A Day in the Life

I wake up at 5:30am, the girls got my body trained for this time, and even with them now sleeping in I can't break the habit. I make my morning coffee, get a good stretch in and read my morning news, its a Monday so I check in how all my fantasy teams did and read more on how great that 18-inning Giants game was, epic!

I'm on Team Tinker, which is a bit of an R&D special products team, we are ramping up the work on a really cool new product. I'm building out the backend API and excited to be using the Go language. This week I hope to really get cranking, so I figuratively cut out all our work by opening up a dozen or so issues in Github.

Around 6:30am, my 2-year old wakes up so I hold her while I finish opening the last couple of issues and she has her morning milk. She likes to cuddle while I'm at the computer, who am I to complain.

Her sister also wakes up and hangs out with me in the office as part of our morning routine. I read them a book and start to get us all ready for the day. The girls don't go to pre-school today, so we have a bit slower start getting breakfast and changed before my wife comes back from her workout and takes over.

Also, an electrician is coming by our house today to look at a broken ceiling fan, so I stick around to talk with him. While waiting, I chat with some teammates on Slack, a couple are in Europe, and I'm in California, so the morning time is the best to talk about the project, what they are working on and our plan of action. Lots to hammer out early as we define the APIs. I also document on our team's internal blog a conversation I had last week discussing storage options.

Where to work today?

We have an office up in San Francisco, which I live about 30-45 minutes away. It's a day-to-day decision if I'm going to work up there or down on the Peninsula.

I have a co-working space locally but it is pretty quiet and a little lonely. Our office may only be a handful of people, bit it is lively and fun place to work. However, today there is a big Giants game during the day and I don't feel like fighting traffic, so I'll work locally.

Around 9:30am I head to my local space and dive into development, ok, maybe a little reddit, Hacker News and another quick sports article to get my mind focused. My work environment is relatively minimalist – a normal desk, my laptop is a Macbook Pro and I live in Terminal and Textmate.

Since I'm building an API, barely even need a browser. I normally listen to music or podcasts while I work, on Monday catch up with TWiT podcast, but they're talking too much about Windows 10, so switch back to Spotify.

After lunch, I'm helping out one of my co-workers on a small project he's doing, which will be part of our holiday surprise for the company. I'm helping him put together a post about it. A cool thing is we have a team working on an awesome new editor which is what I use for building the post. Dog fooding FTW! The editor is a joy to use especially with multimedia content. I do discover a few bugs and report them back to the team, but really excited for the new tool to launch.

As I continue to work, I start to fade and find myself being distracted by the Giants game which just started up. I decide to go get a cup of coffee and actually head home to watch the game. I figure its easier to have the game on in the background and work instead of switching tabs and reload constantly.

I come home to a couple of screams and big hugs, which answers the “are they napping” question.

At home, I work on this post and setting up a development server to run our test API site, neither of which require huge chunks of concentration; a few minor interruptions by baseball and kids aren't a big deal.

I typically put away my computer around 5pm and focus on playing with the kids, dinner, baths, getting ready for bed and all the typical evening with family stuff.

Today's Monday, so I'll go to my bowling league with a buddy, otherwise I might get back on my computer a little while watching TV. Most evening time is mindless browsing and I've been trying to cut more of it. Tonight I won't get to bed until midnight or so, which even that doesn't help me sleep past 5:30am, typically I'm in bed around 10pm.

So that's my Monday. It isn't a typical day of work, but one of the benefits of Automattic is a flexible schedule. A co-worker shifted his hours all summer so he could spend his days playing with his kids; others travel and work from whatever café or spot they end up.

If this sounds interesting, come work with us. If you want to read more in our “A Day in the Life” series, check out the #a8cday tag where other co-workers are documenting their day.