A Typical Work Day
We have a wide variety of professions represented across the Shot Of Jaq community. Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge talk about their typical work days, covering the kind of work, tools and approaches involved with the hope of the community sharing your typical work days too.
Remember, Shot Of Jaq is all about the conversation, so do share with us what your typical work day is. What do you do? What tools and approaches do you use? How much time on the phone are you? How crazy is your INBOX? How do you manage your work?
22 Comments to “A Typical Work Day”
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This says it all.
This says it all: http://xkcd.com/722/ .
Gerv
“The time when I’m most productive is when I’m listening to metal… because I can focus on what I need to do.”
Words fail me.
Gerv
Different strokes for different folks, I believe the phrase is.
Bug report: the link to the mp3 file actually points to the ogg file
oops. Fixed. Thanks
As I’m currently studying, life generally revolves around uni: sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll (that is, I study that… I like to think I practice what I study; it’s a work in progress).
Mid-semesters I work as a graphic, web, and interface designer (freelancing), and the occasional FOSS project.
In either case there is no set time to get up, do a specified amount of work nor go to sleep — it all depends on too large a range of factors: when lectures are, when tute sessions are, when assessment is due, what friends are doing, what clients are doing, when deadlines are, ….
As for music during work: hell yes; can’t work without it. Genres? Preferably trance, but swings otherwise between various other types of electronica, rock, and industrial.
Good shot. (:
My typical work day is accompanied by emacs and the org mode – “My Life in Plain Text”. Check it out, if you haven’t done that yet: http://orgmode.org/
I’m just completed my first year of car-free commuting, so I dress right into my cycle clothes and often stop by the store on the way into work, and I’m grateful for the shower at work. So when I get into the office, I completely transform from what appears to be a growling bike messenger to a khaki-clad programmer.
Much of my workday is head down and then waiting for the compiler. I’ll often be growling at the code most of the day until my Sith power masters the logic.
There is respect for quiet-time in my office. It is a quiet place where the phone-bound staff is downstairs, and we tend not to interrupt each other verbally in our workspace. Rather, we IM so as not to disturb the mode of concentration. This is often somewhat isolating a feeling.
If we are not pressed on deadlines, we take a brake to play hacky-sack.
Say, Jono, given you work from home, why did you move to America? I assumed it was to work with Ubuntu, but you could do that just as well from Wolverhampton? Just curious.
At a stretch you could have hired some office space in Aq’s basement. That would have been fun, the two of you working side by side, Aq in deathly silence in front of his monitors, you jiving away to death metal or talking on the phone for hours on end. Hmm.
SHOT OF JAQ: The sitcom.
A day for me:
5:30-6:00 When the 10mo or 3yo wakes up, feed them, wait for wife to rise.
7:30-8:30 At some point have a 5-min shower.
8:30 Drive 30km to work (podcasts are great for this). Think of lots of interesting comments to make re podcasts on twitter and shotofjaq and promptly forget them.
9:00-9:30 Scrape into work.
9:30-10:00 Read email/tech news
10:00 Some Java programming, maybe some tech reading, maybe report writing/reviewing, maybe hardware management. Use a notebook for notes. Occasionally day dream of being sufficiently organised to use GTD.
12:00 Work through lunch due to getting in late.
17:00 Realise the time at 17:00, manage to leave by 17:30. (If I’m really organised I’ll leave a little earlier and go for a quick jog before driving home.)
18:15-ish Get home, eat tea, bathe kids, read bed time stories and put them to bed, wash dishes, pick up toys.
20:30-21:00-ish, sit down to watch telly, brain too numb to do much else.
22:30 decide to go to bed.
23:30 actually make it to bed.
0:00 Finally decide that NASCAR isn’t really that interesting and turn off the bedroom telly. Wish the Twenty20 Cricket World Cup were on free-to-air telly (mind you, I’d be up to 2am then).
0:02 Sleep.
3:00 Sometimes get up in the middle of the night to change kid’s bedclothes (training for nappy-less nights is not as much fun as it sounds).
You did ask.
Seems a little bit late, but here goes: The glamorous life of a PhD student working on a research project.
Get up around eight, in the office uni at about 10-ish. Read an article or two, hack a bit, write a bit: basically do whatever needs to be done towards the next article that we try to submit.
Wait for rejection letters from conferences, struggle with the administration.
Once a week go and teach a bunch of students about bash and unix.
Often listen to music to drown out the open-office-spaceness of the room.
Go home around 6-ish. Oh, and I work on Saturdays.
I spend 2-3 hours of my day commuting which sucks and means I nearly have a 12 hour working day. It especially sucks at the moment as my car radio is broken and I basically sit in traffic in silence. I’ve even started talking to myself to break up the silence! I tried podcasts but I can’t hear the speakers on my Macbook over the road noise of the motorway so I need another solution.
