I got tagged by Colin Devroe, so I had to!
5:00am – Pitter patter. Shower. Feed the dog and let it out. Empty the dishwasher. Off to work. My office is a few miles away. You go to an office during the pandemic? I do, as it is just my wife and I. It’s a neat place we have dialed in just for us.
6:00am – The early morning hours are my favorite for creative productivity. I allow myself to work on whatever I feel like working on. It could be anything. Working on a feature or bug fix for CodePen. A blog post. Editing a video. Answering email. I feel the most “fresh” at this time, so if I’m going to tackle something big, I feel most up for it right away.
8:00am – The day starts giving way to communication. Email and Slack messages flow in more heavily. I work on things that are my true work responsibilities.
11:00am – I almost always have a meeting of some kind.
12:00pm – Lunch. I feel guilty about eating it at my desk (often watching a YouTube video), when I should eat at a table like a grown up and take a walk.
1:00pm – Work on the things that feel the most pressing. Smaller meetings through the afternoon. Pairing sessions are the most common, tackling things that two of us can do better than one.
3:30pm – I’m still just working, but I’m starting to get faded. Answering one email might take me 15 minutes where in the morning it would have taken me 2 minutes. I might flip on the music at any point during the day, but almost always here at the end of the day, I will flood the office with sound.
5:00pm – Kick off home. I absolutely should entirely log off at home, and sometimes I do, but most often I don’t. We eat dinner as a family one way or another. We watch TV and do activities and chat.
7:00pm – Bath time for Ruby. She’s 3. Stories and bed time shortly after, always in bed by 8.
8:00pm – A lot of days we both go to bed right away, especially when we’re feeling tired, sick, or stressed. But somedays we’ll stay up another hour or so watching TV or doing a light house project.
If it seems a bit much to be doing 11-12 hour days, well, it kind of is. But I do a lot of work for companies that are small and trying to grow, and I’m theoretically partially in charge of that.
That long of a workday means that I can be very flexible without feeling behind. If I need to run any sort of errand, I do. If I need to stay home a morning, I do. If I need to come home “early”, I do. And I can do that without feeling like I’ve meaningfully eaten into my work, which is a major stressor for me. It means there is some space in my day for play and exploration.
