Day in the Life: Digital Director

Andima Umoren, Octane’s Director of Digital shares her daily activities from sun up to sun down, and how she remains organized in a field that requires knowledge about everything digital, from SEO to running a successful e-marketing campaign.

5:30 – I wake up. Actually, this is just the time I want to wake up, so I can meditate and go to yoga. Catch me in a month, I’m working on it.

6:30 – My alarm clock goes off and I snooze it until 7:00 AM

7:00 – I’m finally waking up. I grab my phone and get caught up on emails and spend more time than I should on Instagram.

7:00 – 9:00 – We can fast-forward through all this stuff. This isn’t a fashion blog, you don’t need to know my skincare regimen.

9:30 – 9:45 – I arrive at work and head straight to the kitchen to grab some coffee and water. Then I spend the next couple minutes reviewing my to-do lists on Asana and organizing my thoughts. Then I write down what meetings, priority items, and tasks I want to get done for the day down in my notebook.

9:45 -10:15 – If you work in digital, you know that the platforms you use to carry out your work change every single day. Maybe Facebook makes a change to its advertising platform or Snapchat releases a new filter. As a digital professional, you need to know about it. So, how do I keep up-to-date?  Twitter! Twitter is my go-to platform for news and updates. And yes, I have an embarrassing amount of Twitter Lists. (Breakfast normally happens around this time as well.)

10:00 – 10:30 – After browsing my Twitter feed, I conduct my second dive into my emails and start to deal with the emails I flagged earlier in the day as easy “to-do’s” and make a note to tackle the other emails later.

10:30 – 1:00 – I read an article that General Assembly shared about being productive, so I’ve been practicing some of the strategies in the article for a month or so. It really works for me! I reserve my mornings for working through my most intensive projects, i.e. presentations, strategies, writing, taxing analytics projects, etc. I reserve meetings and less time-consuming tasks for after lunch.  So, around this time my door is closed and I’m working through a time-sensitive deliverable with a couple of coffee breaks in-between.

1:00 – 1:30 – Lunchtime! More details that you don’t need because this isn’t Refinery29.

1:30 – 2:30 – Back to the to-do list. Around this time, I’m trying to knock out as many small tasks as I can. Making an update on one of our WordPress hosted websites. Reviewing staff editorial calendars. Proofreading a blog post. Even posting an ad for a UX Freelancer. The list goes on.

2:00 – 3:00 – It’s brainstorm time. Typically, our Senior Account Executives are the one’s holding brainstorms. But when the Octane Digital team gets to launch a “digital only” campaign it’s all-hands-on-deck. As a boutique PR firm, we like to invite all staff members to brainstorm.

3:00 – 3:30 – I take another “educational break” to browse my Twitter timeline and read articles about the latest updates in digital marketing. I make it a practice of sharing articles with the digital team and letting them know how any updates may change the way that we work. We use Slack as our internal content sharing platform.

3:30 – 5:00 – I get my second wind of energy in the afternoon after lunch time restlessness wears off. This is typically where I dive into wrapping up the longer project I focused on in the morning.