An Honest Day in my Life as a Latina UX Designer Working From Home

What's up? How's it going? Welcome. Happy Monday. It is Monday morning. Just kidding. It's Monday afternoon. It's 1220 and I'm not going to lie. I had a pretty like rushed morning and early afternoon. I didn't wake up when I wanted to wake up. I felt like so tired this morning. I didn't even like fully get out of bed until 10. I took a meeting from bed, obviously with my camera off. Like I hope they couldn't tell that I was still horizontal. Then took another meeting and I had to like brush my teeth during that meeting, also camera off, but I had to like eat while I was on that meeting. And just like when I have mornings like this, I just feel so like icky. I don't know how to describe it. I just feel like more stressed. I feel more overwhelmed. I don't feel as motivated. I love watching day in my life vlogs. Those are probably the videos I watch the most, honestly. Yeah, no, definitely the videos I watch the most. And obviously I love making those kinds of videos. So last night I like charged my camera. I, you know, wiped out a NSD card for memory space and I was like all ready. And this morning I just didn't wake up in time to do my morning routine. I just didn't have time to like really turn on the camera and start the video. And I wasn't gonna film because I was like, you know what, this is a crap day. It's not going as I expected. It's not going as I planned, but I decided, you know what, I'm gonna film. I'm going to show them that not every single day as I am a UX designer, as a UX designer is perfect. I don't always have time in the mornings for, you know, my morning making a fresh brew of coffee and like having a meditation and stretching and going for a walk and all those things that I love to do in the morning. But sometimes you just don't wake up in time. Sometimes you hit snooze and sometimes it just doesn't go as you expected or as you wanted it to go. So that being said, hi, my name is Greta. Greta Luna Priego. I am a very proud Latina UX designer, woman in tech, whoop, whoop. I'm living in New York City. Oh, and happy 2022. Oh my gosh. I honestly, I don't know. Okay, I want to quickly chat about this because this is something that I've been feeling recently with the new year. I just feel so much pressure. Pressure in terms of making this the best year yet or pressure of achieving all of the goals that I have or pressure of making this a better year than last year. Last year was amazing. I moved. I got a raise. I got to make more friends. I got to travel a little bit. So, you know, not to say that last year was bad in any shape or form, it was great. I'm super grateful for the year that I had, but I just feel like with every new year, there's this pressure. There's this pressure to make it better than last year. There's this pressure to be, to start it off strong. There's this pressure to be highly motivated, highly productive, highly creative, whatever it may be. At first, I was really excited for the new year, but now I just feel this overwhelming sense of pressure. And I don't know if it's social media. It probably is. I feel like a lot of negative emotions can be brought back, like can be traced back to social media, unfortunately. As much as I, you know, obviously engage a lot in social media, it is sometimes detrimental for your mental health, but I don't know if it's that. I don't know. I don't know what it is. I just felt anxiety, just thinking about everything that I want to do this year, feeling like I'm running out of time for whatever reason. I don't know. I don't know where it's coming from. And that kind of translated into this morning where I just felt so overwhelmed with the idea that I wanted to film a video, even though I love filming videos, but I just felt so overwhelmed by it. And what I'm trying to do when I feel this way is what I'm doing now is just to do it. Stop thinking about it, Greta. Just do it. Just stop planning so much. I think I'm such a planner and I love to make things absolutely perfect. I think it's important to just stop waiting. Stop waiting for the right time, the right people, your energy to increase. I mean, obviously there's better times for certain things than others. Like would my video have been slightly better if I would have filmed it when I did wake up early? Yes, maybe. It's important to not sacrifice progress for perfection. That's something that I've really learned and tried to embody this year. I think that it's important to just put things out there, to do things, even if you know it's not gonna be perfect, but that's how you get better. Just by putting things out there, by doing it, doing it constantly, whatever that may be for you. If that's like painting, you can take all the classes that you want. You can wait until you feel like it's the perfect moment for you to make your first creation because you feel fully ready. But that's not how you learn. You learn by just trying and making a first painting that might be crappy and then being like, okay, this was really ugly, but at least now I know how to improve the next time. So basically what I'm saying is that I felt this pressure of feeling like I needed to be absolutely perfect and needed all of my ducks in a row. But sometimes you just need to do. You just need to act. You know what? It's better to have a video, right, than not to have one because I wasn't, I didn't feel like it was gonna be good enough. So yes, it is Monday. It