(upbeat music)
- Good morning, everyone
from this badly lit kitchen of mine.
Just making some coffee to get my day started,
I'm actually using the beans that arrived for me
in a parcel, in the last vlog.
It's a company started by another YouTuber
and they're actually pretty good.
It's odd, they're the kind of beans
where, and actually I don't know if this is like a thing
in other coffee beans,
but when they're really hot,
there's actually not a lot of flavor
and you kind of have to let the coffee cool a little bit
for all the flavor to come out.
I don't know, that's what I've found, it's kind of odd,
but it does taste nice.
I just wanted to say thank you
for all of the lovely feedback on my last vlog,
I honestly, I know I said in that vlog
that I started a few and never uploaded them,
so I ended up having, like, a big gap
where I think the vlog before that went up in June.
And I've had people saying on Twitter, like, how much
oh, they miss when I used to upload vlogs
and in my mind, I still make vlogs, if that makes sense.
But I'm actually, you know,
obviously I'm not publishing the content
to make other people know that
and so I'm trying to get back into the habit of it,
hence doing this vlog today.
It's been a really good week,
I know I started the last vlog off talking about
how the pandemic was really getting to me lately
and how I was trying to push through that.
And I think it was actually in that vlog
that I was saying, you know,
today was actually a really good day.
Since then, I've had a string of really good work days
and that's been really awesome,
I feel like, super inspired by my work again
and it just goes to show how much you need to take a break
you know, in order to get back to that sometimes.
At work at the moment we have, there's so much to do
that's it on that level of like,
just on the brink of chaos,
which is, I feel like, where I thrive
because there's enough to do
that I can't let myself get distracted too much, you know?
When deadlines are a bit looser and things are a bit calmer
it's really easy for me to just be like eh,
I can take a break
and watch a YouTube video now sort of thing,
or like dawdle on stuff.
But when you've got a lot to do,
you're forced to make very fast decisions
and go with your gut and make things happen.
And that's what I've been doing the past couple of weeks,
which has been really cool.
Come on, coffee, brew, brew, brew, brew.
I have a meeting right now actually.
I'm meant to be with Hollie, our freelance designer
who works with us on a lot of projects at ConvertKit.
So sorry, Hollie if you're watching this
that I am late to making my coffee.
I did some editing this morning,
did a workout and so my workday
is starting a little bit later.
Hollie actually has a channel of her own
that I'm gonna link to in the description
because you should definitely check it out.
She vlogs like days in her studio.
She is like a brand strategist,
as well as a designer.
And so yeah, if you like my blogs,
I think you will really like hers.
My favorite mug. (dinging)
(upbeat music)
Okay, let's leave this bad lighting
and head to my meeting.
This is Hollie, everyone.
(chuckling)
- Hi.
- We've just been chatting about some fun
like demo content we're making for ConvertKit.
It's really cool, yeah.
Thanks for staying up late
to talk to me, Hollie. (chuckling)
- It's all right, it's 8:30.
- Yeah, not too late for you then, all right.
Have a good day, bye.
- You too.
- Okay, meeting out the way
and my usual morning catch-up with everything is done,
so that's good.
Hollie and I are working, I think I said just before,
but we're working on some demo content.
So we wanna set up like some ConvertKit accounts
for some personas, I guess would be the right word to use.
Basically I wanna make sure all of our demo content
is really indicative of the types of creatives
who use ConvertKit and who we wanna be using ConvertKit.
So whenever I make like an example landing page
or an example email template or things like that,
that's always what I'm thinking about.
And so to save us
from coming up with new a new example every time,
Hollie's created a few create an archetype personas.
For us with their own brands and things like that
and that's what I'm gonna be using for demo content.
I love always using real examples whenever possible
on our home page at the moment.
It features real landing pages used
by the real creatives
that you see next to them in the photos,
which I think it really great
and I always wanna do that.
But not everyone is comfortable
with sharing absolutely everything inside their account,
like all of their subscriber details
and what they've earned through selling products
and things like that.
So when we need to show screenshots of our products
to give people an idea of what the inside of it looks like,
we need some dummy content
and I want their dummy content
to be useful and to actually like give people an idea
of the different ways in which you can use ConvertKit.
So yeah, that's our plan.
It's gonna be a big job.
I'm gonna try and get the product team
or engineering team involved
to set the account up
so that it always has like data flowing through it
and things looks good in screenshots.
Yeah, and keep you updated as I go with that.
It's honestly gonna be a day.
I don't think I'm gonna be designing anything today.
Not in the current plan anyway.
Sometimes you have these days.
More and more honestly where it's a day of planning
and strategizing or writing, for example.
Today, as well as working on the next step
of this demo content project
now that I had the meeting with Hollie,
I'm gonna be figuring out a plan
for personalization on a site.
We have been testing out a tool called Proof.
I actually interviewed Proof's designer, Brent Palmer,
as part of Inside Marketing Design.
So if you wanna go listen to that episode,
I will link it on a card.
But yeah, we at ConvertKit use the product
to run like personalization tests on our website.
So I need to come up with a plan
of exactly how we're gonna get the most value out
of this tool that we've signed up for
and yeah, put a plan in place
for some things that we can do.
Hopefully some quick wins,
although I hate that term.
But yeah, maybe low-touch is a better way
to describe what I'm attempting to do with it first off.
My plan is to plan a lot of things
and then there's a bunch of meetings
that I have later on in the day.
Now that I'm thinking about it,
I don't know why I chose to vlog today,
not a day where I'm gonna be doing something
more aesthetically pleasing
to show you on screen recordings throughout the day.
But hey, this is life, right?
And I'm trying to build that habit
of vlogging back up again.
Oh, someone just bought my font. That's exciting.
- [Kids] Yay!
- Honestly, I get a smile like that
every time I see an email that says new font purchase,
which is telling me that I've had a new order
through of my font.
It's very exciting.
Thank you, Bryan who just bought a copy of Grayscale.
If you wanna get your own copy of it
and make me smile too,
you can head to charlimarie.store.
And pick up my font.
I am hoping to move on to honestly working on a second font
as another project after I wrap up all the editing
and stuff Inside Marketing Design.
Just because it is so fun to see my font out in the world
when it's in use
and to get like random sales coming through
on a Thursday, Thursday morning.
It's yeah, it's really fun to be having this
as like a source of passive income.
And like as a creative project too.
So yeah, I think I'm gonna get
to work on a second one very soon.
Anyway, enough of all of that.
Let's get into some work for the day,
which will be a not very aesthetically pleasing screencast
of me writing in a document.
(lively music)
(whirring)
Hi buddy.
(lively music)
I just had lunch.
I forgot to blog any of it
but that's what I did
and then I had myself a afternoon espresso.
I have about an hour now,
like almost exactly an hour
until my next meeting of the day,
I was gonna say first meeting
but I had one with Hollie this morning.
I don't normally have meetings in the morning, you see,
because most of the team is based in the US.
So morning meetings are pretty rare for me.
But yeah, meeting in about an hour,
meet a new team member
and talk about some data stuff.
And an hour is always a good like time box for me
to get something done.
So I think that I'm going to set myself the next hour
to get as far as I can with this plan
for using Proof and personalization.
So let's set about doing that.
(upbeat music)
Good morning, people.
It is now Friday.
I didn't end the vlog yesterday
so I thought I'd keep it going today.
It just seems to be a trend, doesn't it?
Last night I went to the supermarket.
That was like my fun outing for the day.
That's honestly the only place I seem to go these days.
Although, over the weekend, last weekend,
we did go and buy some plants.
We got this guy here.
I think that this little tree part
of it did not survive the repotting but that's okay
because these ones are looking okay.
We also have, over here,
this new snake plant.
I bought this lamp too,
which I absolutely love.
I think it's really pretty.
It was also half price,
so that's always nice.
And then I got a plant stand for it
because I just love the look of a wooden plant stand
with a white pot.
This is actually just still sitting in its pot
that it came in thought,
so I need to properly plant that this weekend.
I always had the pilot palm in my office
that you've seen before
but that was really the only plant we had inside the house
'cause we traveled so much.
But now that we don't travel,
I guess this is our way of like accepting the fact
that we're gonna be home for a while.
I'm thinking it might be nice
to honestly make this little bit here
underneath like a chin bench,
filled with plants too
because this is way too low to actually sit at.
It's too low for a bar stool.
I don't know if you can actually tell.
Too high for like a regular chair though.
So it's kind of a little bit useless.
So having plants there could be really nice.
While we're talking about plants,
let me also come outside
and show you a chili plant
that I got, whoa, it is bright out here,
and also very, very hot.
I got this guy from MArk's mum
when we went to visit last.
She let me take this home with me, which is cool.
And we've got loads of chilis that are turning red
and gonna be edible, which is very exciting.
These little chilis are very hot.
Very tasty to make meals nice.
It's too hot to stay out here much longer,
that's for sure.
Let's go back inside into the nice air conditioning.
I can't remember what I was doing
when I picked up this camera
and why I left my office.
