0 to 60 in no time flat {new job & new calling}
I meant to blog after my first week at my new job, but that obviously didn't happen since I'm now finishing up my third! Life is cuh-razy now, in case you were wondering.
{new job}I now work Monday through Friday from about 8-5. My job is pretty cool and has lots of perks. A few of them are monthly birthday parties (a paid 45-minute event where we get a treat and get to hear about people who had birthday or work anniversaries), daily team-building breaks (paid 30-minute breaks where we play fun games like Snake Oil or the Skittles game), food truck Friday (a different food truck chills outside our building every Friday for a few hours during lunchtime), and 10am & 4pm stretching (just my team, just at our desks, but we usually all migrate together to chat for 5-10 minutes). There are also random optional things going on, like a monthly book club and yoga 2x/week during lunch, as well as currently a Bachelor bracket challenge, an Oscars nominee challenge, and a lip sync competition coming up. There's fun stuff at my place of work! :) Oh, and I can spend one hour/week doing personal blog stuff because my company likes its employees to be familiar with the internet and stuff, so I'm writing this post at work right now and it's totally fine! :)
What I do is a bit different than I anticipated or what I'm used to, but now that I've been at it for three weeks, it doesn't actually seem that different haha. In my previous editing experience, I would edit directly on paper or use Microsoft Word track changes to make my edits, and sometimes add a comment about why that change was necessary. In my work at Boost, I edit directly on articles, as well as in a comment box below, where I have to explain basically everything I do. I let writersknow what they did wrong and how they can fix it in the future. Not only all that, but I also have to give each article a rating (1-5 stars) based on this system we use. Basically, there are different grading items listed in each tier (star level). For instance, tier level three has four items: engagement, examples, audience, and organization. If the article is boring, 3 stars is the absolute highest it can get because of the "engagement" factor. Anyway, I could keep explaining, but I think anyone reading this would find it tedious rather than interesting haha.
I read and edit articles that are 400-600 words and talk about lots of random things like dentistry, veterinarians, personal injury law, storage units, and fashion. As a company, Boost is all about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), so part of making a company get to the top of Google's list is having a lot of solid links leading to that website. So if a dentist wants to get to the top of Google's list, and tons of bloggers talk about this particular blog and link to that dentist's website, that will help his website get to the top of the list. We don't actually work with bloggers, but that's the basic idea. So after I edit an article about dentistry, I add a link to a Boost client's website into the article to improve their internet standing. I don't know where those articles end up after I edit them, but that's my part in the shindig :) There are other teams that do other aspects of SEO, but I don't know much about them.
Anyway, so it's a good job, and I'm enjoying the perks and all my coworkers, but it's definitely hard to edit for ~7 hours/day. I get tired, I get bored, and I get sick of people writing things that are fine to edit, but difficult to say why I had to edit them. Haha :)
It's also rough feeling like I have NO free time anymore! Russ and I have started to implement a lot of new habits with this new year, and some are going well, but others aren't quite yet. The things that we've implemented are taking up some time, and more habits just mean more time gone. We have started exercising regularly, so we wake up early in the morning and go to the gym. That's a 5:30am wake up call. We've also been trying to have successful Family Home Evenings, which take up an hour of Monday nights (because we just get carried away in discussion, not because I think FHE has to be an hour long). Other things we're trying to implement are healthy eating (which implies cooking, which takes time, which neither of us want to spend after working all day long), and daily cleaning. Neither of those have really taken off yet because after we get home, we're both dying for some good ol' fashioned R&R, aka, Parenthood at the moment. But, you know. Goals and stuff.
{new calling}Another thing that has started taking up my Tuesday nights and will soon be taking up my Saturday mornings is my new calling. For anyone who's not familiar with callings, they're basically positions in my church that we're asked to do, but we have the option of saying yes or no. If we say yes, it's done on a volunteer basis, aka, not paid. Almost every single person in every congregation has a calling of some sort, and callings change every few months or years. My particular calling will only last a few months because it is for a very specific event: the Provo City Center Temple Cultural Celebration. The celebration will involve over 5,000 youth, but my calling deals with about 40 of them. Basically, I learned a simple dance from the choreographer, and now I get to teach that dance to the youth in my ward for their Tuesday youth nights. There will also be rehearsals on Saturdays, but the stake dance coordinators will run the show on those days.