is 12.30 p.m. already. I had breakfast, honestly, like an hour ago, like at 11.30. Just to give you a recap of my morning so far, I started it off with a team meeting. I had that with my UX manager, with the other UX designers on my immediate team. It was just like a touch base of what everyone's doing. We also chatted about our weekends, setting the tone for the week. So that was at 10. That's the meeting I took from bed because I was, I just could not get up. So I went to that meeting. That's fine. And then after that, I had, at 10.45, I had a stand-up. So I have my like overarching team. And then within this overarching team, we're split up into different squads, I guess you could call it. And my specific squad had a stand-up this morning. That was with my product manager of the squad. I'm the UX designer on that squad. And then all the other rest of the people on the call were developers. So basically I usually give my update first in the lineup and then all the developers will go one after the other. We'll talk about what we did on Friday. We'll talk about what we're gonna do today, Monday. And then we'll talk about any blockers, anything we need from anyone, any help we need, et cetera. Yeah, so that was that at 10.45. And then I had another meeting at 11. And that meeting was about a specific project that I'm working on. So that was with the, this is a different product manager that is specifically working on this project I'm working on. The other UX designer that's working on it. My manager was on that call. Some people on the business operation side were on that call. And we just basically chatted about a presentation that we're giving on Thursday. So we're giving a big presentation about the work that we've done so far for this project. And we're giving it to a group, a large group of product managers, not just product managers, but mainly product managers, also UX designers. And these are people from all over the organization. But we had a meeting today just to talk about how the presentation is gonna go, who's gonna talk about what during the presentation, what we wanna talk about during the presentation, et cetera. So that was that. It was more of a planning workshop type of meeting. And now it is technically lunchtime, but I'm actually, because I had breakfast so late, I wouldn't even call it breakfast. It was basically brunch. I had brunch so late. I am not hungry. I have my coffee. This is my leftover coffee that I put in the fridge from yesterday. So another main reason I feel kind of stressed is because I recently got back to New York and I have no groceries. I've been eating out so much. And that's not an excuse. I really could have gotten groceries this weekend. I had a friend visiting. And just when you have people visiting, I just feel like they wanna go out and see the city. So we were out seeing the city, but I need to get groceries at some point today. Okay, it's gonna happen at some point. I put it in my bullet journal. You know it's real when it's in my bullet journal. I'm gonna go at some point. I think I might go after work. My next meeting is at one, and that is with one other UX designer. And we're gonna be talking about a project that we are both working on. We're teaming up. He is actually from a different squad than I am, but we're teaming up on this project and we're going to be working on it together. We're gonna have kind of like a touch-based meeting. And by the end of the meeting, hopefully we'll have like an idea of like who's doing what and our next steps and what our end goal is, et cetera, et cetera. So it's more of just like a chat. But right now it's 12.45 basically. So I have like 15 minutes. I'm going to sip my coffee. I wrote my to-do list actually last night for today. So that's great. I love when I do that because I just already know what I need to get done. According to my bullet journal, the first thing I actually need to do is update my work log. So this is like a personal thing that I do. At the end of every week, I like to write a little list of everything that I did, at least the major things that I got done that week, just so that I know what I did. Cause sometimes I honestly forget like what week I did what. Like someone will ask me like, oh, when, you know, did you talk to Becky yesterday? Or did you talk to Becky last week? And I'll be like, let me check on that. And then I'll check and I'll see like, had a conversation with Becky, blah, blah, blah. We talked about this. And it just like helps me remember what I did. And it's also great if you want to get promoted, you can refer back to this like work log and you can see everything that you did, all the things that you contributed to. It's like your backup ammunition. Like no one can tell you nothing. So I'm going to update that now and basically write out everything that I did last week. And then write out what I've done so far today. Yeah, I think that'll get me to one o'clock. I'll meet with the other UX designer and we'll chat. And then we'll see where the rest of the day goes. At that point, I probably will be hungry. So it's not too late. It's not too late to have a good day. Okay, meeting is done. It went super well. We just chatted about how we're gonna divide the work and what our end goal is. Now I'm going to be designing my part based off of what we chatted about. And then we're going to meet tomorrow to talk about our updates, what this other UX designer designed and what I designed. And