What is your typical day?
When do you rise? Do you have a morning routine? What is your daily work or school schedule? How do you unwind after a long day? Do you have a night-time routine?
assignment 3
On a typical day, the cat wakes up hours before I do. Lately, he's started to awaken at 6 am, though 7 is also bad. At that hour, he likes to scratch on window blinds and doors. Not only does that damage the furniture, it makes noise which I cannot ignore.
Lately, I've put him in his cat carrier in another room with the door closed when he starts to make noise. This prevents him from destroying anything and keeps my bedroom quiet so I can sleep until 8 am.
At that point, I usually wake up, let out the cat and feed him, and have a glass of orange juice while I check my e-mail. From there, I shower, dress, and eat breakfast while reading the comics. Breakfast on weekdays is alternately cold cereal or a bagel with yogurt. On Sundays I cook pancakes. (I go grocery shopping on Sundays so I need to prepare with a larger meal.)
After that, I start working. On Saturdays, however, I change the bedsheets and wash them sheets, my pajamas, and my bathroom towels. On a good day I finish washing and folding this laundry before noon.
Most of my co-workers make it to the office between 9:15 am and 9:45 am, so I try to match their schedules. Some days I start earlier and other days I start later. Because half of the company works in the Pacific time zone and half works in the Eastern time zone, most of the meetings I attend take place between 10 am and 1:30 pm. For example, every other Friday I have a meeting with several book editors.
Sometimes the editors in my group also have meetings. Unfortunately, we have people on different continents such that 9 works out best. (My manager doesn't like to have meetings that early, but it really is the best time.)
I don't have many meetings. Besides the bimonthly book meetings and the infrequent group meetings, my boss and I talk on the phone briefly every other Thursday morning. I also take notes for a weekly programming meeting on Wednesday afternoons. Sometimes it lasts as long as an hour, though things have quieted down lately.
I spend my mornings sorting through e-mail and catching up on the latest news. To do my job well, I follow several different communities and hundreds of projects. The best way I know of to keep track of these things is to participate in depth in a few projects and to watch what other people do and talk about.
Besides any special projects, most of my week revolves around writing and publishing two newsletters and finding, editing, and publishing four or five articles. That doesn't sound like a lot of work, but consider that that means that I have to produce, commission, edit, and publish around 10,000 words every week. That's over half a million words every year.
In a good day, I can edit two articles. That means reviewing them for technical accuracy, good organization, and clarity, as well as performing some copyedit and review. Sometimes I have to work with an author over two or three drafts to find the right audience and tone. Fortunately, if I do my job well, this works out as training for the author. If he or she writes for me again, the process works more smoothly. I work with several very talented authors as it is.
Around 1 pm I head downstairs for a short lunch, usually leftovers from the night before. I like to read the opinion pages during lunch, not because the letters to the editor have great insights but because they're more interesting than the rest of the news. Reading the newspaper is especially frustrating those weeks when I'm copyediting or proofreading a book.
My best hours come after lunch when I can concentrate on editing and scheduling articles. From 2 to 3:30 I feel the most productive. Around 3:30 I take another pass through my inbox, trying to leave fewer messages for tomorrow than I had that morning. Some weeks it works very well and I can leave work on Friday with an empty inbox. Other weeks, it's all I can do to stay abreast of incoming work.
Recently I began to experiment with reading a technical book for half an hour at the end of the work day. I haven't had the time in the past few weeks, but it seems like a good habit. Research is part of my job.
Along those lines, I also intend to spend a couple of hours on Friday afternoons playing with code. In addition to finding new subjects worth covering, I think it's valuable to help to create new subjects sometimes. One of my goals for this year is to improve the search system on our sites.
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I spend thirty minutes exercising, whether lifting weights or going for a walk around the neighborhood park. My schedule here has been erratic this summer, but it's nice to leave work and my house both physically and mentally.
I usually cook supper after six. My roommates and I and anyone else at home usually watch a TV episode off of a DVD at that point. So far, we've gone through most seasons of Babylon 5 and Angel and are working our way through Alias now. It's good to sit for 45 minutes eating and relaxing.
A group of friends usually comes over on Friday nights. Often we go out to eat and come back and play games of some sort — sometimes video games and sometimes board games. Saturday nights are similar. Sunday's aren't. My brother and sister-in-law and nephew often come over here for lunch. There's no way to predict who else will appear.
After supper, on weeknights, I try to do a little bit of housework, whether paying the bills, doing laundry, or cleaning. Then I read, play guitar, or work on small projects on the computer.
Around 11 or so, I head to bed. I have a small routine where I brush my teeth, wash my face, and check my mail one last time. I used to read for half an hour before turning off the lights and sleeping, but haven't made time for that recently.
That leaves me between eight and eight and a half hours of sleep per night — that's my limit. I try to fall asleep lying on my right side but flip over to my left side after a few minutes. In that position I can doze for twenty minutes before flipping over again and finally falling deeply asleep.
I usually dream but forget most of the stories of the dreams by the time I shower. Only a few vivid images stay in my mind.
Then the whole cycle of my average day repeats.