I am at the Central Station at 9 A.M. on the dot, hopping into bus 48 on my way to the Media.Monks office in Houthavens. If I’m lucky, I am met by some of my colleagues at the bus station and I can spend the bus ride chatting about our weekends and the busy day ahead right before we arrive at the office. As I ride the elevator up to the second floor, I am quickly checking my Envoy app to make sure I have booked a seat in the office – people will get upset if you steal their seat! Once I have secured my seat, I head upstairs for my favourite part of the morning at the office – the breakfast buffet. Right before we start the busy day, we get 30 calm minutes to have breakfast with our favourite colleagues and slowly wake up.
The second the clock hits 10 A.M., it’s time to start the work day. We all rush downstairs to our laptops and open our calendars to start planning our day. The day is full of meetings, sheets and endless TikTok scrolls to find just that right persona to advertise the challenge Booking.com is throwing for the Big Game. As the office buzzes with the sound of keyboards clacking and footsteps of managers running from meeting to meeting – the monks know how to have fun! The days at the Monastery are never boring and we’ll always take an occasional break to show each other the amazing new TikTok trend or create one ourselves for some of our very own monk influencers. Before you know it, it’s time for lunch.
We all head back upstairs where our kitchen team welcomes us with a lunch buffet and for those 30 minutes the whole office is completely silent and empty – you’d think the apocalypse happened. On the contrary, the top floor is buzzing with the sound of clinking plates, chatter but mostly importantly – laughter. A bit of time passes, and the busy monks rush back downstairs and the office seems alive once again. We spend the rest of the day working on our newest campaigns… and sometimes the old ones. I go through all my emails and make sure to answer all the US influencers and agents before the end of the day because time difference is a friend and an enemy – but no time to waste at the Monastery. As we finish up the day with final calls, all the monks quickly check their calendars in hopes that today is Thursday.
Thursday means our weekly after-work drinks and we all rush back upstairs, put on some dance music and start unwinding from the busy week. This is the time where we can finally see some of our colleagues that we always miss at the office or the old colleagues that are no longer monks. As the sun sets, we all rush to take bus 48 back to the station. It’s time to say goodbye to our day at the Monastery. Well at least until Monday…where we start all over again.