Hello all!
Today is my one-month anniversary of officially starting my internship at Pearl Lemon, and I’m excited to start sharing my thoughts and tracking my progress through these monthly blogs!
To quickly introduce myself, I’m a rising American college Sophomore in Linguistics (for now) who’s now a bit over a month into my summer vacation. I still worry a bit about how the ~20 hr/week workload will look once we hit late August and I’m back in school, but as I’m largely still getting my footing in the first place, I’m comfortable crossing that bridge when I get to it.
What I’ve Been Up To
My job title of Digital Marketing Executive is intentionally meant to be a bit of a catchall, since I was brought on to work HR, and my trial week was slightly extended for me to try out working some LinkedIn campaigns because there was a need for more support there.
I was excited to do both, and thus my work as HR Executive and LinkedIn Marketing Manager melded into what you see today.
By now, my tasks have been varying greatly even from those two, as I’ve taken on some work in social media management (planning out what blogs to post when and scheduling them to post automatically on all platforms, strategizing how to optimize Deepak’s personal social media pages) and even a couple in writing just yesterday (making a cold call script off some recordings, bulking up the answers on a FAQ page).
Being a person who picks up most any task from others with a lot on their plate is turning out to be a pretty great informal model for me; I’m here in the first place to gain varied work experience and learn what kind of tasks I actively look forward to and which I can juuuust get through and be done with.
My one consistent daily task has been the description of that LinkedIn management title. Every day, I keep up with a dozen or two LinkedIn direct message conversations hoping to bring some leads- potential clients -far enough down the ‘piqued interest’ assembly line that I book them a video call with another employee more qualified to actually give them the pitch on what services we offer in digital PR support. From dropping in to hang out with Deepak doing cold calls for clients a few times, I’ve learned that passing a lead off to someone else is the ultimate goal there too.
As someone who just made my own LinkedIn account a few months ago, these kinds of insights on what professionals use it for, as well as what lofty terms like “Lead Generation” actually functionally mean are exactly the kinds of things I’m trying to get out of this position.
So I’ll more than consider it a good sign that I already have some of these takeaways.
Challenges
To be honest with you, I’ve struggled a lot with personal time management and productivity for quite a while now. I pretty easily fall victim to the vice of my age group: procrastination.
With this in mind, the incredibly flexible structure of Pearl Lemon both has the potential to exacerbate my existing weakness and provide a track to improving it. Let me explain.
One, being able to work at any time of day for as many hours as comfortable means there are no tangible repercussions for starting my workday at 9pm after blowing the entire afternoon off. No real reason to be scolded, and surely a skilled procrastinator can ignore any personal guilt of all the day’s wasted time.
Two, the structure has tools to keep you from abstracting your productivity or lack thereof into meaninglessness, and you’re still undoubtedly part of a team. We all use a Chrome Extension called Clockify to track how much time we work each day, and on what tasks. We also send a screenshot of our Clockify day to the team group chat to mark the end of our personal workday. With this, I can tell the standards of how much I have done compared to how much I probably could or should have, all with the power of quantifiable data to keep me from convincing myself that a less-than-standard work day went better than it actually did.
Trust me, it’s okay to have off days. Just acknowledge them for what they were, or else you’ll never get to dissecting them and learning how to do better. Don’t let your bad days compound by tricking yourself into calling them good days.
Working at Pearl Lemon, I have plenty of opportunities (like writing right now!) to self-reflect and work towards both personal and professional improvement, and I’m already starting to see the progress take shape.
Goal-Setting
To wrap up, I’ve decided to create some pointed goals for myself to complete before my next blog around July 24th. I’m sure there’s some extra motivational power in these being posted online, so here goes:
- Log at least two weeks of reaching the 20-hour goal without having to catch up on weekends. You deserve some intentional time off.
- Record and post at least 15 software review videos for the Pearl Lemon Official YouTube channel. You’ve been meaning to record 10-20 a month starting this month, but this has been the task you’ve most stubbornly pushed off among any so far.
- Work with at least five different people to get new tasks. You know you want the breadth and you don’t need to be shy in asking anyone if they want less on their plate!
Alright, that’s all for me now! I’m excited to see how much my experiences change (and improve!!) in the next month, so see you then, empty Google Doc!