then we're just going to chat and have kind of like a working session tomorrow with our manager because he kind of wants to be involved in the conversation. I am really hungry, but I really want to just go outside. It's like a really pretty, it's like so sunny and just like blue sky. It's super sunny. It's really pretty outside. I don't mind the cold when it's sunny, but when it's dark or raining, girl, let's see. Check if I have any other meetings today. Nope, no more meetings today. That's great. It's only 2.20 and I am done. I don't know if you can hear my radiator. She is going off. Actually, I'm totally kidding. I got up to put on my jacket and I got so hungry. No, no, no, I simply cannot walk right now because I'm so hungry. Okay, so lunch has been had. Also, sorry, my radiator is screeching again. I don't know what she's trying to tell me. I think she's just turning on, but I had to do some work while I was eating. I hate eating and working at the same time. I just feel like I can't, I should be enjoying my food, but like when I'm working, I'm not really enjoying my food. Because I don't have any other meetings, I'm going to do a midday-ish, not really midday, kind of end of the day-ish grocery run. The work that I have to do later tonight is that design stuff that I was talking to you about. I met with that UX designer at one and we talked about what we need to do. And essentially, now we're breaking off and he's getting his part done, I'm doing my part. And then tomorrow, we are going to come back together. We're going to join forces and show each other the work that we did. Okay, let's go. I'm going to switch to my phone because this camera, she's a little big and a lot of people, not a lot of people, people IRL ask where my phone cases are from and this one is from Casetify. I love it, you can customize it. And that's what I did, I thought she was so cute. ♪♪♪ It's called Bengal Spice and it is not caffeinated. It literally tastes almost like a chai, it's similar chai vibe. It has like cardamom and cinnamon, but it is so good and we drink it with some oat milk. And I drink this like almost every day, it's so good. And that's that on that. Now I'm back at my desk. Like I mentioned earlier, unfortunately, today was one of those days where I just didn't get a lot done. I don't know, it's so crazy how your morning and I made an entire video if you want to watch it. I do my entire ideal morning routine that I would love to have every single day, working on it. And now I'm back at my desk. It is literally 6.30, just crazy. So it's actually, it's literally dark outside. Most of my team has logged off. We usually log off at like a reasonable hour, like five to six, sometimes 6.30 if it's like super busy. But I am re-logging in. Logging in as in like, we don't actually log in. I just mean that we, like if we are working, we'll have, we use Slack. So we'll have our little green active button on if we are working. So I turned mine off while I was grocery shopping. I had like a little BRB next to my name just to let people know that I'm not like physically at my desk. I am looking at my bullet journal just to see everything that I have to do. I did barely anything from my to-do list. And my to-do list was very long. I want to work on those designs that I mentioned that he and I spoke about. We decided who's doing what. So I'm working on the desktop version and he'll be doing the other version. We are working with the present, not with the past. As, I don't know who says that, but as I say. Okay. Wow, this is professional YouTuber, YouTuber stuff right now. I mean, the lighting is impeccable. The angle is just magnificent. Okay, obviously this is a terrible angle, terrible lighting because I have my mood lighting on. I like to turn on my, so I got the Philips light bulbs and I love them so much. They just like, they create this like nighttime cozy mood. But yes, so I finished that work that I was talking about. I made mocks. I basically was on Figma all evening, just making those mocks for the meeting tomorrow. And I'm ready to share it with that UX designer and my UX manager. Sometimes that's how it'd be. Sometimes that's how it is being a UX designer. You do have to work a little bit later at times when you have to prepare for something the next day. I don't have as many meetings in the morning tomorrow, which would be nice. I don't have like the usual standup, standup for us, which is when we give our updates of what we did yesterday, what we're gonna do today, any blockers we have. That is Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So since tomorrow's Tuesday, we don't have that tomorrow morning. So that's nice. I don't have the team meeting that I had this morning. So tomorrow seems a little bit less heavy on the morning meetings, which will be great for me. So maybe I'll have that morning routine that I wanted. But yeah, that is my day. I hope this was interesting. I hope you enjoyed. Or if you have any other questions, girl, guy, hit me up. I got you. Follow me on Instagram. I'm always on my DMs in there, talking to people, chatting with people. I love connecting with people on there. So yeah, feel free to hang out with me over there. The party doesn't stop. Just as Pimple would say, que no para la fiesta. Is that what he would say? I hope you have a great day tomorrow. Or if you're watching this in the morning, I hope you have a great rest of your day. And I will see you in the next one. Bye. Besos. ♪♪