Ask HN: What's your working day like? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious about the details of the usual working day for different professions/positions (not necessary technical).
Examples of professions/positions: UI Designer, CEO, Sales, CTO, Welder, Trader (online/offline), Recruiter, System developer/administrator, Web developer, Civil Engineer, Quality Assurance Engineer, Teacher, Professor, Astronaut... Anything.
I'll start:
Profession/position: Web developer - full time, remote - <50 employees organization.
Workday:

    - Wake up & prepare myself.

    - Join a 10~15min call with my team (3 Developers, 1 Manager, 1 Designer).

    - Start working on assigned issues, usually for 1~4hours.

    - Catching up with emails/team conversations.

    - Reviewing other developers patches.

    - Repeat until calling it a day, usually 7~8 hours with 1 hour break.
 <comment><USER16> Profession: Software "Engineer"

[06:15] First alarm goes off;

[06:45] Finally wake up, get out of bed, shower, shave, make espresso for me and the wife

[07:15] out the door, 30 minute commute to office

[07:45] breakfast bagel at my work cafe

[08:00] arrive at desk, begin contemplating work -- work on something I procrastinated on the previous day so that I can have a good standup report

[9:00] everyone arrives at office, noise increases 10x, I am physically unable to concentrate anymore. Earplugs and noise-deadening headphones help some, but then having those on distracts me

[10:00 til 05:45 or 6:30 pm] Constant battling distractions, meetings, interruptions, and general work-related chaos, trying to somehow manage to squeeze in any actual developer work. Work proclaims how 'fun it is to work here! awesome! totes cool! We have so much cool stuff! Our culture is the best culture!'

Help me.

<comment><USER17> Many people complain about the usual work chaos. I'm also an engineer and I don't get it. For me, having other people come and ask questions is not distraction but an opportunity to help, learn to know their point of view, learn new things. Meetings are a way to influence the direction of the company however small my influence may be. Other people talking can really distract if it's heavily on topic, but usually also enables a little smalltalk 2-3 times each hour, which provides a lot of the otherwise missing social life between Monday Morning and Friday Afternoon. Even the actual development can happen together with one or two other guys, which increases the speed (since what's hard for me is usually easy for one of the colleagues and vice versa) and makes the solutions smarter (you can't just think off something, you need to be able to argue it as well).

In my eyes it's really addicting, and I usually get this after-disco/cinema low when the amount of people in office starts to slow down.

What's the actual "engineering work" you are trying to do without interacting with people all the time?

Edit: I think most answers can be summarized as "When I'm left alone I get into the flow mode, and that's enjoyable". The same way I mostly get it when working together with a colleague on a problem. Both ways may not always be the most productive, but due to producing a good feeling we prefer these. I see, thanks for showing your points of view.

<comment><USER18> Hmm. How about actually building stuff? For most software engineers, thats a very important part of their job/life/happiness. That requires long focus and flow. And in my personal opinion has a great sense of fulfillment attached to it compared to lot of scattered micro impacts. Ultimately you need to learn to balance both otherwise it gets very frustrating.

<comment><USER19> Do you have to personally write every single line of code or are you happy when the whole team builds the code?

<comment><USER20> Not the previous poster, but I'd argue that being able to point to something meaningful (doesn't have to be the whole system, but a coherent component) and say "I made that" brings satisfaction that's hard to beat.

This seems tricky to reconcile with the "everything is done by a team" model that's currently in vogue.

<comment><USER21> Also: [http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt- interrupt-...](http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-a- programmer/)

The above comic strip absolutely perfectly shows what's it about for me. Though I agree there is stuff better done with others (brainstorming, or discussing hard problems where you're stuck; also variants of rubber-duck debugging/designing; I'd say it boosts "breadth" and "lateral thinking"). But for many people there is most certainly also stuff better done alone ("depth" I suppose? often things like analysing interactions between subsystems; or building an algorithm; or reading docs or a paper; researching existing apps/solutions/libs in order to "spreadsheet" their pros & cons; also analysing/designing thread interactions; or debugging, building internal knowledge of a problem - which is also a required step before rubber-ducking, or generally discussing it, is even possible; also arguably maybe reviewing someone else's code).

<comment><USER22> +1, this comic strip is _perfect_. It describes the issue _precisely_ , in a way rarely seen even in best comic strips.

Things I have to do fall into two categories - either I immediately know how to approach them, at which point I can code while having conversations and there's little you can do to distract me - or, I don't immediately know how to approach them, at which point I _need_ time alone and in peace to load the whole system into my head and think through appropriate steps, possibly running mental simulations of several solutions in my head. The second kind of work is when I turn into a pretty antisocial person - I don't just avoid conversations, I avoid being in the same room with other people.

And frankly, second kind of work is kind of more important. It doesn't take skill to pump out hundreds of lines of code an hour. It takes skill and concentration to write those and _only those_ lines that move the project forward in a way that's maintainable down the road.

<comment><USER17> I also have that feeling, but only when coding with other people. The only time I really need to think that complex on my own is when I learn a really new topic. E.g. two weekends ago I really wanted to learn how iptables work because I was so frustrated that most SO/blog answers are not agreeing with each other, they often don't work when just copy&pasting, and nobody really explains why he chose that way and not another. [1] Then I really need to spend like 24h just reading docs and building these complex systems in my head.

With two people these complex systems often also end up in actual diagrams or code, which then can be tested or used for documentation and later lookup.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/43375012/wrapping-ones- he...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/43375012/wrapping-ones-head-around- port-forwarding-with-iptables)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Profession: Firefighter - Full time <600 organization

Workday (kind of, nothing is typical at the firehouse):

\- [06:00]: Wake up - get dressed covertly and slip out of the house

\- [06:30] Arrive at the station - Get coffee! Find my "relief" which is the similarly ranked person on the off going shift.

\- run 911 calls

\- [07:30] Have "line up"; Where we discuss what drills we have planned, eat some breakfast... drink more coffee. Talk about the previous day off.

\- run 911 calls

\- [08:30] Workout. Generally we have a mix of runners, lifters and crossfitters. Sometimes we will do the workout "on air" with our SCBA packs on... sometimes we need to just walk a few miles. Everyone on my shift likes to workout.

\- run 911 calls

\- [10:00] Shower and checkout equipment or drill. Send someone to the grocery store for the meals of the day.

\- run 911 calls

\- [11:00] Cook lunch, check email, and do any CE/Online training

\- run 911 calls

\- [12:00] eat lunch (between 12 and 2pm we typically get to eat... based on calls) , then pick up

\- [13:30] safety nap for the long night ahead

\- run 911 calls

\- [14:30] Afternoon coffee, plan drills for the next shift. Admin stuff.

\- run 911 calls

\- [15:00] Drill on some piece of equipment. Learn or relearn something. Generally Fire in the morning, EMS in the Afternoon.

\- [16:00] start preparing dinner

\- [17:00] Flag down and eat (depending on calls). We can watch TV or do personal stuff after this time.

\- run 911 calls for the night, try to sleep

\- [06:00] awake and get ready to go home.

<comment><USER24> I've been a software engineer for the past 20 years but I'm really looking at changing things up and doing something totally different—I just can't stand spending so much time in front of a computer anymore (I find myself _looking_ for excuses to do physical activity away from the screen). This sounds exactly like the sort of thing I'd enjoy, and I'd get to learn lots of useful skills and serve my local community at the same time. I'd be fine with taking a pay cut.

Do you have any advice for someone wanting to become a firefighter? Or any resources that you can point me to?

<comment><USER23> It is mostly EMS now... just fair warning. A lot of your options, like software engineering, depend on where you live and/or where you would like to re-locate. That is, lots of volunteer and professional options on the east coast... while mostly professional paid/career options on the west coast.

I cannot speak to the volunteer tier of the fire service, I am simply ignorant to the demands of that side. I can speak to the west coast professional model. To be clear, there are lots of professional options on the east coast too. I just don't know them.

In my humble opinion, this job is not for everyone. This job like any other has lots of cool shit and tons of horrible shit too. The ageism that may or may not exist in software is real in firefighting. Not due to politics or opinion or the SV stuff.... NO, It has do with the physical stress the body takes in this profession. It isn't commercial fishing, but sleep deprivation and picking up patients that weigh 500lbs, fighting brush fires all day, stress from seeing bad situations, etc. is real for most Fire/EMS folks today.

The academies are tough and the competition to get in is really high. For each class in my department, there are generally about 3K applicants. We select 30 or 40 and of those 15-25% will wash out of the academy before it's over.

If none of that makes you change your mind, go get EMT certified, Firefighter I and II certified, then take and pass the CPAT test... After that, start testing at every department that has open applications. You could probably script the app process :)

<comment><USER25> I went through academy (didn't work as FF though, just as EMS)[1] in Cleveland, in a program heavily oriented towards professional programs, and would echo most of this.

[1] I graduated just fine, but had pretty major time conflicts with grad school and decided not to go into FF full-time, which pretty much precluded my ability to do it at all, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Profession: "Security" Engineer

[08:00] Wake up

[09:05] Arrive at work a little after 9 to fight the power

[09:15] Coffee. The daily pilgrimage to the Mr. Coffee is the highlight of my day.

[09:25] Go to meeting scheduled by demon. I don't need to be in the meeting and nod my head whenever they look at me.

[10:05] Check email to find a customer figured out my email and started emailing me on how to figure out their wifi password. This is their 5th time emailing me despite having forwarded them to customer support.

[10:45] Ask head of developer team if security issue XYZ is fixed yet. Dev team head says he doesn't think it's a real security issue and won't be dedicating resources to fixing it. Tells me to reopen the ticket as a "feature". Researcher plans on disclosing the security issue within the week.

[11:10] Check ticketing system to find 5 new emails from security researchers from India demanding bug bounty for a reflected XSS issue they found on one of our static promotional websites.

[11:15] Briefly consider a career change

[11:16] Remember how big dat paycheck is

[12:00] Lunch

[13:00] Meeting about long-standing architectural security issue that I want fixed. None of the PMs want to dedicate resources to fix it.

[14:00] CEO sends company wide email about how good our security is compared to our competition.

[15:00] By now I've read every reddit post on the first 20 pages.

[17:00] Go home while being too mentally exhausted to go out after work and make friends

Loving the wage slave life

<comment><USER27> not a security engineer, but working at a large financial company a lot of these points hit especially 11:15 & 11:16 and 17:00 :))))

<comment><USER28> I don't get it - how can it matter that you make tons of money if you are not satisfied with your life? (legit question)

<comment><USER29> It's easier to argue money doesn't matter when you're not making a sh*t ton. If you have a family to support and are making a crap ton of money it's more difficult to walk away from. But yeah, it's definitely not worth dying inside for.

<comment><USER30> Completely agree with this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Profession: Farmer (growing wine and winemaker) - about 20 - 30 hrs week, owner, single employee

(For the rest of my time I write software as a single contributor/freelancer)

[6:30] Wake up, light breakfast

[7:30 - 10:00] commute to the village where is my farm, there is no need to rush. I take tram to train station, get some coffee, read emails on train commute, then switch to bus, read some book, then 4 km walking to final destination. When I am in hurry (say 1 or 2 times a month), I just drive by car, then the commute takes about 45 minutes.

[10:00 - 15:00] change to my working clothes, walk 4km to the vineyard, stop at small grocery store on my way to buy some food for a day and maybe beer. Start doing work that needs to be done, listen to podcast or music during the day or just think about stuff and listen to nature.

[15:30 - 17:00] commute back home, some coffee, reading books on bus and train.

[17:00 - 22:00] home with family, playing with kid, maybe some light programming, go sleep.

<comment><USER32> Idyllic. I love the unhurried cadence of this day.

<comment><USER31> Nature of this work is very seasonal, so harvest month is anything but calm and unhurried. Those field days I described are my favorite, but there are many other type of days in life of farmer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Profession: Web Developer, self employed working remote with startups and creative agencies.

Workday:

\- [08:00] Wake up in a daze and make my wife and son tea and breakfast

\- [08:30] Shower, get dressed and ready

\- [09:15] After prepping water canister and tea caddy, head to garden office.

\- [09:30] Procrastinate

\- [14:00] Realise the work day is nearly over. Panic. Cram work in.

\- [17:00] Finish work, make son dinner and play with him.

\- [19:00] Put son to bed and start making wife and I dinner.

\- [20:30] Watch Parks and Recreation whilst contemplating an entire career change.

<comment><USER20> _whilst contemplating an entire career change_

To anything in particular?

<comment><USER33> Haven't a clue, I don't like working with clients anymore, and running a SaaS is out of the question since everyone wants to do it and it's not as dreamy as it sounds. I'll figure something out for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I am seeing a lot of depressing posts here (and mostly in humor, I think)

Lots of talk about sleeping in, procrastinating, pretending to work, etc. etc.

I used to be a Software Engineer and I can relate extremely well. Now I am attempting to be a travel writer and photographer, driving around Africa. I spring out of bed in the morning, and have some of the best days of my life, day after day. It's hard, but I love it much more than my previous live. The money is not so good, but what do I need money for anyway? Gas in the tank and food for dinner and I am happy camper (literally)

My advice: We each only have one life, make sure you live the one you want to. Save some money, quit for a while and try your dream. If it doesn't work out you can always go back (I did, twice already, just to earn fast cash then hit the road again. I am hoping this time there is no going back - it's going _OK_ so far)

<comment><USER35> Thanks for this. I'm a web developer, recent college grad. I freelance and travel a lot. It's cool, but I hate the work for the most part. I do lots of tiny UI tweaks and stuff every day. It's slowly killing me inside I think.

The upside is I work from 'hpme' and can sleep in and have lots of freedom and stuff, but when it comes to work... It's destroying me.

I have been living in Costa Rica for the past year and I'm incredibly jealous of some of the locals here. Some of the locals running surf shops or tour companies or ______ are living their dream. Less stress than me, 10x happier. It's incredible.

<comment><USER36> The grass is always greener. You're (theoretically) making more money than them and most likely have a more flexible schedule. They're also tied to location. You can get bored of Costa Rica and move tomorrow if you want.

There's nothing to be jealous of. You can start a surf shop if you think they have it better than you.

<comment><USER37> That doesn't seem quite right to me. You might be making more money in USD, but their cost of living is likely far lower. The cost of real estate and rent in major American metro areas is insane these days, and that's where all those high-paying software jobs are located. Even in many of the not-so-major areas, the rents have gotten really high. So sure, you might be making a lot, but it's all going to some landlord, or getting tied up in a house that could very well lose much of its value if the market crashes again like it did in 2008.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Profession: meat robot at an Amazon fulfillment center.

[4:00am] wake up

[4:30am] coffee, morning workout, maybe code

[5:30am] shower

[6:00am] breakfast

[6:30am] drive to work

[6:55am] clock in, mandatory stand-up, bullshit, pretend OSHA stretches. Everybody claps out.

[7:00am] push juice carts full of merchandise from point a to point b, push empty juice carts from point b to point a

[10:15am] break, definitely not surfing HN on a work computer

[10:45am] push juice carts full of merchandise from point a to point b, push empty juice carts from point b to point a

[2:15pm] break, definitely not surfing HN on a work computer, also definitely not complaining about processes or the UI of the internal software on the public whiteboard.

[2:45pm] push juice carts full of merchandise from point a to point b, push empty juice carts from point b to point a

[5:30pm] clock out, drive home, maybe code

Alternately, instead of pushing juice carts, I can remove items from bins, count them and put them back, remove items from bins, count them (a different way this time) and put them back, or remove items from juice carts provided by other people doing what I do now, and put them into bins to be counted.

Robots bring the bins, but that's not nearly as fun as it sounds, because it means you have to stay in one spot for the entire shift while the work comes to you, because algorithms. The little orange fuckers[0] are worth more than my car and I'm pretty sure that if someone set the facility on fire, the Kiva pods would be rescued well before me.

This is not a technical job, and not one Hacker News would be at all interested in reading about from my position, but for the time being it's the only job I have.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Robotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Robotics)

<comment><USER30> I'm sorry to say this, but this is literally one of the funniest things I've ever heard

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Commercial programmer, full-time, some remote, some office. No alarm clock, watch, or cell phone. I don't know what time it is except for outlook meeting reminders or SO telling me it's time for dinner, Jeopardy, or Penguins or Steelers game. Same routine for years:

      - Cats wake me up when it's light. I feed them.
      - Bike ride on trails, 5 to 13 miles.
      - <USER2>
      - fresh fruit, coffee, salad, grazing off & on all day
      - check & resolve all personal email
      - check & resolve all work email
      - check headlines
      - check work queue (Visual Studio)
      - review last night's notes
      - spend most of the day in IDE, writing code, unit testing
      - take a break every hour or 2 for email, VSO, snack, Hacker News, twitter, lichess
      - attend meetings when outlook reminds me
      - dinner with SO, reminded with, "Two minute warning!"
      - check & resolve all email (I end every day at email zero.)
      - Jeopardy with SO
      - no more computer
      - print source code, review, & mark up in red
      - write down tomorrow's To Do List
      - read other stuff
      - lights out

<comment><USER40> > print source code, review, & mark up in red

Can you expand on this one?

What code are you printing? Other developer's code for code review? And to be clear, you mean a printer right? That paper comes out of?

Also: I like that you only check email twice. I should look into that.

<comment><USER39> Maybe the most effective practice I've ever had. Check out #49 here: [http://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.pdf](http://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.pdf)

<comment><USER40> Cheers for the link!

> ©2011.

Update in 2021?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Taco Bell Manager in a mall food court [0800] - Wake up, shower, eat breakfast. [0830] - Ride my bike to work since I lived close to the mall. [0850] - Unlock the store, turn on lights, turn on re-thermalizer, groan about how crappy the night shift cleaned. [0915] - Wonder why I still work at Taco Bell. Drop the previous days's, along with fresh, beef/chicken/steak in the re-thermalizer to be ready to serve at 1000. [0920] - Run through the food/supplies to make sure we have enough for the day. [0930] - Another crew member shows up (usually someone I like since I make the schedules), I delegate work for them to do. [0935] - Prepare the cash drawers and do the morning count of the safe. [9050] - Stare at the wall of my office wondering why I still work at Taco Bell. [1000] - Open up the store and feed whomever eats Taco Bell for breakfast... [1130] - Swap out food line (replace stuff that will be 'unservable' in about an hour). A couple more crewmembers show up for lunch rush. [1200] - LUNCH RUSH/Deal with really crappy customers which make me wonder why I still work at Taco Bell. [1500] - Lunch Rush ends. Another manager shows up, and we do the change of shift stuff. [1600] - <USER3> finally get to take a break. [1700] - Clock out. Find out my bike is stolen. Walk home. [1800] - Eat some food, play video games. [0000] - Go to bed.

I'm no longer a Taco Bell manager. Now I am a software dev like many of you. I just thought I'd share since there was a lack of fast food in this post.

<comment><USER42> I'd be interested in hearing more about your journey from fast food to software development.

Grats on the life change!

<comment><USER41> At the time I programmed as a hobbyist to try and better myself--I wasn't always just playing video games after work. Eventually I got an office job as a temp doing data entry. I came to dislike my single task I was given, so I did what any lazy programmer would do and automated it. Eventually I was found sleeping at my desk while the program was running, and was reported to the boss. When I went to the boss's office to be reprimanded he instead referred me to the head of IT who then offered me a job as a programmer. That was about 5 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I made an account to post this. I come to HN often because I find it interesting and I thought I'd contribute, in amongst the software engineers:

Teacher (UK):

6:30 get up, eat, take child to nursery

8:15 arrive, plan lessons, mark work

9:20 teach

12:40 working lunch (meetings, helping students with work)

13:40 teach

15:40 plan lessons, mark, or attend meetings

16:30 gym

17:30 collect child from nursery and generally feed and entertain

20:00 feed self

20:30 planning lessons, marking

22:00 bed

<comment><USER44> Profession: Teacher (primary school)

0500: Alarm goes off. Read the news for 5-10 minutes.

0510: Out of bed, making coffee.

0515: At my desk, coding one of my side projects or learning something new.

0630: Stop working, make breakfast for my wife, have breakfast with her.

0710: Shower, dress.

0725: Leave for work.

0755: Kids are in the classroom. Pandemonium for the next 6.5 hours. Each day I have two breaks (15 min in the morning and 35-ish minutes for lunch). If it's one of my two weekly plan days, I get another 90 minutes for planning/sitting in meetings.

1425: Dismissal, walk kids to the bus, watch everyone leave/get picked up. Head back to the classroom to cobble together the next day's materials.

1530: Out the door.

I'm applying for software developer positions - as much as I love teaching, I'm glad this will be my last year in the classroom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Profession: CIO - Full time at company of roughly 3400 employees

      - [6:45 AM] - Wake up, take out dog
      - [7:45 AM] - Place kids in the car, off to car pool
      - [8:25 AM] - Arrive at work
      - [8:30 - 9:30 AM] - Catch up on email and news
      - [9:30 - 11:45 AM] - Work on whatever
      - [11:45 - 12:45 PM] - Head to gym and get workout in
      - [12:45 PM - 5:45 PM] - Work on whatever
      - [5:45 PM - 7:45 PM] - Head home, spend time with family
      - [7:45 PM - 11:30 PM] - Work on either full time or personal projects on laptop while on the couch with the wife
      - [11:30 PM - 1:30 AM] - Work on personal projects
      - [1:30 AM] - <USER11>

Working on whatever during the day can include: attending meetings, checking in with the team, helping out on servers, writing code, architecting solutions, <insert whatever here>. Because I still write code and devops/admin, etc, I wouldn't consider myself a typical CIO...and I very much prefer it that way. I know and understand our entire stack, and I find this simple fact crucial to effectively driving innovation.

<comment><USER46> Wow, less than 6 hours of sleep. Is that sustainable?

<comment><USER47> It depends on your genome

<comment><USER48> It does, but at least for me, the ritual requires a bit more work than that. My whole family is good with less than 8 hours of sleep and interestingly, growing up it was seen as a symptom of a problem if we slept for 8 or more hours. I am usually good with 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night, but in order to maintain that, I must ensure that I don't oversleep on the weekends, or my whatever thing gets out of whack and my body wants to oversleep on other days. I've also got to maintain my exercise regime, because for some reason, when I work out, I feel good and totally refreshed after 5-6 hours of sleep. But if I haven't worked out for a few days, or I overslept on the weekend, it takes me a week and some exercise to get back into feeling refreshed after only 5-6 hours of sleep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Full stack web developer in .NET.

5:25AM : Alarm goes off.

5:26AM : Make tea in microwave.

5:30AM : Study period where I learn new tech.

6:30AM : Make a double espresso.

6:35AM : Catch up on the tech news. Sometimes I play a short video game.

6:50AM : Personal hygiene.

7:05AM : Fresh eggs (from our chickens) over-easy on toast/bagel/English muffin.

7:20AM : My commute. Often in the summer it's 30 minutes and by bike.

7:30AM : Read email, handle any requests. Check our internal task system for what I should be working on.

7:45AM : Greet the incoming devs (I'm almost always in first) and catch up a bit. Start firing up the tools and find my place from yesterday: Visual Studio, SSMS, Notepad++, Beyond Compare, Firefox, Chrome, Outlook, Slack, Lync (yes, both, one for devs, one for management), VLC (for headphone time), Nomad

8:00AM : Go DnD. Check email at 1/2 past the hour. Check task system to see if priorities have changed.

12:00PM : Lunch! 45 minute walk, or play Magic the Gathering.

1:00PM : Go DnD. Check email at 1/2 past the hour. Check task system to see if priorities have changed.

4:30PM: Check my personal email (list for the store?), then I'm outta here!

There are random meetings from time to time, but maybe only one or two a week.

Honestly, I can't imagine it much better.

<comment><USER50> Tea... from the microwave...

Use a kettle, your life will be renewed. Your days more meaningful and your relationships happier.

<comment><USER49> Can't pass up a recommendation like that. Out comes the kettle.

<comment><USER50> Good man

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Reading the comments I have to consider myself very lucky in a way. I work full-remote.

\- I never use an alarm, normally waking up around 8:30am

\- I often start coding right away when I wake up, in these first 2 hours I am often exceptionally productive

\- eat something, coffee, reading, relaxing

\- do some more coding till I feel my focus drops

\- repeat the last two steps

When I feel tired I try not to code if possible, I consider it being a bad habit.

Relaxing between the focussed coding sessions is of major importance to produce good code IMHO, while relaxing I'm often thinking about the different options of how I can best write the next piece of code.

If I have a bad day, not being really productive, I often do some more coding at night if I can get the right focus.

On a good day I outperform 2 coders that work in the open office of our company, with ease.

<comment><USER52> Full-remote here - same workflow, same results too :)

I'm considering to switch to working 10 billable hours each day on Tue-Thu, though. I'm usually too exhausted after a working day to socialise, but not too tired to work. A 30h work-week with four days of weekend sounds pretty tempting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Profession/Position: Senior Software Developer (.NET stack), onsite, 20 development/150 non-development employees in office, < 10,000 employees for entire company

-[05:30] Alarm goes off, check phone/read something till I fully wake up

-[05:45] Get out of bed, pull blankets off wife to wake her up

-[06:00] Make omelette, pour coffee programmed to brew at 5:45

-[06:30] Eat breakfast, read Bible

-[07:00] Begin commute

-[07:10] Drop wife off at her office

-[07:15] Arrive at my office

-[07:30] Read email, get more coffee

-[07:45] Start up Brain.fm and begin most productive part of work day

-[09:00] Everyone is now in the office, productivity wanes as meetings are scheduled

-[11:30] Lunch time, go to onsite gym or go for run outside

-[12:30] Shower/cleanup and back to my desk

-[13:00] Standup conference call

-[13:10] Back to work, code reviews, meetings, etc.

-[16:00] Productivity dwindling

-[16:30] Read HN/industry news, leave the office

-[16:45] Pick up wife from her office

-[16:50] Arrive at home

</comment><comment><USER54> 2nd year Surgical resident, part of my education to be an orthopedic surgeon. Currently working in a town 100km away.

05:45 wake up, quick breakfast and cycle to the train station 06:20 train. Grab the laptop, prepare for procedures or work on research 07:45 handover or 08:00 start of first procedure. Do timeout, grab a coffee while the anesthesist does his job 12:00 when lucky time for lunch behind the PC, administration 16:30 usually last procedure, handoff when on wards or clinic duty 17:00 see patients of the day, check for question from the new shift of nurses 18:00 train home. Do some coding for a company my friends and me run 19:15-19:30 home

Excerise, work on scientific papers or meet with the team at the office. Work on some points in the job queue. Sleep at 23:00.

Just a few more months and I'll change to a job closer by

</comment><comment><USER55> \- [05:30-06:00] breakfast

\- [06:00-07:30] random.choice([bike riding, work on side projects, hiking, reading/studying])

\- [08:00-11:30] solid coding hours

\- [12:00-13:00] lunch

\- [13:00-17:00] try to get work done, but because people have a tendency to interrupt me every 5 minutes, work never actually gets done during these hours < [http://www.freelancing.ph/wp- content/uploads/2014/08/Program...](http://www.freelancing.ph/wp- content/uploads/2014/08/ProgrammerInterrupted.jpg) >

\- [17:00-18:30] squeeze in some more coding time, maybe

\- [19:00-20:30] dinner

\- [21:00-23:00] random.choice([piano practice, work on side projects, reading/studying, night hiking, house chores/laundry/maintainence, additional work time if necessary])

</comment><comment><USER56> Profession: Software Engineer (Web) at a large enterprise software company (~12k employees)

Workday:

\- [6:30 am] Wake up and get the kids ready (I try and let my wife sleep-in since she has likely been up several times during the night tending to our infant son)

\- [8:00-8:15] Get to work, check Email/Slack

\- Write Code

\- Mid-morning stand-up

\- Write Code

\- Home for lunch (I'm a 12 min drive from home)

\- [1:00 pm] Write Code

\- [5:15 pm] Home to run around with my insane 3 y/o

\- [8:00 pm] Both kids are in bed

\- [8:05 pm] Go for a jog

\- [9:00 pm] Either work on side projects or read a book

This is pretty much every day. The software I work on is not exactly inspiring stuff but my company grants me a stable and predictable schedule of which I am thankful for.

