In an effort to get to know each other’s work days better, and to share publicly what it is like to work for a distributed company where most of us work from home, some of us at Automattic will be publishing “A Day in the Life” posts on our personal blogs throughout this week. The posts will be tagged #a8cday if you’d like to follow along.
5:30 – Head downstairs to my office with my water bottle to start the day.
Do I like getting up this early? Not really. But with an almost 7-month old baby in the house, it’s important to get my day started early.
I’ve closed down most things from last night, so I open up the ticket queue. Before I dive into answering tickets, I open up Focus@Will. It’s an online service that plays word free music and gets me in the zone to work. I typically set the timer for 25 minutes and start working and that’s exactly what I did this morning.
Start answering tickets starting with the oldest. 13hrs old, 20 in the queue.
Normally there would would hundreds of support requests to attend to, but I’m on a rotation with the VaultPress Team. The VaultPress volume is less, but the tickets are much trickier and usually take much longer to resolve.
A few ticket examples from this morning:
– How can I cancel my account?
– My website isn’t backing up, PLEASE HELP!
– Is it possible to backup up multiple installations of WordPress on my server?
Over the course of 3 Focus@Will sessions, there are only 3 left in the queue.
7:00 – Moved to the dining room table. My wife is starting to get ready for work and I’m on baby listening duty.
Start reading internal posts (also referred to as P2 posts, based on P2 Theme) to catch up what’s been going on across the company since yesterday
Saw the notification about the new version of the Beta WordPress iOS app, so I install it / start to play with it and test out the new features. Cool new features on the horizon.
25 minute block got me thru all my P2 posts
8:00 – Breakfast and play time with daughter. Anxiously wait for in home baby sitter to come so I can get back to work 🙂
9:00 – Grab my computer and head down to my office.
I pull up Codeschool.com to learn a bit of Javascript. Automattic allows us to spend time each week learning new skills. During the past year, I’ve refreshed my HTML/CSS skills and mastered improved my Sass skills. Now I’m digging into Javascript because it seems like everywhere I look, I’m seeing Javascript code.
Today’s lesson: loops. Focused on for and while loops and how to print text to a browser. I’m getting good with console.log("Print this out");
10:00 – Browse other a8cday posts to get inspiration / see how my colleagues are creating their blog posts.
10:30 – Back to the ticket queue. Sitting at 18 resolved posts right now
Second ticket in came from a colleague pointing out that a reminder email we send out is slightly outdated. After a brief chat on Slack (our internal communication tool) I posted to the VaultPress team’s P2 (our internal blog) to let our team know and for us to create a todo to get it fixed.
11:00 – Quick break to jump rope. 52 consecutive jumps and a few grapes as a snack. With all the traveling in the last 3 weeks (only been home 2 days), I’m slowly getting back into doing physical activity inside. I’ve found jump roping, pushups and pull-ups are great to do in batches when I need a break.
Keeping answering tickets in the queue. Finally get the queue back down to 5.
12:00 – Few errands and lunch.
2:00 – Back to it. This time at standing desk. Usually I spend more time at my standing desk, but I’m slowly getting back into it after being ‘lazy’ for a few weeks.
Pings from coworkers distract me from working on my WordPress Project.
I’m one of the go-to people when there is a WordPress.com podcasting question, so I chat about podcasting for awhile.
I realize that I have too much going on today to spend time on a project right now, so I move that block of time until tomorrow and spend more time answering tickets.
During this time, I continue to work for 25 minutes and break for 5 minutes. During the breaks, I refill my water bottle, do misc. tasks around the house, or jump rope. At one point, I got to 72 consecutive jumps 🙂
4:00 – One more read thru P2 posts and email and then tidy up my crazy ridiculous to do list and I’m wrapped up for the day.
Babysitter is leaving, so it’s time to go play with blocks and other toys.
That’s my day in a nutshell! My days vary based on the availability of our babysitter. Sound like something you’d enjoy? Apply today we’re always hiring.
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