Hee! Well, my days are pretty variable -- not much is average -- but let's see....
As many, many people know, I have the worst case of Non-24-Hour Sleep/Wake Disorder (irregular pattern) that my doctors have ever seen in a human being who doesn't lack external light cues. This means that my average "day" is anywhere between about 26 and 40 hours, so all of this is done on a fairly irregular basis, time-wise. (Which makes interfacing with the business, 9-to-5 world difficult, but does make it much easier to be fu's boss, since she's on a 12-hour offset from my time zone! I'm pretty much guaranteed to be in her time zone for at least a little while, at least two or three times a week.)
So, usually I wake up, stumble into the office, wake up my computer, and read my email and my reading list while I'm caffeinating. That usually takes me about an hour (both the reading and the caffeinating), all the while opening tabs for things I need to respond/deal with/solve/categorize/etc. I'll eat breakfast at the keyboard (trying to avoid too much in the way of laptop crumbs, although I did manage to spill queso into the speakers of my brand-new laptop last week.)
From there, I'll do the usual daily routine, which includes:
* checking in on payment processing volume from the day before (if I wasn't awake at the time the nightly email got sent) and checking for any issues
* responding to any payment-related issues or support requests in private, employee-only categories
* replying to any emails that need my attention
* checking in on Bugzilla to triage things, etc (which I'm soooo behind on, ack)
* handling the Suggestions queue (ideally once a week, in practice it winds up being every few weeks)
* making/returning business phone calls if it's within business hours; making note of them for later if it isn't (I try to push my sleep schedule around so I can make business calls roughly 4 out of 5 weekdays if I have to)
* checking in with people who need my help/attention/questions answered/etc (or sometimes just need a listening ear!)
* coding! Ideally I really, really try to spend one day a week coding; in practice, I haven't been able to get anywhere near that. (The business stuff started eating up my time in mid-March for tax prep and really hasn't stopped since. It's calming down a bit now, at least, thank goodness; I hope to be able to get back to it fairly soon.)
And I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of the stuff I do regularly, too! It's all so routine by now that I just don't think about it.
sarah comes home from work between 5:30 and 6:30PM most weeknights, and when she does, I put the computer away and spend time with her -- dinner, movie watching, TV watching, jewelry making, knitting, household chores or home repair projects, or even just sprawling on each other and reading. Unless there's something major going on, though, the time from about 7PM to about 10PM every night is for relationship time. (Thankfully, she also thinks the definition of an ideal night is sitting in front of our computers faffing around on the internet.) We also have a once-a-week TV night with a friend, which is useful for making me actually put the computer down and go do something else. On weekends, it's pretty much the same thing, except sarah will be working on around-the-house projects; half the time I'll be helping her out, half the time I'll be working through.
I have recently started trying to take more time for not-in-front-of-the-computer, since part of what lead to my epic burnout circa 2006-2007 from LiveJournal was the fact that I was literally always working -- if I was home, I was in front of the computer, and about 80% of the time I was working on something for work. (The other 20% of the time I was writing.) You can see a day in the life from early '07 -- that pace was brutal, and was a good part of what led to me quitting. I still haven't retrained myself -- only working 40-45 hours a week on DW stuff feels like I'm doing nothing, and am an immense and epic slacker -- but I'm getting soooo much better.
no subject
As many, many people know, I have the worst case of Non-24-Hour Sleep/Wake Disorder (irregular pattern) that my doctors have ever seen in a human being who doesn't lack external light cues. This means that my average "day" is anywhere between about 26 and 40 hours, so all of this is done on a fairly irregular basis, time-wise. (Which makes interfacing with the business, 9-to-5 world difficult, but does make it much easier to be
So, usually I wake up, stumble into the office, wake up my computer, and read my email and my reading list while I'm caffeinating. That usually takes me about an hour (both the reading and the caffeinating), all the while opening tabs for things I need to respond/deal with/solve/categorize/etc. I'll eat breakfast at the keyboard (trying to avoid too much in the way of laptop crumbs, although I did manage to spill queso into the speakers of my brand-new laptop last week.)
From there, I'll do the usual daily routine, which includes:
* checking in on payment processing volume from the day before (if I wasn't awake at the time the nightly email got sent) and checking for any issues
* responding to any payment-related issues or support requests in private, employee-only categories
* replying to any emails that need my attention
* checking in on Bugzilla to triage things, etc (which I'm soooo behind on, ack)
* handling the Suggestions queue (ideally once a week, in practice it winds up being every few weeks)
* making/returning business phone calls if it's within business hours; making note of them for later if it isn't (I try to push my sleep schedule around so I can make business calls roughly 4 out of 5 weekdays if I have to)
* checking in with people who need my help/attention/questions answered/etc (or sometimes just need a listening ear!)
* coding! Ideally I really, really try to spend one day a week coding; in practice, I haven't been able to get anywhere near that. (The business stuff started eating up my time in mid-March for tax prep and really hasn't stopped since. It's calming down a bit now, at least, thank goodness; I hope to be able to get back to it fairly soon.)
And I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of the stuff I do regularly, too! It's all so routine by now that I just don't think about it.
I have recently started trying to take more time for not-in-front-of-the-computer, since part of what lead to my epic burnout circa 2006-2007 from LiveJournal was the fact that I was literally always working -- if I was home, I was in front of the computer, and about 80% of the time I was working on something for work. (The other 20% of the time I was writing.) You can see a day in the life from early '07 -- that pace was brutal, and was a good part of what led to me quitting. I still haven't retrained myself -- only working 40-45 hours a week on DW stuff feels like I'm doing nothing, and am an immense and epic slacker -- but I'm getting soooo much better.