So far, we've had two rehearsals. And guys. I'm loving it! It's really fun to be totally in charge haha :) It's also been fun getting to know the names and faces and personalities of the kids in my ward. Also, Since I'm a young adult, I think that gives me a cool factor in their eyes hahahaha. It's like I'm older than them, but I'm not old, so I'm just cool. Maybe it's not true, but that's how I felt when I was a teenager. I loved my leaders that were just a few years older . . . that's what I wanted to be--just a few years older! Haha :) It's also been fun seeing them get the hang of the dance. The dance is seriously simple--we're talking a lot of marching and some knocking on imaginary doors and shaking hands (the dance has a missionary theme)--but I'm dealing with a lot of inexperienced youth and trying to get them to all do the same movement at the same time. But even though it's simple, it's really satisfying to see them get it and put their personalities into it. It was also suuuuper fun this last Tuesday because after rehearsal finished, all of these 12- and 13-year-old boys wanted to do the electric slide, and a mom put the song on and they had a mini dance party. I really just loved seeing them have so much fun dancing (and I may or may not have joined right in) :) It was seriously such a fun night for me and I'm already excited for next Tuesday :)
So going from no job and no calling to a 40-hour/week job and a time-consuming calling has been crazy, but it's definitely going to be good :) I need a few more weeks to try and get those other habits into place, but so far, things are pretty good :)
{new job}I now work Monday through Friday from about 8-5. My job is pretty cool and has lots of perks. A few of them are monthly birthday parties (a paid 45-minute event where we get a treat and get to hear about people who had birthday or work anniversaries), daily team-building breaks (paid 30-minute breaks where we play fun games like Snake Oil or the Skittles game), food truck Friday (a different food truck chills outside our building every Friday for a few hours during lunchtime), and 10am & 4pm stretching (just my team, just at our desks, but we usually all migrate together to chat for 5-10 minutes). There are also random optional things going on, like a monthly book club and yoga 2x/week during lunch, as well as currently a Bachelor bracket challenge, an Oscars nominee challenge, and a lip sync competition coming up. There's fun stuff at my place of work! :) Oh, and I can spend one hour/week doing personal blog stuff because my company likes its employees to be familiar with the internet and stuff, so I'm writing this post at work right now and it's totally fine! :)
What I do is a bit different than I anticipated or what I'm used to, but now that I've been at it for three weeks, it doesn't actually seem that different haha. In my previous editing experience, I would edit directly on paper or use Microsoft Word track changes to make my edits, and sometimes add a comment about why that change was necessary. In my work at Boost, I edit directly on articles, as well as in a comment box below, where I have to explain basically everything I do. I let writersknow what they did wrong and how they can fix it in the future. Not only all that, but I also have to give each article a rating (1-5 stars) based on this system we use. Basically, there are different grading items listed in each tier (star level). For instance, tier level three has four items: engagement, examples, audience, and organization. If the article is boring, 3 stars is the absolute highest it can get because of the "engagement" factor. Anyway, I could keep explaining, but I think anyone reading this would find it tedious rather than interesting haha.
I read and edit articles that are 400-600 words and talk about lots of random things like dentistry, veterinarians, personal injury law, storage units, and fashion. As a company, Boost is all about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), so part of making a company get to the top of Google's list is having a lot of solid links leading to that website. So if a dentist wants to get to the top of Google's list, and tons of bloggers talk about this particular blog and link to that dentist's website, that will help his website get to the top of the list. We don't actually work with bloggers, but that's the basic idea. So after I edit an article about dentistry, I add a link to a Boost client's website into the article to improve their internet standing. I don't know where those articles end up after I edit them, but that's my part in the shindig :) There are other teams that do other aspects of SEO, but I don't know much about them.
Anyway, so it's a good job, and I'm enjoying the perks and all my coworkers, but it's definitely hard to edit for ~7 hours/day. I get tired, I get bored, and I get sick of people writing things that are fine to edit, but difficult to say why I had to edit them. Haha :)
It's also rough feeling like I have NO free time anymore! Russ and I have started to implement a lot of new habits with this new year, and some are going well, but others aren't quite yet. The things that we've implemented are taking up some time, and more habits just mean more time gone. We have started exercising regularly, so we wake up early in the morning and go to the gym. That's a 5:30am wake up call. We've also been trying to have successful Family Home Evenings, which take up an hour of Monday nights (because we just get carried away in discussion, not because I think FHE has to be an hour long). Other things we're trying to implement are healthy eating (which implies cooking, which takes time, which neither of us want to spend after working all day long), and daily cleaning. Neither of those have really taken off yet because after we get home, we're both dying for some good ol' fashioned R&R, aka, Parenthood at the moment. But, you know. Goals and stuff.
{new calling}Another thing that has started taking up my Tuesday nights and will soon be taking up my Saturday mornings is my new calling. For anyone who's not familiar with callings, they're basically positions in my church that we're asked to do, but we have the option of saying yes or no. If we say yes, it's done on a volunteer basis, aka, not paid. Almost every single person in every congregation has a calling of some sort, and callings change every few months or years. My particular calling will only last a few months because it is for a very specific event: the Provo City Center Temple Cultural Celebration. The celebration will involve over 5,000 youth, but my calling deals with about 40 of them. Basically, I learned a simple dance from the choreographer, and now I get to teach that dance to the youth in my ward for their Tuesday youth nights. There will also be rehearsals on Saturdays, but the stake dance coordinators will run the show on those days.
So far, we've had two rehearsals. And guys. I'm loving it! It's really fun to be totally in charge haha :) It's also been fun getting to know the names and faces and personalities of the kids in my ward. Also, Since I'm a young adult, I think that gives me a cool factor in their eyes hahahaha. It's like I'm older than them, but I'm not old, so I'm just cool. Maybe it's not true, but that's how I felt when I was a teenager. I loved my leaders that were just a few years older . . . that's what I wanted to be--just a few years older! Haha :) It's also been fun seeing them get the hang of the dance. The dance is seriously simple--we're talking a lot of marching and some knocking on imaginary doors and shaking hands (the dance has a missionary theme)--but I'm dealing with a lot of inexperienced youth and trying to get them to all do the same movement at the same time. But even though it's simple, it's really satisfying to see them get it and put their personalities into it. It was also suuuuper fun this last Tuesday because after rehearsal finished, all of these 12- and 13-year-old boys wanted to do the electric slide, and a mom put the song on and they had a mini dance party. I really just loved seeing them have so much fun dancing (and I may or may not have joined right in) :) It was seriously such a fun night for me and I'm already excited for next Tuesday :)
So going from no job and no calling to a 40-hour/week job and a time-consuming calling has been crazy, but it's definitely going to be good :) I need a few more weeks to try and get those other habits into place, but so far, things are pretty good :)
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