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A day in the life of a CMO: The ultimate productivity cheat sheet you need

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I am Aulia Halimatussadiah, the co-founder and CMO of Storial.co.

Writing is my go-to sanctuary and with over 30 published books under my kitty, I now run Indonesia’s only, online self-publishing platform with 150,000 writers Storial.co. It is a social storytelling platform that allows writers to do direct publishing digitally, get direct feedback from readers and directly monetise their book per chapter.

I am also a marketing pro and the Co-Managing Director for Girls in Tech Indonesia. I have been a mentor for young mentees in entrepreneurship.

If you are wondering how I juggle it all, here are my daily productivity hacks. Worth a steal!

I wake up at 5.30 am and start my day with the intention of having a better day than yesterday.

I listen to a guided meditation by Dr Joe Dispenza for 20 minutes.

I sit at my home office and start writing the things that I’m grateful for in my gratitude journal. (I’ve been doing this practice since 2014 and it has helped me a lot to keep myself optimistic).

I am a checklist person, so I start making my to-do list of the day on my paper notebook. I start checking emails that are mostly related to approving something (press releases, storyboards, campaign ideas, etcetra) and make connections with potential partners.

Also Read: 5 simple yet effective ways to enhance remote team productivity

I have signed up for automatic email reports on the things that I want to measure like the number of newly registered users, active readers, and writers, number of chapters written and bought. I study the data and find out ways to optimise traffic sources and make new strategies.

I prepare for a morning meeting, two hours before it starts.

I listen to an audiobook at Audible while I shower and eat. The latest book that I listen to titled, This Could Be Our Future by Yancey Strickler, Co-Founder of Kickstarter. I like this book for it is offering a concept to build a society that looks beyond money and toward maximising the values that make life worth living.

I read a book on Kindle through the cab ride. This time, it is a spiritual book by a Russian quantum physicist Vadim Zeland. I like to have a strong positive start in the morning with good books.

At the office, I meet with my team, update the status of current marketing campaigns and review the success as well as planning for our next campaigns. We are in the business of supporting our writers to get exposure to more readers. We believe that everyone should have a chance to express themselves in writing and be rewarded for the effort they make in creating their stories.

I prefer lunch meetings with investors and mentors. I update him about our three times growth in revenue this month, our partnerships line ups and our plans for 2020. As a good mentor as he always been, he never throws us any compliments, just an ‘almost compliment’ such as, “Not bad, la!”

Also Read: Indonesia’s Storial, the startup that will fuel your literary ambition

I use calls with foreign investors to reevaluate our direction. They give us great feedback on what the industry needs and expects from us. My CEO and I usually can execute one or two initiatives after these calls.

I like to use the afternoons to go to the gym using the brand new MRT in Indonesia. I enjoy my time pondering while walking at Jakarta’s sidewalks and grateful for new developments in Jakarta. While I’m on the treadmill, I continue listening to my Audiobook and make a little progress, as I never run more than 10 minutes.

I support a cause related to youth, women, and refugees in Indonesia. I visited refugee learning centres in Jakarta to see how can I help more in their facility. Refugees in Indonesia cannot work and cannot go to school. They need more volunteers to teach refugees kids some math, English, Bahasa Indonesia and basic skill to use a computer.

I catch up with my best friends over dinner and they are all mostly entrepreneurs themselves. Our conversation topics would be around fundraising, growth strategy, reaching KPIs, managing team, juggling personal life and staying sane in the process.

I try my best to sleep around 10.30PM, while reevaluating my day, what and how I can do better that day, I listen to any random guided meditation on Youtube and fell asleep.

I guess a day in the life of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) sounds like a normal day in the life of another person. It’s just sprinkled with tons of empathy, curiosity, patience, excel sheets, PowerPoint presentations, and a mess of data on her plate.

Bon Appétit!

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