How to Metamorphose from Corporate Worm to Creative Butterfly

diary of a melancholy marketer #6

Every day, I wake up to an avalanche of notifications. Between work emails, personal emails, Slack messages, texts from family, and group chats that blew up overnight, there are at least 50 notifications to start my day. Yesterday alone, I received over 180 notifications, and the day wasn’t even over (I took that screenshot at 4 pm).

And I’m not alone. The average young person receives over 200 notifications per day.

From the minute I wake up to an hour before I go to bed, my attention is split into 1) tasks I didn’t finish the day before, 2) tasks I need to do, 3) tasks I’m actively doing, 4) tasks I’m thinking about doing, and 5) tasks I need to remember to write down. This can wear anyone’s capacity, but as someone who works in Marketing and Communications (a creative job by nature, but bogged down by the corporate infrastructure it exists in), I have to be extra intentional about how I recharge when I finally shut my laptop at 6:00 pm.

A Day in the Life of the Head of Marketing

Let me walk you through the number of tasks that I completed during a 9-hour workday:

Start my day at 8:15 A.M. for a meeting with my co-workers
After that, I wrote the rough draft of a speech for my manager for an event she’s attending next week
I made two slide decks (when did we stop calling them presentations) for completely different audiences, filled with pictures, data, tables, and testimonials
Created new flyers for our recruitment team to use at job fairs
Drafted the topics and initial copy for the CEO’s social media for the next 30 days
Analyzed some data and made tweaks to our paid media campaigns
Penned the first drop of next week’s newsletter copy
Reviewed and tweaked graphics that are going into a new email campaign
Wrote a script for an animated video we are producing
Copyedited several posts for our organization’s blog
Did some SEO tinkering and drafted a plan for increasing my organization’s ranking for several keywords
Attend four more meetings, each of which required an agenda or a small written report
Answer and send over 100 Slack messages throughout the day
Log off around 5:45 P.M.

The wide range of tasks is what initially drew me to the Marketing and Communications industry. I loved that there’s a healthy mix of my right and left brain—strategic, creative, and analytical. Where the friction comes into play is that I spend most of my day behind a laptop. You can imagine that the last thing I want to do is close the tab where I’m writing a blog for work to open up a tab to start writing a blog for Diary of a Melancholy Marketer.

A corporate worm’s to-do list never ends, so you have to learn to stop.

Even if I get my inbox down to zero unread by the time I log off for the day, it’ll be back up to 10 unread before I log on the next morning. There’s always one more blog that can be edited, a slide deck that needs feedback, a social media post to review.

A corporate worm’s to-do list never ends, so you have to learn to stop.

Especially because I work from home, it’s hard to create separation between what I do to make money and what I do for myself. It’s even harder to ensure I’m leaving enough brain power to pour into my creative projects.

That’s why I’ve created a post-work ritual to help my body and brain stop thinking about all the things I need to do at work tomorrow.

Becoming a creative butterfly takes intentionality

Below is the fluid and relatively comprehensive list of everything I do to shift from WFH to being a real person:

Turn the damn laptop off: The very first thing I do when I end my day is close all of my tabs and windows, turn my laptop off, shut it, and leave it charging on my desk. Pretty obvious, right? You wouldn’t believe how many people I know who never turn their laptops off. Turn it off. Leave it on your desk. Out of sight, out of mind.
Chug water: Pretty self-explanatory. It’s the first thing I do after turning my laptop off. I know there are times when I sit down to work, blink, look at the clock, and three hours have passed. Usually, I forget to eat a snack or drink water.
Uplugged exercise: The actual activity changes every day contingent on my schedule, but the category remains constant. Some days, I walk my slightly rotund chihuahua, Pico de Gallo, around our neighborhood. Others, I go to a pilates class. Sometimes it’s a hot girl walk with a girlfriend. On low-energy days, it’s yoga in my living room. The non-negotiable, however, is that the activity must be done screen and earbud-free. No music, no text messages, no distractions. This helps the inner monologue in my brain slow down.
Rage jot: Once the voices in my head are a little quieter, I pull out my journal and stream-of-consciousness everything that pissed me off during my day. I find that this helps me release any lingering negative emotions, and I don’t blow up at my husband because he’s breathing too loudly next to me on the couch (surely I’m not alone here).
Leave the house: I try to have something scheduled every evening that requires me to leave my neighborhood. Usually, that comes from the fitness classes I schedule, but it also comes from seeing my friends. There are days when work is so draining and nothing goes my way, and all I want to do is crawl into my bed and rot on TikTok. Those are the days I need socialization the most. Yes, sometimes that means I have to pack like I’m going out of town, but it’s worth it.

I had a fitness class right after work and then had dinner with friends after class. So, I had to pack two sets of clothes, products to refresh my face and hair, two purses, and two sets of shoes. Inconvenient, yes. Did it make me feel like Jane Birkin, also yes.

Becoming a creative butterfly outside of your 9-5 will take intentionality.

Have a friend who needs help unplugging from their WFH job? Share this article with them!

The problem isn’t that I don’t have time, it’s that I don’t have discipline

Now, diva, I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But exercise does, in fact, make you feel better. Drinking water and eating a little snack will (in most cases) quell the crashout. And yes (your mom was right), it really is that damn phone. When I’m strict with my post-work ritual, I find that I’m less irritable and have more energy. I also find that many people have some iteration of this ritual.

I recently had a conversation with a friend who’s a full-time freelancer, which really made me re-evaluate how I look at my free time. We talked a lot about how to unplug, but also plug back in more thoughtfully.

She also works in marketing and mused with me on how honesty with yourself is the first step toward creative discipline. I talked more about that in my last article,

But most importantly, we discussed how pushing yourself in creative endeavors actually fills one’s cup. It’s a mind shift from “Ugh, I have to spend another two hours at the computer writing when I literally did that all day” to “I get to spend time pouring into myself and creating for me.”

Putting together this newsletter every week is actually helping me stay in love with marketing. With writing.

Sure, it’s more “work.” It’s more time behind a computer. But it’s also keeping me present, reflective, and curious. It’s building a brand that’s independent of my job title and refining skills that I’ll carry with me forever.

Think about it

As if you couldn’t tell, I’ve been musing on ways to be intentionally online. This article does a fantastic job of documenting what it’s like to break up with your smartphone: