Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Ordinary Days - Part 2

Ordinary Days Part 2

 

What is your working day like?

 

I generally work a nine to ten hour day.  I work a 9/80 shift - that is one week I work five days and the next week I work four days, which gives me every other weekend as a three day weekend.  I highly recommend it as it is a big stride toward finding some semblance of work life balance.

 

Because I am in management, I spend between 60% to 100% of my day in meetings - daily status meetings, weekly status meetings, team meetings, project meetings, requirements meetings, analysis meetings, tactical meetings, strategic meetings, one on one meetings.  I review analyses, I write analyses, I write other documents, I schedule work, I review schedules, I direct work loads, I connect people and projects.

 

I do have task responsibilities of my own - most of them get done later in the day once the meetings have wrapped up, or they get done during the meetings.

 

But, if you were to imagine my day and you imagined me either sitting in my office (or pacing around) with a headset on, listening and talking, answering and asking - you would pretty much have a clear picture of what I do every day, more or less.  At any given time I am working two or three major projects and a dozen or so smaller projects.

 

One of the reasons I am so addicted to my Blackberry is it provides a much needed windowto the outer world while I am on meetings - both through the e-mail connectivity (you really can't call me at work, because most of the time I am on the phone already) and texting, and through the web surfing ability.

 

Besides the telephone, we also use a pretty impressive array of virtual meeting tools to share data.  Web cams have not yet be adopted fully, but that is only inevitable.

 

Do you take lunch?

 

The only time I will not take a lunch hour is when I have meetings scheduled back to back through the day - I routinely block the lunch hour off on my calendar and refuse to give it up, unless the requestor happens to be further up the foot chain than I am - in which case we serve our corporate masters.  I'll often go to lunch anyway and dial into the call with my cell phone and then sit there on mute just listening.

 

But, on any given day, it is a safe bet that I have gone to lunch.  Either I go with friends and associates, or I go by myself.  That break in the middle of a day full of meetings keeps me relatively sane and gives me a chance to talk about something that is NOT work.

 

When does your working day end?

 

Nine or ten hours after it started, so, usually I wrap it up around three or four PM Pacific Time.  Because I can work virtually, I will often go home and toss another hour or two onto the pile, finishing things up, or doing those things that need to be done for the next day.  Generally speaking though, I try to get a clean break at the end of the day.

 

What is the ritual and order of the end of your day?

 

I kind of take a look around, assess where I am at, see how I am sitting for the next day, and then ritually shut my work computer down and head for home.  My reverse commute is also pretty short.

 

On the way home I tend to run any errands that I need to run - stop at the grocery store, stop at the bookstore, etc.  Probably two or three nights a week I will also stop somewhere for dinner, or grab something to take home with me.

 

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