In my internship with Impact Hub Madrid, I’m not going to be working in one specific field. In the upcoming weeks I will be working with the consulting team, with marketing, and with one of the event coordinators. Since I am not working in exclusively marketing or communications, this means that I will be working on a few projects at once and splitting my time between the marketing& communications, consulting, and human resources teams, making time management extremely important to ensure that I am keeping on top of everything I’m doing.

To help keep myself organized and prioritizing my tasks, I spent some time this past week organizing all of the documents and slide shows that I have been given access to for projects that I’m going to be working on. The team that I am working with has a shared drive on google where all the documents and projects that the team is working on are kept. With the view that I have now, all those documents are under the same file, so I have been organizing everything under my account according to the department that it is for and grouping everything for the same project together. I’m also going to be working with a member of the team to set up a schedule for what projects are the most important, so I am able to visualize my work in a calendar and help with managing my time. I’m going to make a point to prioritize those that are higher up on the list to make sure that all deadlines are met. Making sure that everything is organized in a way that makes sense for me is going to help me manage my time well.

Another task that I have been working on is translating presentations for the marketing and communications teams. Several of the presentations that they have made are going to be used in activities across various hubs in the Iberian Peninsula for internal meetings, as well as events for potential clients. The team has wanted my help with revising any translations that have already been done or translating directly from Spanish, so they have those presentations prepared depending on what language the client or group speaks. For all the documents and presentations that I have been translating, I have created a separate folder that contains a copy of the original text and then a version of the translated text. This way the team can look back and see the original copy or make any changes further down the road. I have all of the presentations ordered from most urgent to least urgent to help me better manage my time and keep up with what needs to be done sooner than others.

Another thing I do to help myself keep track, is taking a small notebook to work and recording what I have done each day; what projects I’m currently working on and all details such as start date and daily progress, information that I learn in team meetings. Having everything written down helps ensure that I’m not forgetting any information that I need to know or learned during meetings. Being able to look back at what I have recorded for the last few days helps me visualize how long a project has been going on and helps me have a mental note of if a project needs to be moving faster or is fine at the pace it is going currently.

              Since I am working with a few different teams, someone will often message me asking if I am interested in attending a regional meeting or a local event that one of the Impact Hub offices is hosting. I plan on almost always saying yes to events or meetings since I think it will help me to better know what types of activities the Impact hub is working on currently as well as meet more people from other departments that I wouldn’t normally. Even though I always want to attend something, I might not have time, or something might overlap with my schedule. Having an organized and up to date calendar helps me manage my time and helps me avoid a situation where I have back-to-back meetings in different locations or have to cancel something because my schedule is already full.