Hello everyone!

I am currently experiencing a very hot Sunday evening so as per usual I am sitting down to write (fan – on, curtains – drawn, notifications from my flatmate living his best life on a trip to Norfolk – off).

Let me just start by saying London is definitely becoming the next all-inclusive holiday destination considering the temperatures we’ve been hitting in the past week and will continue to do so in the upcoming one. 37 degrees? Seriously? Where’s all the rain and clouds which are supposed to be the classic London experience, huh?

All jokes aside though, I had another fantastic week! Managed to pull in around 30 hours which is what I will be aiming at until the 28th of September when my final year of university starts. The rest of my time I will dedicate to doing my dissertation research and getting some rest.

This was actually inspired by a chat I had with Deepak a couple of days ago – I’m definitely the type of person that works on SOMETHING 24/7. Whether it’s Pearl Lemon or uni work or housework or anything else really. It’s not really sustainable in the long term though so sometimes you have to (a) choose your battles, and (b) force yourself to take some time off just for self-care purposes!

I’d say this was the biggest thing I learned this week but I also did a couple of hours of cold calling and cold emailing training so I feel like that could be a bit unfair😁 This week definitely felt like the perfect mixture of learning by taking action and learning by doing courses, reading blogs etc. I feel this is the system that works best for me – a girl just loves to have that theoretical background! I can’t help it🤷🏼‍♀️ Over time it will definitely turn into mostly action-based training but at this stage, I feel like both are needed for my growth.

So you might be wondering – what else did I do this week? Let me give you a quick recap then:

• I finished training on content writing longer pieces for the PL blog;
• Found us a LinkedIn outreach account;
• Did research on a new SaaS tool we could launch (and I believe Ben, Deepak and I are having a call tomorrow with the development team in Johannesburg about it!);
• Helped with a marketing strategy for 8designers;
• Continued updating the spreadsheet with feedback on ResumeCats and responding to queries the design team had about it;
• Had an unexpected weekly call with the design team as well to see how things were going on their side;
• Had a call with Lydia, and another one with Dee to talk about how the programme has been so far;
• Provided feedback to other team members;
• Attended the team meeting with our two newest team members – Sarah and Noah, who both seem lovely;
• Recorded my first training video and after fixing some audio issues, will be re-recording an improved version in the upcoming week.

And THEN, for the absolute highlight of my week: I went over to Dee’s place for a BBQ. Originally, I planned to pop in for a beer or two and then go home to get some work done (how professional of me!), but ended up having so much fun I only got home around 1am😅 I even got a picture with the man, the myth, the legend!

This also gave me the opportunity to talk more to Sarah (sadly did not get any pictures with her😔) and meet our newest team member that will be joining us on Monday – Dan! It is quite surreal to see the people I’m used to interacting with online only, in real life, but they definitely did not disappoint!

I also got a company t-shirt which I proceeded to tell every family member and friend about😎 Can’t wait to flex on people with it ASAP!

For the week ahead, I’m planning to switch strategies a little bit when it comes to organisation – I should try different things after all. I am planning to have a designated one major task of the day that is pre-planned and needs to get done on that day each day. The rest of the work time each day will be dedicated to completing smaller tasks as they come through.

I’m making this decision since I noticed I tend to knock out the smaller tasks earlier on and then by the time I get to the big ones, they seem way too big to deal with on that day (regardless of whether they actually turn out to be as time-consuming as I thought) and therefore, keep getting postponed. That’s why I wanna see if my newest strategy brings better results when it comes to my productivity!

I will be signing off for now and wishing everybody reading a lovely upcoming week.

Lots of love,

Paula