework at ConvertKit
a lot of the time called now, next, later.
It's really good because it means that you're planning,
like, what are the things we need to do
in the immediate future to get this started?
What happens next after those immediate things
have been taken care of?
And what can we address later on?
It's sort of a way of prioritizing
the order of the things you're gonna work in.
And from there you can start setting due dates and things,
but it's sort of a way to group things
into immediate future, slightly further out
and further out from that without having set dates,
when everything, right at the start, so yeah.
So that is my next step.
I'm gonna start drafting those,
but I won't get that part finished today.
I have a one-on-one with my manager,
our VP of Growth coming up soon,
so I'll get to talk some things through with him.
I've got a meeting with the designer on my team.
What other meetings do I have this afternoon?
Our growth leadership meeting.
One-on-one with another person on my team.
It's a meeting heavy afternoon, can't you tell?
And then to end my day, I'm recording two podcasts.
One is a live show that I host
as part of my job at ConvertKit.
It's called "The future belongs to creators"
and we record it live on YouTube every Wednesday.
And then the second one is an episode
of my own show "Inside Marketing Design."
I'm going to be talking to Tatiana
who works at Stripe on marketing design there
and, like, on their web stuff.
So I'm very much looking forward to that
because, you know, I've been a huge fan of Stripe
and their design stuff for a long time.
So you should subscribe to,
wait which side is it?
I think it's going to be on the side,
the card to the Inside Marketing Design YouTube channel,
if you wanna see the episode when it comes out.
But yeah, that is gonna be my afternoon.
So right now, honestly,
I think I'm going to go and just, like,
put a bit of makeup on my face.
I don't normally bother getting like, you know,
done up for the day and doing my hair and things.
But when I'm recording an interview, I do like to look nice.
I don't know. (laughs)
(upbeat music)
Okay, meeting time.
(upbeat music)
Oh my gosh, I am tired now.
That was like, yeah, a lot of meetings
and then recording two podcasts back to back.
I feel like I have no more energy.
Hence why we just ordered Five Guys for dinner.
I'm not coming across great in this vlog
in terms of the food I eat, am I?
You haven't seen a whole lot of vegetables in my diet today.
I wish I could say this is super rare, but yeah,
it's maybe not as rare as I would like it to be.
(laughs)
I am just doing one last go through of Slack
and making sure that there's nothing
anyone's waiting on me for.
I really, I don't think I need to be doing this
at this time.
It is 9:00 PM right now.
But I like to just check in
after I've taken a bit of time out
to do something for a side project,
which is what recording that last podcast episode was.
Yeah. But it looks like everything's fine.
So right now I'm going to close down my computer
and this is the end of my workday.
We're gonna wait for Five Guys to arrive
and yeah, eat dinner, probably watch something on Netflix.
That's usually, like, an evening activity.
Although lately I have been spending a bunch of time
on my computer planning a trip to Iceland.
So that's been a fun late evening activity,
just been doing a bunch of research
and planning a trip, and so.
And it was just nice to get back
to be able to do that, you know.
Nora wants to get out of the office.
She's ready to be done for the day.
(laughs)
Thanks for watching this vlog.
I hope it was interesting to see, like,
just a full work day in my life as creative director.
Basically, you just saw me sit at my computer a lot
because that's what I do usually.
My day today didn't involve any hands-on design time
and that is fairly common these days.
I did have a meeting with the designer on my team,
and we talked about his work.
But yeah, that is just the reality
of being a creative director,
is I'm not always on the tools all the time,
although I will be doing some design tomorrow.
All right, I'm gonna end this here.
Thank you for watching.
Please subscribe, if you wanna see more vlogs
and videos about life as a designer.
I share lots of tips for progressing in your design career
and, like, improving your design process.
I'm really passionate about helping
other people out with things like that.
So, yeah. Subscribe if you wanna stick around
and I will see you in the next video.
Bye.
(funky music)