Alex Moses is the Marketing Manager at Study Space HQ, an online video learning platform based on the Australian curriculum. He also work as a Digital Marketing Manager at the Sadaqa Welfare Fund.

This conversation is brought to you by HelloFresh, delivering delicious ingredients and simple recipes straight to your doorstep each week. Save 40% off your first HelloFresh box with Balance The Grind.

1) To kick things off, could you tell us a little about your background and career?

I’ve always had this huge fascination with telling stories and pictures through video and photo. I picked up a camera at 15 years old using my total life savings which I had saved up working a retail job that paid horribly!

This would end up being a turning point in my life that directed me to my current marketing roles, being able to use a tool or piece of technology to tell a story digitally and make someone feel something.

This love of storytelling shaped me and changed the way I thought, and so after graduating out of WSU with a bachelor of business with a major in Marketing, I was lucky enough to be offered marketing roles straight off the bat.

I have an affinity for technology and data having studied programming and data science I found myself thriving in the digital marketing role which balanced the creative and logical.

2) What is your current role and what does it entail on a day to day basis?

As the Marketing Manager at Study Space, as well as a digital marketing specialist at Sadaqa Welfare Fund.

I run two small but successful marketing departments in two corporations.

One of those is a charity that helps unfortunate around the globe in disaster areas, the other is a company that wants to make massive waves and change the way we think about educating our children.

3) What does a typical day in the life look like for you? Can you take us through a recent workday?

A typical workday consists of waking up 5.30 in the morning to train whether that’s at a gym or if I’m out for a jog.

I have to make sure to get up and get out every morning so that way I can approach my job with focus and feel energised throughout the day (those days I sleep in and miss training are my slowest and least efficient days)!

I get to work a half-hour before I’m supposed to start and spend 30 min each morning reading articles usually from Medium, or LinkedIn.

Coffee fuels me at this point, beginning the first minutes of my workday by brewing a coffee (shout out to Padre’s Coffee who’s beans are the best) and getting in the mindset to work!

4) Do you have any tips, tricks or shortcuts to help you manage your workload and schedule?

I spend most of my day glued to a computer screen and participating in meetings, so it doesn’t hurt that every 2 hours I go outside on our balcony to just take a breather.

We’re lucky enough to have a great view of a bushland area, so when I step out, I’m greeted with a view of trees and the sounds of birds.

If you hadn’t had guessed already, I find the sounds and sights of nature to be very revitalising and calming and an excellent way to step back from an otherwise utterly digital workday!

5) In between your job, life and all your other responsibilities, how do you ensure you find some sort of balance in your life?

During international charity campaigns for the charity, I am invited to volunteer as well as document the teams on the ground in various countries, creating visual stories that raise awareness for the needy in the countries we work in.

These trips can be very full-on with sleepless days and working in some of the harshest conditions around the globe, but I find that the passion and enjoyment I get out of helping others is enough motivation to get me through these eye-opening and vital trips!

Planning and scheduling is the most critical way you can achieve better results and not lose your sanity while working. It can be as simple as pen and paper having a diary to manage your schedule.

I utilise digital methods to stay on task and get work done on schedule. Balancing my Google Calendar for most of my scheduling, with Quire a currently free team management app that allows you to schedule, assign and list all your tasks in a visual way.

With all the extra time you have freed up from proper work planning and scheduling, you can make sure to get out of the office and spend time mingling!

Having a work-life balance allows you to make sure you stay focused and enjoy your workdays instead of always thinking about escaping work!

The more satisfied and joyful you feel about your work, the better your job will be, Khalil Gibran, a famous poet, said this in his book The Prophet:

Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.

6) What does work life balance mean to you?

Your work will only benefit from your happiness! So if you don’t have that work-life balance on a point already, make sure you do everything in your power to allow that to happen.

There are no excuses that would prevent you from being happy and don’t ever settle for less.

7) Are there any books that have helped you improve over the years?

Read more. Read anything that makes you want to read more. Fiction or not try and learn as much as you can, find a piece of literature that makes you wanna keep reading at first after you get into the habit of reading, you will never stop learning.

Some of the all-time favourite books that have helped me especially have been:

• The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (humour and witty writing that got me through a rough time at work a few years back)
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• The Art of Not Giving a F**k by Mark Manson

8) Do you have any last thoughts on work, life or balance that you’d like to share with our readers?

Don’t stop learning, it can be all too easy to lose the passion for your job and get into a cycle of working and then switching off as soon as you leave work.

If you can find the motivation in your own personal time to keep learning new things or even revising stuff you already know, you’ll find that you’ll grow an insane amount and further yourself on a personal level as well as a career level.

If you’d like to support Balance the Grind’s mission to promote health work-life balance to a global audience, you can join our Patreon membership for as little as $1 a month.