I’m a software engineer and at work I mostly use Google Apps, Pivotal Tracker, Eclipse, Terminal, Inkscape, our own web-based collaboration platform and every web browser you can think of. I have a standup meeting every morning and the occasional planning meeting and off-site work like usability testing.
The normal state of my email inbox is empty – anything that comes in is processed during regular inbox-clearing sessions and either replied to, deleted, archived or forwarded to rememberthemilk as a next action for me to do.
I find certain last.fm stations help me concentrate, the IRC channel of my local LUG is a massive distraction!
RE podcasts, you could always use a pair of earphones. Some of the new bud ones can block out quite a bit of noise. YMMV regarding legality but I don’t think it impairs driving ability that much (certainly haven’t seen any studies on it). Speech audio also blocks very different frequencies to music, so hearing may not be that impaired for what you need to drive.
I’m 1st line support at the city government for a local town.
04.50 I am supposed to get out of bed.
06.05 When I actually get up.
06.30 Bus, then train, to work. Takes about 1 h 15 min.
07.45 Get to work, turn on my computer, growl at my workmates. I’ll have a cup of horrible machine brewed coffe, and eat a bun. Then I’ll login the telephone.
I spend my hours trying to make Windows XP work for people and trying (oh brother do I try) to teach people how to use our VOIP system. I get to take a lot of shit from people, and I quietly hate them all.
11.30 This is when I unpack my lunch and try not to speak to anyone for at least 30 minutes.
16.30 I leave, as quickly as I can. And then I take the train home, usually in a bad mood.
I get to work around 9:30 or 10… read the news most of the morning, go to lunch, fake working for a couple of more hours(while listening to podcasts
), go to meetings and then go home. That’s a typical job day for me. Sometimes I actually get some stuff done but that doesn’t usually take more than a couple of hours out of the whole day.
Apart from my job I work on this personal project I started two months back. That’s usually in the evenings and weekends. And since it’s a rather new thing and untested ground in so many ways I alternate between periods when I work day and night and periods when I don’t do anything and just wait for inspiration. I can be rather obsessive and when I start doing something I usually have to remind myself to eat and sleep.
I’m a web developer at a 6th form college, moonlighting with a bit of freelance work.
6:30 Wake up and have a shower (or if I’m lazy) 6:45 Wake up and have a wash
7:30 Leave for work, driving or cycling weather dependant
7:50-8:00 Arrive at work, make my day’s cup of caffeineated tea and eat breakfast
8:00-10:00 Check emails to ensure that overnight data imports all worked. Respond to support emails, fix bugs etc. Once a week this time is staff training, I might also be in meetings
10:00-10:20 Break and redbush tea
10:20-12:00 Mostly development work. This could include meetings to produce specifications, actual coding, more bug fixes, server maintenance etc.
12:00-13:00 Lunch and redbush tea
13:00-16:00 More development work, maybe some training some users or more meetings.
16:00-16:30 Go home
16:30-18:00 Check my personal emails, make a mental note of any freelance work to do, relax before my girlfriend gets home
18:00ish Make/have dinner
19:00ish Do any freelance work that needs doing, spend the rest of the day hanging out with my girlfriend
22:00-00:00 (dependant on insomnia) go to bed
WTF up with everyone being so organized? I never get to do anything. I work freelance, and usually haven’t got any projects. When I do I work I usually do it non-stop a few days until I’m finished and exhausted.
So, this is my usual days doing nothing:
10.00: Wake up. Read emails on my G1.
11.00: Get up. Wanting to go out to my “office”. But keep sitting by the laptop. Program a bit.
12.00: Tell my girlfriend it’s noon and she better get up too. She gets angry for sleeping so long and rushes out to the university.
14.00: Fsck, I really should go now. Things will close. Hungry, finding something to eat.
15.00: Finding something new interesting on identica or LWN (as always)
16.00: FSCK, I MUST GO OUTSIDE.
17.00: Manage to go out. Walk the short trip down to my office. Continue reading funny stories and starting new programming projects all the time there.
22.00: Get angry phone from girlfriend saying I’m never home; come home now. I say, be there in a minute.
23.00: Get a Jabber-message from girlfriend, «YOU’RE STILL NOT HOME». Having enormous problems going away from the computer. In the end I manage it and walk home. Extremely hungry, so I make pancakes.
23.10: Watch 2-3 episodes of some cheesy episodes with my gf has downloaded on her Ubuntu-ified MacBook. I always protest, but watch them anyway.
02.00: Swear, «goddamn GF, it’s fscking late today as well. grrr.»
ROFL!
Can’t say I’d claim to be organised by I do at least get up before 7 each morning (small children do help with that, mind you).
)
Its nearly two in the morning – but my last three exams are coming up so….
sleeeeep
SHOT OF JAQ: The sitcom.