A Day in the Life of a Team Lead (Part 1)

Hi there! My name is Tejasvini and I’m one of the Team Leads for IHL in the Bay. Here’s what I do on a typical weekday:

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My day usually starts at 7:30 AM. I wake up (reluctantly), eat breakfast, and go to school. My classes end at 3:30 PM, so I end up coming home at around 4 PM. I normally take a few minutes to relax, get a snack, and/or watch TV, but I’m pretty busy on the weekdays, so I try to get started with my work as soon as possible. I prefer starting with IHL since it’s nice to be productive without doing the same type of work I do at school.

This month, I’m in charge of running our team’s Instagram account, along with the website. This entails editing my teammates’ posts on Canva, sending posts out to our coordinators for approval, and publishing our posts on Instagram. I also spend a good amount of time marketing the posts, in other words, reposting them on our account and creating interactive quizzes for followers on our stories. The time commitment differs depending on the task -- editing posts usually takes me about 30 minutes, but marketing takes a lot longer. The website is definitely less work, but I also have to edit the advocates’ blog posts and curate Instagram posts to promote them as well. Right now, we're working pretty hard to promote our IHL ASYNC Recipe Cookbook activity -- if you're interested, it's an asynchronous IHL lesson, where you'll learn the basics of international law. I'll link the registration page in case you'd like to check it out (you also get 1.5 volunteer hours!)

IHL ASYNC Recipe Cookbook (Office Hours)

Asynchronous Event|Office Hours

Register Now

Now back to the topic at hand, I try to end my IHL work at around 5 PM. This doesn’t happen all the time -- for example, if we’re hosting an event in the same week, I end up prioritizing the campaign over other tasks. On a normal day, however, I’d start practice at 5:30 PM (I do Taekwondo!), and that usually ends at ~7:30 PM. I live pretty far away from my studio, so most of my training happens virtually (also because of COVID).

After training, I'm usually pretty tired. I eat dinner and begin my favorite task of the day (wait for it): ✨ homework. ✨

I'm a junior in high school, so I definitely have a lot of stuff to do, but recently, I’ve been able to finish everything by ~11:30 PM. I will admit -- I’ve definitely stayed up a lot later than that in the past. Being a team lead taught me a lot about time management and organization, so even though it’s a lot of work, it’s a very rewarding experience.

By the time I decide to wrap things up for the day, it’s probably close to midnight. I make sure to check Slack, our team’s communication platform, in case anyone has any questions. If it’s something that requires me to sit down at my desk again, I usually let them know that I’ll take a look at it the next day. If it’s just a simple clarification question, I typically respond immediately. A lot of people tell me that I don't need to be spending so much time communicating with my team, but one of my biggest pet peeves is when people take forever to respond to emails or messages. In that sense, I try not to be a hypocrite and respond to my team whenever I can.

If I know for a fact that I won't be able to respond to my team members' questions (let's say I'm on a vacation), I let them know ahead of time so there's less confusion and chaos. At the end of the day, I never want to be the reason why a teammate doesn't meet a deadline or doesn't receive the help that they need.

And that’s pretty much it! Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next week :)