Hello from Palm Springs!

I’m writing this to you from my adorable Airbnb in the desert! (ICYMI, you can watch my little house tour reel here).

I got here on Friday and it’s been a bustling few days with friends, but I finally unpacked and today is a full work day for me, which I’m excited about.

Ever since I started working for myself, I really struggle with working remote, outside of my routine and my office, so it’s a bit of an adjustment for me. I’ve had a lot more anxiety lately, but I’m sure I just need a little more time to get settled and create my own routines here…I felt like this when I went to LA too.

I had BIG goals of creating content every day here, and I’m starting to realize that I was a bit over ambitious (shocker).

I tend to set big goals and then when the time comes to execute them, I kind of crumble with all of the pressure and expectations and ended up freezing and stressing myself out…when I’M the one putting the pressure on MYSELF, for literally no reason??

See, I wanted a shiny deck with content pillars and a whole personal content strategy planned out before I came here…but I think one thing that marketers, especially social media marketers, struggle with is wanting everything to be set up and “perfect” before we actually start creating.

And we can waste so much time on the strategy that we never actually get around to creating.

When you work in brand marketing, it can be SO hard to let go of the desire to have everything be perfectly on brand…but I can already tell that being here is going to be a good exercise in forcing me to let go a bit and JUST POST!

For example, in the house tour reel I posted today, I just used the native captions sticker instead of taking 30min-1 hour to create custom captions in Inshot. I just… didn’t have the time.

And no one died. It’s fine. The captions sticker is fine, even though it like, pains me because I know it’s not the best content I could create. But it was the best content I could create TODAY.

It’s going to be hard to balance freelance work, content creation, AND spending time with my friends and family visiting, so I’ll need to be more efficient with my time, because I’m not sitting around in my office on my laptop all day.

So if you’re suffering from posting standstill…you’re not alone. Just try to focus on the best content you can create today, with whatever limited time and resources you have.

I also think this is generally the type of content that is performing best these days anyway…it’s less about picture perfect curation and more about just showing up consistently to your audience.

My friend Kirbie Johnson was talking about this on her IG Stories the other day, using the example of trying on Skims swim, and basically saying how millennials are so trained to create this “curated” content where we would shoot the swim to look as good as possible, whereas Gen Z just wants to see you try it on in real time in your room and see what it actually looks like on a real body.

There is a dramatic shift happening with Reels and TikTok now, where posting consistently and creating real, trustworthy content is more important than the aesthetic, and I think it’s in all of our best interests! We just have to re-train ourselves and all of the former “best practices” that were ingrained in us through the OG Instagram age.

Speaking of TikTok…that will be my next newsletter! I came here with the goal of posting 2-3x a day on TikTok AND creating a brand new TikTok channel focused on marketing…so we’ll see how that goes. So far I have posted 0 times lol.

But Coachella is coming up, and this will be the FIRST Coachella where TikTok and Reels are dominating…isn’t that wild!? I can’t wait to see how it unfolds on social.

Anyway, I just wanted to check in with y’all and say hi!

If you have any requests for content from me, just hit reply to this email and let me know 🥰

💖 Taylor