Who I am
I’m Alex, and I’m from Grenoble, France. I spent part of my childhood in Québec, then came back to Grenoble at age 9. Already at that point, I loved languages, and soon entered a bilingual high school where some classes were taught in English. After that, I dabbled in economics, hated it and switched to French, English, Italian and German translation studies (LEA bachelor’s degree), soon specializing in marketing. I then studied marketing at the graduate level at emlyon business school.
After my studies, I left for Ireland, where I helped client companies set up their marketing workflows over their first 3 months with HubSpot. I then became the Content Marketing Manager at JobTeaser, and finally got a chance to come back to my early love of languages, joining the Localization team at Meta.
Professional comfort
work organisation
My overarching philosophy is based on the Pareto principle: 20% of the effort yields 80% of the result. Since the past years have been all about efficiency, I’m sticking to this more than ever: if you want me to give you the final 20%, you’re going to have to convince me that it’s really worth it.
Very clear tracking is important to me. I use Obsidian for my own stuff, but will do my best to use other tools, like Notion. To-do lists and clearly assigned tasks are the only way to get me to do something. I will take lots of meeting notes because otherwise I forget everything. I try not to use Google Docs much because they get really messy, but it’s often inevitable and that’s fine. Anything that can be put on a wiki should be on a wiki.
My interests include: documentation, using new tools and giving feedback on them, reading, finding information and doing research on anything and everything.
You can hit me up at any time to know more about LGBTQ+ issues (professionally or in the world) or for enthusiastic monologues about open source projects.
communications
When I’m available, I do my best to answer messages as soon as I can. If I don’t reply within 24 hours, I got overwhelmed and probably forgot: feel free to send me a reminder.
I get most work done in the morning and favour afternoon meetings, when my brain is a bit too fried to create anything and talking to people is nicer.
If there’s nothing in my calendar, I’m probably free, but I do not do well in meetings, so let’s talk asynchronously whenever possible. Many questions can be solved more easily with a quick call than a long message exchange: you can call me anytime, just give me 5 minutes to put clothes on!!
I try to avoid group meetings as much as I can. When I have to attend one, I will usually keep my camera off unless I’m talking. I wrote a whole essay about the numerous issues of video calls.
consistency
My productivity works as a cycle.
When I’m not feeling well, I might put most things on hold for a couple of days and then have a surge of energy where I get everything done in a few hours.
I try to work on a weekly basis and have all of my tasks done by Friday night before I finish the week, so end of week deadlines are best for me.
Personal comfort
attitudes
The more people involved in a discussion, the more I get confused and tend to lose my focus and give up on the meeting.
I tend to compensate for my lack of listening skills by talking a lot and trying to lead the conversation – please stop me when I take up too much space! I’ll never take a « let me finish » negatively and I expect to also be cut off. I’m working on this, but need to improve a lot still.
interests
I enjoy reading and will read any book or article you send my way. Everything.
My interests include sociology (I actually got a bachelor’s degree in sociology just for fun), editing Wikipedia, music (I used to play the piano and the saxophone, but am completely useless now; however, I’m a solid shower singer), and writing about things I’m interested in, usually on my blog (and usually in French).
And I’m a big Winter Olympics enthusiast!
That’s it for now – I’ll update this as I continue my career, and hope it will be of use to some of you!