Alexandra Cote 🚀

Are You Pretending to Love Work? – The Hustle Culture and False Expertise

Disclaimer: The comments below don’t apply to all workplaces and life situations. Change your tab if you’re a die-hard hustle supporter and come back in a couple of years.

A while ago I started a Reedit thread on how inhumane the hustle culture was.

Here’s what someone wrote:

My friends and I were talking about this today. Someone at his company committed suicide just last week and he’s still processing it.
We’re all working in tech in various fields and we were noting how fragile everyone’s mental health was. My UX designer is constantly in tears. My senior PM is often in the toilets crying.
I don’t think the picture is clear black and white, but I’m finding times much more stressful and when I look around me there’s a lot of anxiety and depression.

I hear news of workers committing suicide at work or on the basis of work at least weekly. But they happen DAILY if not hourly. Here’s a list of suicide rates by industry.

This alone without all the stress-related stats is enough to open our eyes to how huge the problem is. But are we aware of this?

I don’t have any numbers, yet from what I’ve seen, most of these people are over 30 which could mean they’ve been stuck in a rut for years and haven been postponing it. That’s just an assumption though but worth thinking of.

What we need to remember though is that these “numbers” and “percentages” are real people. Like you. Like me. Like us.

Low pay.

No job security.

Long work hours.

No free time.

Workplace bullying. [Yes, it’s still a thing.]

Overexertion.

High workloads.

Burnout.

All issues which start with management, specifically poor leadership. Not counting the 12.5/100,000 managers who are just slaves to the culture. I’ll get to this later.

It starts with a global system

Unfortunately, the current life system is keeping people stuck in jobs they don’t like and don’t want to do just because they need money. Simply put, they’re afraid they’ll go broke. In turn, they’re too scared to quit, too scared to say anything, to scared to keep living.

This also creates a false illusion that people are just obsessed with working.

A world where everyone is busy and everything they need to do at work is important. By nature, humans don’t value work alone. You love other things too, not just proactively contributing to the business world.

Life Advice, or How You Can Use It for Your Career

Or how everything you’ve ever been told is tied to your work.

But first:

A case against the 9 to 5

Live life your own way.

Do what you love.

Take time to spend with your friends.

Control your success.

All of these are crumpets of wisdom we’ve heard at some point, but how well do they apply for most of us?

We’re all ultimately caught up in a rat race for life or death, resorting to the typical 9-to-5 job that will make our rent and put food on the table.

So where can you fit in some freedom?

Truth is we’re all essentially different human beings. And it’s already a common fact that the same work schedule or environment does not work for everyone. I’ve previously tackled the issue of different career paths you can take in life and the same diversity applies when it comes to your schedule and life choices that gradually add up to help us fulfill our dreams.

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The original vision around the 8-hours of work/day was proposed to bring in balance (equal time for work, downtime, and sleep) and, believe it or not, it was much welcomed considering people were working 10+ hours. And in physically demanding jobs.

If we take a quick look at the past we can make a simple presumption that if people where working 10-18 hours/day during the Industrial Revolution, it’s really about time for a change to happen in today’s age too.

What kind of change?

Tilting the balance towards people’s wellness. No more trying to put work in perfect equilibrium with the rest of our lives. For many people, there just can’t be such a thing. 8 hours + a few more for commute and errands drains us day by day, leaving you with literally zero time to actually do something worthwhile for the remainder of the day.

There’s More Than In-Office and Remote Career Paths to Choose From

The general debate when talking about career paths is always around remote and regular office work.

But there are so many other opportunities people have already taken advantage of to improve their work lives.

Freelancing, entrepreneurship, side gigs, book writing, dog walking, recording audiobooks, volunteering, research studies, or just simply crafting something and selling it occasionally.

Just think about this yourself for a second or ask a couple of your friends. Most of them will have some kind of an idea as to what their ideal “way of making money looks like”:

“I want to work on an island.”

“I am a nomad at heart so I want to spend each year in a different country.”

How to Save Money When It Comes to Your Digital Marketing Efforts

The thing I like talking about the most is saving money. But instead of writing a boring post on how you can set aside 60% of your income, I decided to put together a quick guide to reduce the costs when creating your digital marketing budget plan.

Here are my best tips for reconsidering how you allocate your budget for marketing this year:

Do you really need that tool?

Everyone’s paying for editorial calendar tools, social media monitoring software, and even writing optimization or reporting add-ons. A small or medium business website won’t need to spend money for these.

There’s honestly only a few tools you’ll really require to run your marketing campaigns. Google Analytics (free), Google Docs (free), Google Sheets (free), an email marketing platform like Mailchimp (free up to 2,000 contacts), the MozBar (free), and a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush. You can even do without the latter ones if you mix a bunch of other free tools like LSIGraph, Google Trends, AnswerThePublic, and SEO analyzer software like SEO Site Checkup, Alexa, SEOptimer, NeilPatel’s SEO Analyzer, PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, or the Google Search Console.

Did you know that a larger percentage of the marketing budget for most companies goes into paying for software and not paying the employees?

The key is to pair them all together. Don’t worry though. You only have to do SEO audits every now and then to stay updated so this won’t take away much of your time.

You can also check out my visual guide to SEO if you’re not yet familiar with the field.

Or you can just use the default SEO audit option under your browser’s Developer tools:

Cool, so where do I keep my editorial calendar?

AI in Digital Marketing? It’s Already Well Beyond Reality

Artificial intelligence will inevitably be all around us one day. At work, at home, on the street, maybe even in our dreams.

Heck, it’s already everywhere.

So should marketers be preoccupied with learning all about it?

To a certain extent, definitely!

“But AI is so, you know, for techies.”

🙄 No. You’re already using it actively to begin with. So I’m sure you have some kind of understanding of how it works. You just don’t know it yet.

Fancy buzzword or not, it’s definitely not something that should intimidate you.

I don’t even need to list a bunch of benefits. Just keep this in mind: Google’s algorithm is AI itself.

Making recommendations – Nearest neighbor classifier

One central use of AI ( data mining and machine learning in this case) is for creating predictions and recommendations for your clients (done using the nearest neighbor classifier if you want a fancier term).

This type of system is commonly used to select songs, videos, movies, items, or other types of content that’s already similar to what one user is commonly searching for. The principle behind this system is that a user is more likely to click on items that are similar to previous searches, thus matching his/her interests.