Stephanie Krieg
It’s been a minute, but I am so excited to bring you a brand new submission for our Day in the Life of a Nonprofit Communicator series! This series lets you describe your workday in your own words. I would love to start sharing your days again so submit your day by filling out the form at the end of this post.
Stephanie’s Bio
Stephanie Krieg, MSHC, CHES, is an advocate for health promotion and communication. She holds a Master’s degree in Health Communication, a Bachelor’s in Health Promotion and Education, and is a Certified Health Education Specialist (CHES). Stephanie has devoted her professional journey to empowering individuals and communities in making well-informed decisions regarding their health. Her expertise is centered around crafting and executing highly effective health promotion strategies, specifically tailored to address diverse public health concerns within the cancer community.
When Stephanie isn’t educating and advocating for the cancer community she can be found spending time with family and friends near some great cheese and even better wine, out on coffee talks with friends, or making memories with the amazing tiny human her and her husband have helped create.
She works at home and this is her typical day:
Before 8:00 am: I wake up at 4 am to kick start my day. I am a part time fitness instructor and have been for 15 years, so I have two dedicated AM classes that I teach at 5 and 6 am. My motto is that there’s nothing a little caffeine, cackles, and CrossFit can’t fix.
I get home at 7 am just in time to get my 11 month old son up and ready for the day. We spend some time cuddling, having breakfast, and watching Sesame Street before one of his grandparents meets us at the house for pick up so I can start my workday.
8:00 am to 10:00 am: I start my workday at 8 am – just me, my computer, and my to-do list. Both my husband and I work from home, so in the mornings we usually get organized together. We review our to-do lists, meeting schedule, and chat about big initiatives. We both work in the public health space, so its nice to bounce ideas off of one another and get a different perspective.
I have both a physical and digital to-do list. My physical one is a list of what I want to get done that day, and my digital one is an excel spreadsheet with my open projects. I leave notes daily on whats been done, what needs doing, and any significant updates/documents linked related to each project. I lead a department of two, plus an intern, and we’ve all adapted to using open project spreadsheets to stay organized and on top of the variety of requests we receive.
I finish this part of my morning reviewing emails to make sure nothing urgent has come up while I start tackling the day.
10:00 am to 12:00 pm: The thick of my workday is between 9 am and 2pm. I am most productive in the mornings, so I tend to schedule important meetings and my most comprehensive work during these times.
I have been working outside of a traditional office since 2018 and I find that I focus so much more this way versus an office environment. I check in with my teammates using text/zoom/g-chat/email, and I block focus time on my calendar so I can concentrate on projects. I spend a lot of my time in HubSpot, Canva, and researching ovarian cancer topics for educational campaigns, programs, tools, and educational resources.
As the Communications Director, I also spend a lot of my time in strategy meetings and meetings in general – being looped in across happenings in the organization allows me to strategize early and often about how to communicate our impact and tell our story.
I also use project management tools like Asana to track my time on different initiatives. If something is taking up a significant amount of my time, I work to delegate responsibilities across our team so that we can balance workloads and prioritize a work-life balance.
Speaking of work-life balance – I always block out time for lunch with my husband. Its our connection time in the middle of the day without interruptions from kids, work, or life in general. We will eat or go on a walk around the neighborhood with our dogs.
12:00pm – 2:00 pm: After lunch I take a look at the remainder of my to-do list and prioritize. If you work at a nonprofit, you wear a lot of hats and you know that not everything gets done within the time you hoped it would. I reprioritize if needed and connect with my teammates to see if any of them need support with reprioritization.
This is also the time I usually schedule my team one-on-one’s. Its a nice way to wind down the workday checking in with my team about their workloads, follow up on their questions, and support them. I don’t drink coffee after 11am, but I am a snacker, so this is the time I snag a snack and give myself some grace – I’ve been up for a long time!
2:00pm – 4:00 pm: I take the last part of my day to fill out my spreadsheet with important updates, create the next day’s to-do list, catch up on emails, throw in laundry, tidy up, and start dinner.
My husband and I do a divide and conquer before our son gets home at 4 pm so that we can spend the evening uninterrupted with him.
After 4:00 pm: Unless there is something super urgent like a grant request or an event, I am offline at 4 pm. My son is home and I spend my time with him and my husband. We go on a walk, have dinner together and play. My coworkers and boss are all really respectful of my time and its my favorite thing about working where I do.
You can’t pour from an empty cup, and this is the time I take to unwind and make memories.
Thanks for sharing your day, Stephanie!
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