I'm a professional Content Writer. Here's a day in the life

Here’s what I actually do all day

Sep 19, 2024

6.00am: my alarm goes off for Hot Yoga. This year I’ve been experimenting with becoming insufferable, and for a while it was starting to stick. There was a point where I regularly made 3 early yoga classes a week while also training for a half-marathon. Like all the most powerful regimes, however, mine was fragile and easily toppled. It took a minor running injury and a common cold — ever since, I’ve been slacking. I turn off the alarm, cancel my class, and go back to sleep.

8:00am: my second, shameful alarm goes off at 8am and I snooze it twice before I pad downstairs. I chug an entire glass of water while I make tea and listen to a daily news briefing (healthy).

8:15am: I drink my tea and scroll Instagram (unhealthy).

8:30am: usually, I would’ve logged on for work before now, but I started a new job last month and I’m trying out boundaries, so I make do with checking my work calendar from my phone — just in case someone scheduled me in to single-handedly present a content strategy to the whole company at some point in the last 12 hours without telling me. They haven’t.

8:55am: I migrate to my dining room and set myself up at the table. I’ll spend the first 15 minutes of my day flicking through news and social media, looking for trending topics we might need to take note of, or, more likely, any horrors we need to be mindful of. Once that’s done, I go over my to-do list.

9:30am: I should mention, by this point I’m neither showered, fed, nor dressed. I understand a lot of people can’t start their day properly until they do all the things people usually do to get ‘up and ready’— I am not one of those people. I’ve done some of my best work in pyjamas, running on nothing but a cup of tea and a vitamin D tablet.

10:30am: I typically try to do the worst task on my list first. The one staring me down. The one I don’t really know where to start with but also really, really need to start with. The one I might have to go out of my way to ask someone about. The one that won’t even take that long in the end, annoyingly. Sometimes I fail at this, but today I didn’t. I reward myself with porridge that I eat at my desk while I proof my work. I don’t necessarily recommend eating breakfast at your desk, but it’s a ritual that seems to work for me. Mainly because eating at my laptop while I write a blog makes me feel like Carrie Bradshaw rushing a deadline.

2:00pm: by this point, I’ve outlined another blog, put some angles together for an event series we’re hosting, and dealt with an SEO crisis that I won’t get into because it’s dull, confusing, and confidential. I’m going to a friend’s for dinner straight after work, so I use my lunch break to shower and get partly ready. In the shower I think about the crushing pressure I feel having 400 subscribers on Substack and wonder whether Harper Collins or Faber will get in touch first. Then I go back to my dining table to draft a LinkedIn post about bug fixes.

3:00pm: it’s not entertaining, I know, but for the rest of the afternoon I genuinely just… do my job. Alan Sugar types love to say everybody who works from home is actually just walking their dog or doing their washing or pin-curling their hair, but they’re forgetting that a lot of us are People Pleasers. So, while I’ll stop every now and then to check a text or reply to a Hinge message from a guy toeing a dangerous line between confident and arrogant, for the most part I pretty much just do what I’m meant to be doing. On the schedule this afternoon is: drafting the blog I outlined this morning, editing three smaller pieces based on client feedback, and compiling a list of potential guest-speakers for a tech event. It’s all very glamorous.

4:45pm: I ignore a Teams message from a co-worker that says hi and asks me how I am without providing any context about what they actually want me to do and check Hinge again. The guy from before just started a sentence with “yeah but, to play devil’s advocate…”, so I ignore him too. I highlight and unhighlight a section of a Word doc open on my desktop while I’m waiting for my co-worker to cave and tell me what they want. Eventually it comes. And it’s not bad. It’s a draft for an invitation email. Of course I’ll do that. No worries at all! I’ll just whip something up now.

6:00pm: I finish whipping something up, finish my actual prescribed tasks for the day (give or take), and close the laptop. Suddenly, my dining room is my own again. I have no trouble transitioning into after-work mode — I’m sorry if that’s annoying.

6:15pm: I head upstairs to finish getting ready, and I’m out the door by 6.30pm. On the walk over to my friend’s house, I check my email and see the yoga studio messaged. They’re sorry they didn’t see me. I’m sorry too, Yoga Studio. I think about how I’m blessed with so.much.time. and so.little.responsibility. I don’t have kids, or a commute. My work is flexible. My employers are kind. It really is quite ridiculous that I can’t keep up a few hours of stretching each week.

6:55pm: I arrive before I can really get into lecturing myself. The kitchen smells of onion and garlic and perfume and vanilla candles and suddenly everything is right with the world. We hug and make that “ahhh” sound friends make when they see each other and I hand over the wine I brought. She ushers me into the living room where we sit and talk about work and holidays and world peace and the fact our local shopping centre is actually really depressing now.

8:15pm: dinner is wonderful. We eat pasta and garlic bread and tender stem broccoli on the floor around her coffee table because the kitchen is currently more of a building site. She apologises for this. I tell her I quite like it, but I have a tendency to romanticise things like this. She laughs and tells me I’m ridiculous, and she’s right. But I still quite like it anyway.

10:35: I have stayed longer than I intended to. We are grown-ups with grown-up jobs and we both have work tomorrow, but we have one more anyway.

11:10pm: We both agree it was worth it. I order an Uber because it’s dark out now and I’m a woman. We hug and I clamber into the back of a Toyota and ask the driver if I’m okay to open a window. I look out at the streets as they whizz past, content. I smirk into my phone and book Hot Yoga for 7am.

About The Content Girl:

Opinions, insights, and the occasional marketing musing from a professional Content Writer giving writing in her own voice a go. You can expect:

Commentary on pop-culture/regular culture and the like
Insights/tips/information around professional Content Writing/Marketing and Digital Marketing
Personal essays (I’ll try to make these not insufferable, I swear)
Book reviews, recommendations, and roundups
The odd piece of flash fiction