Hi everyone!
It is Sunday, around 10pm when I am sitting down to give you a rundown of my fourth week here at Pearl Lemon. I feel like I’m definitely losing my grip on the passage of time – it feels like I just started working a week or two ago!
I have definitely fallen into some type of routine with it at this stage – wake up, check messages and email for any urgently needed tasks, sit down to do university research, have a lunch break, sit down for work and hopefully try to wrap up not much past midnight.
While time management has never been my strongest suit by any means, I still feel like I am completing tasks on time and trying to structure my day in a way that is most productive for me. There are some ups and some downs, as with everything else, but overall I just want to create a balance that would allow me to lead a healthy lifestyle:)
I think my best day this week (other than Thursday when I took a day off🤪) was Friday! Got up crazy early (at least by my standards – 7am) to get breakfast with my flatmate and a friend visiting us. Then, I sat down for work and even before the team meeting, I have already made lots of progress! Maybe Deepak was onto something with that getting up early thing… However, I then proceeded to not take my own advice at all and get up around 11am the next days😅 Perhaps going out at night is not the best catalyst for productivity.
The team meeting was easily the highlight of my Friday though – it genuinely just felt like a virtual hangout with a couple of people that I like and not a neMandycessary weekly work call. I even played Kahoot for the first time in my life and immensely enjoyed it!
As for the actual work that got done this week, let me give you a rundown of it:
- Worked with Ben and then the rest of the team on new SaaS tool ideas (with success!)
- The above-mentioned success being: one of my ideas being accepted by Dee and Sabelo, so I am now working on a competitor analysis for this tool (which I want to finish as soon as possible after writing this very blog post)
- Having calls with multiple folks – the design team, Dee, Matt, Dan etc.
- I also prepared some of the research tasks to be handled by Dan, along with training videos and other resources – it feels good to be able to “give back” after getting lots of support myself
- Did training on tonality and body language myself
- Gave feedback on a couple of processes, websites, and presentations
- Watched Ben and Deepak make some cold calls and scheduled a call with Ben for this very purpose for next week
I’m sure lots of smaller tasks slipped through the cracks as I’ve learned it’s better to knock them out immediately, instead of wasting time, meticulously putting them into your planner.
However, the funniest thing, that also earned me the “workaholic” badge amongst my friends, happened on Thursday. I swore I would take a day off just to cool down, relax and have some fun. This all sounds good but by the time 8pm rolled around I was starting to feel kind of bored with all this rest, so before we went out for drinks, my friends found me at my makeshift work station:
In the week ahead I want to try different things to ultimately spend less time on tasks and get more of them done. Maybe I’ll try turning my phone off for a couple of hours at a time, maybe I’ll wake up earlier, maybe I’ll start working in specific blocks of time – the Pomodoro technique is widely recommended so who knows? Maybe this will work for me😁
I definitely have to figure it out before university classes start in September because by then some free time will be very hard to come across for me. On the other hand, I will definitely be very happy about finally being done with university and officially getting that degree📚
For now, as I feel the stress of having the competitor analysis unfinished and my eyelids starting to get heavier and heavier, I will sign off and return to work. Well, other work? Writing this blog post doesn’t really feel like work but I guess it counts as such? Either way, enough of my rambling and goodnight!
Lots of love,
Paula