This post is part of a series describing what Automatticians do on a daily basis. You can read more posts like this by following the tag #a8cday on WordPress.com and Twitter.
Here’s a look in at my “typical” day, even though every day changes, due to my wife’s work schedule and/or three year old daughter’s schedule.
Today is a bit different as I have to take my daughter to her Spanish Immersion preshool.
04:25 – Alarm goes off and I’ve got to get ready for the gym. Due to today’s schedule, the only time I’ll be able to get to Bomber’s Crossfit is at the 5am class.
05:55 – Workout over and I recorded two Personal Records (PRs) for the day, score!
06:10a – I’m back at home and have got to head to my office to record my WordPress podcast, Your Website Engineer. I normally record these shows on Tuesday morning, but I was out of town on Monday, so I’m a bit behind this week 🙂
06:45 – Podcast is recorded and published, time for a shower and get ready for the day.
07:30 – Shouts from our daughter come from an upstairs bedroom, she’s awake and ready to get up. For the next hour, she has breakfast and I unload dishwasher / pack her lunch and pack my computer up to head out of the house.
08:35 – We’re on the road towards school. It’s 22 minutes away and we are set for an on-time arrival.
09:10 – Set up shop at Whole Foods. It’s just minutes away from her school, has decent wifi, so it saves me an hour of driving home and back. I spend the first hour of work in “catch up mode.”
A majority of my colleagues live in different states / countries and there is a lot that has happened since I was done with work yesterday afternoon.
I share my comments on a few internal discussion threads and reply to any outstanding messages in Slack. I read a few colleague’s #a8cday posts and remember I want to write one too.
Some days during this three hour window, I’ll work on tickets to our customers. Today, I’m focusing on everything that isn’t ticket work.
This includes picking items form my todo list that are critical to be finished today and following up on some bug requests.
11:50 – I’m packed up and heading back to pick my daughter up from school.
13:00 – Back in my home office ready to go. Our nanny was at our house when we arrived, so my daughter began playing with her.
My legs are sore from yesterday’s / this morning’s workout, so I opted for my standing desk. I open up our ticket queue, hit the play button, started my music with Brain.FM and begin to help our customers one random request at a time.
The first few are about configurating their shipping modules, then a few about products like Cart Add Ons and coupons not working right.
My usual goal is to get thru 10 tickets in an hour, which is super challenging since some of them can take 30 minutes to debug. My first hour I got thru 3.
Hour #2 was much more fruitful, as I made it thru 11 tickets. The topics ranged from setting up taxes, to verify my theme is working properly, to asking customers to deactivate all plugins except for WooCommerce to check for plugin conflicts.
Every ticket is a new challenge. Most of time, it’s for one of the 400 extensions I’ve never installed, so I have to install the plugin, read the documentation, then try to configure it. Then I have to determine whether or not the behavior is intended, or if it’s a bug.
15:30 – Got a ping from my team lead. Time for my weekly chat. We chat for about 30 minutes on Slack about things of the week, including my regular feedback to HR. Communication is super important to us as a company, so I’ll read everything that he writes before heading off to HR (It’s pretty much a bunch of “Dustin is Awesome” anyways, so it’s fun to read ;P )
16:10 – Almost a wrap for the day. Scan thru and delete files from my desktop (screenshots) and downloads folder (misc work files). Close down Slack, Brain.FM, move any action items from open browser tabs to OmniFocus, then close both Chrome and Safari.
16:30 – Done with work for the day.
Monday’s and Wednesday’s are normally a bit lighter on ticket work as I try really hard to get all the rest of my tasks done for the week on these days. Then I spend the rest of my working week heads down working on tickets.
My goal is to have 150 interactions with customers a week. Some weeks I can hit my goal in during the work week. Other weeks, like this one, I’ll spend less tickets each day, but then spend a few hours on Saturday morning responding to tickets before my family wakes up.
Does this sound like a work day would be perfect for you? Work with us!
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