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Corey: Hello everyone. Good morning. My name is Cory Huff, and I’m the head of marketing for a company called Productive Flourishing. Also, I work from home because I know a lot of people will ask. Productive Flourshing has been that way since the beginning as a remote company. I live in Portland, Oregon, and we have employees in six different states.
Therefore, we are fortunate that we are part of an organization that allows us the flexibility and freedom to work from anywhere. I know this is becoming more common, but I’ve been doing this for about nine years. I have been working remotely. I will spend my day with you. Hope some of you will find this interesting!
Here’s my calendar, but you’ll see my day starts today in about 15 minutes, I’ll be adding a new employee, and then I’ll have a quick checkup with my doctor. It looks like my meeting moved to 9:30 from later in the day. So I have a conflict that needs to be resolved, but this is an important meeting.
So I’m going. We will move it. This is another project and I will move it. My goodness. Later today, sometime. For those who want to see it, this is my home office. Then this is my desk. You can see a lot of stuff on my desk. I’m not a very organized person.
I’m messy, but I have everything I need on my desk. You can see my laptop, my external monitor. A couple of external hard drives for other things I’m working on, a switch for a break, some donut holes, my ADHD medication, some tissues and some business cards.
and deodorant. A bunch of other random crap. So I know one of the things we talk about this day is about health, I have ADHD and I take Adderall by prescription. This is a relatively low dose that I only started taking this year.
It was a very, very fascinating journey to watch me perform. Before and after learning about ADHD. I really appreciate that I work where they are open. Our company does a great job of putting people in roles that can leverage their core strengths and that can be minimized or taken over by others on the team.
and productive. Thrive is run by Charlie, who is a, um, former Army Logistics Officer. So he’s like a logistics and operations genius. Also, he hired a bunch of people who were very, very good at project management and logistics. This is not my core strength area. I think there are some marketers out there who are really good at all the moving parts and all the coordination, and, you know, bless those marketers.
I am a person who leans more towards the creative side. I can come up with, you know, five crazy ideas for whatever we’re trying to do. So, I think it’s really important for marketers to find a team where you’re on a team that needs what you’re good at.
So I’m really glad I have. I’m lucky that I’m in a place where I can talk openly about ADHD and some of the challenges I face, and not everyone is safe. Not every team member feels like they can talk about it with their boss, or even be honest with their co-workers. I don’t have guidance on when it shouldn’t be disclosed or anything like that.
But I think if you feel safe with your boss to be able to talk to them, even if it’s just one-on-one, and say, you know, I have these challenges, instead of saying, I have ADHD, and want them to know What it means. More importantly, I’m good at this thing and I’m not good at this. So how can we make my work focus more on what I’m good at?
I don’t care much about what I’m not good at, and that’s what I encourage people to do in their marketing careers. OK. So I’ll start with a blank draft here and say,
Product Thrive is launching a crowdfunding campaign. If you’ve been a reader or Planner customer for more than a few months, you know we’re working hard to launch a digital version of Momentum Planner.
Such a random part of my day. About a few weeks ago, I helped a fellow in need who was wondering how to hire some marketers. I help them figure out how to write job descriptions and how to work with marketers to make things more effective. So they sent me some packages, which I thought would be fun.
It’s just another random part of my day. This kind of thing happens all the time and I help people and they send me stuff. This is one of the fun parts of working in marketing. OK. It’s 11:06 and I’ve been on the phone all morning, but it was a really good, very productive call. Quickly ask my doctor about my ADHD medication.
My weight has dropped and my blood pressure has dropped. So we’re playing around with my ADHD medication to fine-tune it. Then there was a long call with our development team that was building the power app. The Personal Planner app we are building will be available in Q2 2020. We have to see a demo.
We first saw the planner’s weekly view. So you can see all your projects and how they relate to each other in one place. Super excited about this. We also discussed how we’re going to handle the backend part of transactional emails, and for all marketing operations nerds, we had a transactional email conversation. We even got involved in some O Ops. Uh, about the registration process. Then I just had a nice chat with one of my contractors who is doing influencer outreach for us. We’ve identified some specific YouTube channels that we’d like to work with so that we can send them some program packages to give away to their viewers.
I have them live on Instagram and talk about their creative process so we can grow our audience together. OK. Now I check emails and things like leisure before my lunch break. So I’m going to have a 40-minute lunch. This usually involves me eating some leftovers because I look like I’m cooking at home, and then maybe taking a short walk around the block or relaxing on the couch and playing on the Switch for a while.
So I’m microwaving some leftovers, lamb and lentil stew I made last Friday. We’ll have time for the premiere. We had a big party and a bunch of people came over to watch the premiere of The Wheel of Time. very interesting. It’s 3:30 and my content marketing expert and I have an hour to discuss a big blog post we’ll be publishing in December, and a sales page she’s writing for us.
There’s another big blog post coming out next week. So it’s been a long time, and I’ve been involved in a detailed discussion about SEO, about the right title for SEO versus the right title for general readability and how we balance the two. So these are very common discussions that I have with my team on a regular basis.
I’m doing laundry now because I work from home. I’m just going to throw some clothes away and then I’ll come back and get something done. Then I’ll be talking to the founder at the end of the day because we have some priority conflicts with some upcoming content that I need him to resolve.
So, this is where I am now. I know there is our day’s or week’s worth of clothing here. So my wife sorts the laundry and my job is to take it downstairs to the coin machine in our basement and wash it there.
OK. It’s night and I’m ending my day. As I mentioned before, I discussed some content issues with our founders, and the blog posting issue turned into two blog posts – one of which was going to be much longer and we’d take some time to write, but the shorter one I am excited. After the blog post conversation, I sorted through some emails and made dinner for my wife and I.
We had fried eggs and bacon for dinner and it was easy for the evening. Then I did a side project this evening. Overall, it was a very nice day. There is a lot of work today. This is a typical Tuesday for me. But now that I’m done with work and side projects, I’m ready to go to bed, and I’ll watch a sitcom before bed, maybe Schitt’s Creek, maybe play a little bit on my switch.
Goodnight everybody. I hope this is an interesting or insightful day for marketers. Have a nice day!