I don't know.
Nope, nope, it's gone.
Washed my hair this morning.
That's why it's looking a little bit odd.
I need to redye it too
because basically what happens is my purple hair just fades
after a while and it becomes this sort
of like there's pinky parts under there.
It's a bit green in places.
I don't know, I just go with it.
Yesterday, like I said,
I did mostly like writing and stuff was my day.
Yeah, planning things.
Writing up posts.
That's kind of what today is turning to to be as well.
I've had in, I can't remember if I've talked
about this yesterday but we are doing a second edition
of the I'm a Blogger book.
It's gonna be called I Am A Creative this time
'cause we've kind of expanded our reach at ConvertKit.
We're not just for bloggers anymore.
But I designed this version of the book
and it was a great experience,
glad that I did it.
Do not want to do it again though
and don't really have time to do it again
with everything else that I have on my plate.
So we're hiring a designer for the second edition.
So I've had some quotes through from designers
whose work that I like the look of.
Now we have to like talk about that as a team
and decide who we're gonna go with.
So yes, that's what I have to write up right now.
I will say that if you are wanting
to get into remote work
or wanting to be successful with remote work,
writing is a very important skill for you to focus on
because it is just used so much
and being able to write clearly,
communicate your thoughts efficiently
is just, (chuckling) it's really ironic
that I'm saying this
and not being able to form the sentence correctly.
But it's a great skill to have for a remote company.
Decisions are often made
and information is shared through asynchronous methods.
Like you're not always on a call hearing an update,
you're reading an update
and if you need to give an update,
it's most likely you're gonna be having
to write up a post about it
instead of like saying it on a call.
You wanna be respectful of everybody's time
and make sure that the posts you're writing up
are as succinct and as like clear as possible
so that there's no confusion.
I guess that's my tip for this vlog
is if you're wanting to get into remote work,
focus on your writing skills,
not matter what role you're in.
Writing skills will be important.
Can you see behind me here
that I still have all of my art hanging out.
This is where it hides
so that it doesn't get knocked over by the Neato
when the little robot vacuum is doing its thing.
This is my most recent print,
this yes, yes, yes one, which I absolutely love.
Yeah, all these are still waiting to be hung.
No update on that yet.
I did, however, just order a couple of new frames
for some prints that didn't have frames yet.
So I think once those arrive,
I'll be ready to go
and finally finish up getting this scale room wall hung,
which I'll be very excited about
'cause this was like a plan that I formed for myself
back in March I started ordering a bunch of art.
And yeah, got this far as you saw
in a vlog a couple months ago
and no further, so that'll be good.
At this point, I'm just rambling though.
So let's end the vlog here
and let you get back on with your day.
I hope you enjoyed just hanging out with me.
Honestly, with these vlogs,
I know they haven't been very regular.
I've had a lot of people pointing that out recently
and I've been feeling a little guilty about it
but I think part of the reason for that
is a couple of vlogs ago,
I got a comment from someone saying
like why don't you go out and do stuff?
We wanna see you like being out and about in Spain.
And that's just not my life at the moment.
I'm not really doing that.
I'll maybe go out once on the weekend,
like I said to buy the plants
or go head to the supermarket like I did last night
but for as much as possible,
I'm trying to stay inside.
We're not going out exploring new fun restaurants
or parts of the city and stuff like that.
At the moment, I don't know, it doesn't feel safe.
Case numbers here are back up to what they were
just before we went into lockdown.
So staying inside seems to be like the best idea
at the moment.
So thank you if you still enjoy these vlogs,
despite the fact that most of them take place
like right here in this exact spot in my office.
I really appreciate you watching and hanging out with me
because I think vlogs, more so than any other video,
it does feel like we're more connected in a way.
It's funny, on my more educational-type videos,
I often get comments when people talk about me
in the comments where they're like oh,
she has a cool accent or I didn't hear
when she said this.
That sort of thing.
Whereas in vlog comments,
usually all the comments are to me.
So I don't know, I guess that means
that you watching feel more of a connection with these too.
So I'm gonna try keep making them.
I think it's important and like I said,
I think at the start, thank you for all of your support
and encouragement on my last vlog
'cause hearing that you enjoy them,
it really does make me feel more motivated
to pick up the camera and film
and show you what I'm doing,
even if I do worry that it's really boring for you
and that I didn't really do much.
But hey.
All right, we'll end it here.
Thank you for watching.
I appreciate you.
I hope you have a good week, a good day
and we'll see you in the next vlog I hope.
Bye.
(upbeat music)