My mind is blown at the thought that last week’s activities all took place during the span of one week. It feels like that was a month ago, and that the week itself was a month long.

Time is weird.

Three Things I Worked On:

1. Executing social media holiday book giveaway.

In an effort to increase brand awareness, generate engagement, and give the gift of knowledge, the marketing team decided to run a book giveaway in time for the holidays. 

I was responsible for creating the structure of the giveaway itself, creating and scheduling out the promotionary posts, counting entries, and shipping the winner the book once it was all said and done. 

Another one of the reasons for doing this was to get our new Instagram account in front of as many people as possible. We’ve been in the process of rebuilding our following after having to create a new account, and this was a way to help do that quickly.

Overall, it was fun to do something to bless someone with a book right in time for the holidays, even if we didn’t have as much engagement as one of those win-a-million-dollars-or-a-free-Tesla giveaways.

2. Creating a first draft of our monthly newsletter.

One of our projects for 2020 is to launch a newsletter and grow a solid subscriber list. 

Even though we won’t be launching this until late January, I made a practice version of this newsletter just to get all the pieces in place ahead of time. 

This required creating a Mailchimp account, putting together the email itself, writing the copy, linking to the most perfectly relevant Leonardo diCaprio gif you’ve ever seen, and creating a sign-up form on our website. 

This exercise was a great reminder of the fact that content creation is a lot more enjoyable when you stress about it less. This email was filled with inside jokes, links to unrelated YouTube videos, and the aforementioned Leonardo references. It was the structure of a real newsletter, but it was totally satire. And that was a ton of fun. And it reminded me that the actual creation of the thing isn’t what’s hard, it’s the stupid perfectionism mindset that steals the joy out of things.

3. Adding workshop content to website.

One of our big goals for the end of the year was to have our workshops on the website. Right now the majority of our really rich activity is happening on LinkedIn, and isn’t totally reflected on the website. 

We now have a workshops page (check it out and let me know what you think! Constructive criticism is always highly appreciated). Even though there are still some tweaks that we need to make, it’s much better than the nothing that we had before. 

I uploaded all the content, figured out how to make the different modules do what we wanted them to do with CSS and some jQuery, and made some snazzy cover photos. It’s definitely a work in progress, but an MVP is better than nothing at this point, so I’m glad that it’s up and able to be re-worked as necessary.

Three Things I Learned:

1. VLOOKUP

My boss asked me to combine some information we had gotten from an outside source into one of our pre-existing spreadsheets. It was all relatively simple, until it wasn’t anymore. 

One thing led to another and it ended up reaching a point where I needed to use VLOOKUP, a function that helps combine information from one section to another section and eliminates the need for hours of copy and pasting the same information. 

My experience with spreadsheets coming into this company was much more focused on written content than actual numbers (which—yes, may seem to defeat the purpose a little bit, but it is what it is). The point is that I knew almost zero actual functions coming into this role, which makes each one I do learn even more exciting. 

Spreadsheet magic is a special kind of magic and I envy the people who know how to make them work for them. 

2. Spreadsheets are incredibly easy to mess up. 

Unfortunately this goes hand-in-hand with the whole “magical spreadsheets” piece. I’m so envious of those people because I definitely don’t have the same level of knowledge that it takes to confidently go in and not mess everything up. 

The good thing about going in and messing everything up is that you learn exactly how certain features do (and don’t) work. 

I’m going to spare you the gory details, but I ended up unwittingly sorting the wrong information into spreadsheet oblivion. None of the right contact information was with the right contact. Thankfully Google sheets has the ability to restore the previous version, so I was able to correct my mistakes, but it was a huge time and energy suck. So lesson learned: make sure you’re sorting the whole sheet, and not just the unfrozen columns. 

3. People bring me joy.

These two weeks were really productive for me in terms of what I needed to complete and get shipped. However, they were pretty isolated. I’m the only one really working on the content side of things full-time, so I just did my thing while the rest of the company was working on product and client related projects.

This is great, because knowing that I’m the only one fully responsible for this to get done or not is huge. But at the same time, I’m realizing that one of the things I really loved about working in a more process-focused role was getting to work with my coworkers and help solve problems alongside them. 

It really comes down to the fact that I love people, and I love helping people, and I love building relationships. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love what I’m doing with content creation by any means (doing this is helping create our brand!), but it is bringing clarity to different dimensions of my skillset and joyset (that’s a word now).

—— 

This post has been a long time coming. 

December was a very intense month, but a really good one. It’s crazy that 2019 is done and 2020 is upon us. This time last year I was pulling all-nighters trying to get my website build out in time to start Praxis in January. 

Fun times. 

Thanks for tagging along for the past [insert period of time you’ve been tagging along for], it really means a lot. 

Take care and happy new year, family.