Interview with Mary, a remote senior marketing content writer who maximizes downtime

For a past job at a B2B tech marketing company, I worked remotely for five years out of my house in Massachusetts, with occasional visits to the headquarters on Long Island in New York. That experience taught me habits on what to do and what not to do when remote working, which I've used at jobs since when working from home.

In my current position at ConnectLeader, I have a commute of five miles, but we've all been remote working for the past weeks. Luckily, it's something that's not new to me—minus my son, who's a junior in high school, also being here at the same time and doing remote schoolwork.

I'm the senior marketing content writer for a sales software company. So my job entails talking to our sales reps and our customers to learn what our customer pain points are and then translating that into website copy, blog posts, eBooks, social media posts, case studies, PPC ad copy, and flyers for our tradeshows.

Since I'm a one-person marketing writing team, I wear quite a few hats, but that keeps me busy.

And working from home gives me plenty of time to have heads-down writing time without distractions from people stopping by my cube at the office.

I am an early bird, so I typically work from 8 until 4:30 PM, with a break at lunch to spend time with my son, and eat some food. I may also go outside for a few minutes dressed up as an inflatable pink T-Rex or an inflatable unicorn to entertain the neighbors by doing jumping jacks in the street, taking a stroll up the street, or just being silly.

My son records these antics, and then they're posted each day to my Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn (thankfully, I'm a "creative" so quirky works!) to provide a smile to friends, family, coworkers, and work acquaintances.

Each week, there's a weekly sales meeting to start off Monday morning, and I sit in on that through Zoom to see my coworkers and hear even more about what the customers are saying.

I sure do! I have a pretty large bedroom, so one half of it has my work desk, comfy chair, and my laptop. I keep oldies music on in the background just for some kind of noise —and of course that gets turned off during any meetings.

I use SmartSheets to keep track of what I'm working on, as well as a good ol' Franklin Planner.

Yes, I'm old school! There's just something about writing things down that helps me stay on track.

I write everything down to make sure that I'm not forgetting anything and to stay on track. That includes writing things down in a Franklin Covey planner and also in a notebook for further information from meetings or notes/ideas for future blog posts and content.

I try to be in bed and reading a book instead of being on my phone by about 10:30 PM, so I get a solid number of hours of sleep for a smooth start each morning.

Sometimes, of course, I wind up mindlessly playing Candy Crush or scrolling through Facebook instead of reading, and I can always tell when I've done that because it throws my sleep off. So taking that half-hour of not looking at a screen really helps.

I love that I can have music playing in the background while I'm working for that extra spark of creativity.

Sure, I could play music through headphones at the office—and have at past jobs—but at my current job, when I'm at the office, I learn more from listening to the sales reps pitching our sales acceleration software solutions on calls, so I avoid headphones there.

I also enjoy that I've made a clear time frame for myself that when I shut down the laptop at 4:30 PM, that's it for the day.

When I've worked remotely before, I could easily find myself working until eight or later (sometimes until 11) at night just because I could, but that wasn't healthy, because we all need downtime.

The one thing I miss the most is not seeing my coworkers every day, because they're all great and witty.

But I still get to "see" them every week through Zoom meetings, so that helps.