Life is too short to think about work outside of work.
☀️ Summer is here.
The weather is nice, the days are longer, and humans go on holiday. It makes having a “life outside of work” feel more possible than, say, when it’s pitch black at 4pm, cold, and raining/snowing. Summer brings space.
Many of our first jobs are somewhat of a career “summer.” 🏝️ This role is usually the easiest - in the sense that there are low expectations of your skillset, you have few responsibilities, and you (should) have managers that keep you from making any major mistakes.
In return, you may have to do the time-intensive, easy-to-train, less pleasant jobs while you learn the ropes.
My first job out of university was at a big PR agency, and my primary task was to pitch “breaking news” from the agency’s clients to journalists. Several times a week, us junior staffers would get an excel from the client account team with 200+ names, emails, and phone numbers. We would first email the press release to each journalist, then call them to ask if they’d seen the email and if they wanted to write about the life-changing yogurt. 🥴
Because we were reaching out to up to 1,000+ people a week, there wasn’t much time for personalisation. So it was a numbers game. Copy/paste, bcc, send. Dial, leave message, dial, leave message, dial, get hung up on, dial, leave message. An easy way to spend a LOT of time, yes, but not a pleasant use of time. Not just because journalists would curse at you for wasting their time (fair), but also because it didn’t DO anything. You don’t get results that way (emailing like a human, though - different story) which means the clients were unhappy with you on top of the journalists being unhappy with you (again, fair). I was working hard, but it was not at ALL smart. It was designed that way, because we had no skills, but wow - it sucked.
When you leave work demoralised, tired, and without much to show for it, you can’t show up in the rest of your life motivated, awake, and happy. Most nights I’d just metro home, stop into Whole Foods to get cheese orphans and olives, and mindlessly watch TV while anxiously checking my email.
