The Agency Founder On A Mission To Reinvent The Way Creatives Work

In 7 Hours With, we explore the routines of leading professionals in their space to learn the when, why, where and how they work. In each diary, we will look at what they’re doing at seven different check-ins throughout their day. Hive is the project management tool that powers fast moving teams at places like Starbucks, Google, Comcast, Anheuser-Busch, Toyota and EA Sports. Want to learn more about how Hive can help your team? Contact our sales team here, or try a free trial here (no credit card required). Madison Utendahl is the founder and CCO of Utendahl Creative, a storytelling-first, branding, content & social media consultancy. This is how she spends her 7 Hours.

7:30 AM

I am not a morning person, despite attempting for my whole life to be. Regardless, I wake up and work out 4-5 days a week. I am someone who lives by my Oura Ring and my body reacts very, very intensely to sleep. On days I don't sleep well, I do more of a Pilates workout versus on days that I feel well rested, I will go on a run. Starting my day with a workout is very important to me.  After my workout, I alternate between what I like to call my “morning rituals” -- but I don't put pressure on myself to do them both on the same day. I don't have any sort of a schedule as to when I do them. I either write in my morning journal, which is a journal where I just brain dump, or I meditate.  When I first started meditating, I came up with 9,000 excuses for not allocating time to my practice. I resisted a lot...I mean, a lot. Eventually, I accepted and deeply realized the wider impact of meditation. Meditation actually impacts your day-to-day life, and is a tool to focus and center. I now can’t live without it. Thanks to meditation, I now have the ability center myself throughout the day...I know how to pull myself back into focus and listening to how I feel.

9 AM

My next steps in the morning really depend on the day of the week. I would say that my day usually starts with some form of a team meeting. I love my team. I'd do anything for these women.  Whether it's a one-on-one or a group team meeting, I like to focus the mornings on the wellbeing of my team.  After team meetings, I spend a lot of time in client or intro calls and getting to know people. As a Founder, I unfortunately spend most of the week on back to back calls. As a result, I dedicate Wednesdays and Fridays to getting work done. They are precious to me and really matter. On Wednesdays I don’t take any meetings at all - there are zero meetings allowed for myself and anyone on my team. On Fridays I don’t take any meetings before 11 AM.  I’m the CCO and founder of Utendahl Creative, a storytelling agency. We specialize in storytelling and we have a variety of mediums with which we execute. I would say we're most known for our social media marketing, but we are multi-faceted. We are a design studio. We do branding. We also produce photo shoots. Our values are really rooted in emotional empathy and ensuring that every piece of content we put out strikes an emotional cord with our consumer. And we don't believe that there are only certain products that evoke empathy, curiosity or warmth. It can come from anything. It's just a matter of how you position it and your belief. We work with some amazing clients like Human Co, which is a mission driven company rooted in giving their consumers the opportunity to demand better. So really getting back to this notion of what did we eat hundreds of years ago? And how do we get back to eating clean like that again? Clean food should be accessible to everyone and anyone, it shouldn't be a matter of privilege. It shouldn't be a matter of opportunity. As human beings, we have the rights to be healthy and happy. The founder is Jason Karp, who is actually also the founder of Hu Kitchen. He’s great. Overall, my company is really about radical transparency. Each member of my team supports each other and brings something incredible to the table. I learned about this African proverb from Doc Rivers --  it's called Ubuntu and it's this notion of, "I am, because we are." I can't be all that I can be, unless you can be that all you can be. And we can't operate as a team unless we both show up. That’s the way I like to lead.

12 PM

I recently got an air fryer, so lunch is a little different lately. It’s really just whatever I throw in there! An air fryer makes things easy because I’m not a huge lunch person. Lately I’ve been making chicken thighs in the air fryer, and I have also been making a lot of tofu. Vegetables are also just so easy. Zucchini is a favorite.

