A great, hard year
Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of leaving my agency job. The day after is the one-year anniversary of my first gig as an independent digital strategy consultant.
It’s been a great, hard year. Since then, I’ve:
- helped a leading charity engage and support its volunteers by creating the strategy, IA and content model for a new volunteer-facing website;
- gone into a prison to carry out interviews as part of the discovery for a campaign to recruit more people to volunteer with prisoners;
- created a strategy and content model for a new app to help people support friends and family with their emotional health;
- written a guide to using emoji to talk about emotions as part of a wider piece of training on communicating via web chat;
- helped a charity pin down its personality and translate that into a refreshed brand voice through collaborative workshops with its team;
- planned and run a conference — Curio — with my friend Lou;
- done a webinar for InVision;
- sold some of my photos;
- done pro bono work with the great team at Lighthouse,
- partnered up with talented people I admire on some of my projects (thanks Jonny, Jo, Ben, Miguel, and Paul and Sophie at Lark);
- worked with some great agency partners (thanks Sarah and Pegasus, Richard and Brilliant Noise, Poke, Clearleft).
The ‘great’ is work that perfectly met the brief I set for myself when I started out. Turning down projects from companies whose values don’t match my own. Feeling proud of what I’ve produced.
The ‘hard’ is the crippling self doubt. Constant fear of failure. Working too much. Balancing being a self-critical approval-hungry introvert with having to promote myself.
I want my next year of work to have more of the ‘great’, and a different kind of ‘hard’. More partnerships with organisations that make the world a better, fairer place. More work that’s hard because it stretches and challenges me, rather than because there’s just too much of it. More days off. Less doubt.
Here’s to year two.