2 PM

Around this time I’ll walk my dog. It's such an important part of my process -- being outside and walking my dog or standing outside with my dog. I love being outdoors. When my dog needs to go outside, I use this time to just relax and be with nature. Taking this time to be outside is a big productivity hack. But overall, my biggest “hack” is really just honoring how I feel and sitting in my discomfort. Oftentimes that means processing, and finding ways to process. So for me, I can't show up and be a leader for my team if I also don't process my fears, distractions or concerns. I spend a lot of personal time unpacking myself. I can't do that with my team -- that's unfair to them. So, journaling, meditating, running, these are ways for me to deal with my emotions and it's important that we face how we feel in order to show up for other people. I have to do these things daily so I can show up for them. I have to always show up for myself in order to do so.  When people say to me, "I can't focus, I'm so distracted. I can't get things done. How do you do it?" I always respond asking, "How much time are you spending on how you feel?" Your distraction is often a product of your doubt and what you’re choosing not to pay attention to within yourself. I really believe that distraction is doubt in disguise. You can only confront doubt by taking the time to process it. You'll just continue to be distracted until the day you decide to ask yourself, "Why am I doubting myself at this moment?" Overall, I’ve had an incredible year of growth personally. My dad always says that at some point in life, you have to just own what works for you and what doesn't. Ultimately, you'll really find peace and happiness once you just surrender to what works for you and what doesn't work for you. A great example of this is that I don't like super early morning meetings. No meetings before 10 AM unless its for Simon Huck. That just doesn't work for me. But what does work for me is giving myself that space in the morning in order to show up for my 11:00 AM meeting. It’s so empowering to say, whether it's your employer or your colleagues, "This doesn't work for me," versus trying forever to fit yourself into these constructs that aren't really designed for everyone.

Your distraction is often a product of your doubt and what you’re choosing not to pay attention to within yourself. I really believe that distraction is doubt in disguise. You can only confront doubt by taking the time to process it.

Even think about work-life culture as a creative. This idea of having to show up to a desk every single day and sit in front of a computer is a construct that was not designed for creatives. Creatives going to offices is something that really existed in the Mad Men world. Before then, these spaces weren't designed for that. And so, it's okay if you like working remotely right now and you never want to open your office again. It's okay, that you love being in an office and you miss it. Whatever it is, just own that truth. That's where I am too. I say to my team all the time, "I don't know if I ever want to get an office again." If I get an office, I'm going to create a space that isn’t traditional. I want to get a big conference room and have a cork board and easels and just have it be a space where we come to meet as a team and take client meetings. But no one has a desk and no one works there. If we show up, we show up together as a unit, and we commit our creativity together. But this idea of you have to be at your desk at 9:00 AM as a creative, as a designer, as a writer, I don't believe in it.

6:30 PM

I wrap up my day around 6:30 for a pause. So I would say from 6:30 to 8, I'm not working. I'm either cooking dinner, idling, or talking to somebody on the phone. And then I usually watch something that's educational. I'm a big documentary person. I love everything from Don't Fuck with Cats, which is not educational at all and a total thriller to Explained on Netflix, which is so informative. And I just think it's such an easily digestible format to understand what's going on in the world. Or I listen to a podcast -- I'm a big news junkie. I think part of that is because when I graduated from college, my first job was at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. And as a production assistant, I was just encouraged to consume news.  It helped me understand how important it is to educate myself. I need to take some time to learn about the world that's greater than my existence in this house. And I think when people say, "I can't read the news. It's so overwhelming." Well, there's a difference between waking up and turning on CNN or Fox versus going onto the New Yorker, or listening to The Daily podcast. It's a very different way to learn about the world. And it's not as, boom, sensationalized, in your face. You can actually appreciate beautifully written stories that educate you. 

8:30 PM

I'm a night person, so sometimes I end up getting a second wind around 8:00 PM and will end up cranking out a bunch of work until 10. I, for some reason, get decks done a lot at night when the sun has set and my brain is on. 

11:00 PM

Around this time I'll usually get into bed and start reading either the New Yorker or whatever book I'm reading. I also make sure I have a notebook near me to write down any thoughts or ideas I have. I journal at night too -- I have a morning journal and a night journal. Then I’ll head to bed, usually around 11:30, or whenever my body feels like it.