</comment><comment><USER57> Profession: Electronics Technician on an ultra-deep water drill ship.

Full Time- Rotational 28 Days On - 28 Days Off

[0430] Alarm goes off.

[0500] Call wife before work.

[0530] Morning meeting with all departments to find out plan for the day. Try to pay attention to what others may need help with or where there might be a window of opportunity to work on certain equipment.

[0540] Grab breakfast.

[0600] Meet with night guys to find out what happened during the night and what might need to be continued to work on during the day.

[0620-0640ish] Drink coffee, have departmental meeting to determine what supervisor learned in supervisors meeting. Discuss any issues that may have come up.

[0600-1800] Do maintenance, troubleshoot equipment, install capital projects, research on equipment and projects, check email, do training, fill out paperwork. Eat lunch sometime between 1100 and 1300.

[1800-1820] Discuss day with on-coming crew. Tell them what happened during the day and any issues that need to be dealt with.

[1820ish-0430] Eat dinner, call wife, read, watch movie maybe, practice programming, sleep.

Sundays - Fire drill either during the day or at night.

Tuesdays - Weekly safety meetings after work, discuss any safety issues that have occurred in the fleet or particularly bad ones in the industry. Regulatory safety training on lifesaving equipment.

Repeat for 28 days.

{edit- Trying to get formatting right.}

</comment><comment><USER58> <rant>

Profession: WFH software developer - between half and full time @ small distributed company

Workday (kind of):

\- [between H = 6am and 3pm] wake up

\- [H - H+1] either manage to force myself to code, or get annoyed with not being able to communicate with anyone else, because everyone is in a different time-zone, and/or on a different schedule

\- [H+1 - H+2] depending on the above, continue work, or do some random errands/waste time because "I can do the work later"

\- [H+2 - H+3] depending on work/errands, continue whatever, or decide it's time for a break again because "I can do everything later, since I don't have regular working hours"

\- ...

\- [H+7 - H+8] usually something like one of the following: (1) get depressed by the low number of working hours done this day/week/month, (2) contemplate whether I will manage to get back into some daily routine, or (3) get depressed or excited by the possibility of the routine, or (4) depressed by lack of social interactions while WFH.

\- ["after work"] trying to decide what to do with the rest of my time, i.e. "maybe work more, to make up for the low number of hours" or "maybe do something else, to rest before the next day" \- it's a rather heavily anxiety- inducing decision making process.

</rant> :)

Sorry, this post really made me want to vent. But seriously, it is like ~60% coding, ~30% talking to other remote people or reviewing their code, ~10% other work'ish stuff like deployments to various environments, planning, etc. And I realize the hours and everything could be better, given some better organization and discipline, but anyway I'm going to switch to an office based job, which should Solve All My Problems. Yeah, I'm kidding obviously. :)

</comment><comment><USER59> I want to thank you for posting this. It's a bit inspiring to see how everyone else works, especially what time everyone gets up. My girlfriend has been trying really hard to get me to wake up early every day, and I've been slowly able to do that, but I'm not quite there consistently yet. Seeing all you guys post your stuff is like going to the gym with workout partners that motivate me instead of getting on a boring treadmill by myself. This is great. I also realized that I have not enough of a set pattern for my days.

<comment><USER60> Absolutely, we could all use a bit more focus on health in our life. I'm the same way; the extent of my exercise is taking the stairs instead of the elevator, and my girlfriend dragging me to a running trail on the weekend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Profession: Music Tech Developer - Freelance, Remote

      6:30am : Wake up, sit (meditate > 10min)
      7:00am : Make tea/coffee and breakfast for my wife, eat together, she leaves
      7:30am : Quick exercises
      8:00am : (Sometimes 9a, 11a, or a combination) Meeting to plan the days priorities with either clients or my associate developers
      9:00am - 12:00pm : Making things (researching, writing code, testing, taking screen shots / recordings, reviewing, committing)
      12:00pm - 1:00pm : Lunch, often watch content on apple tv (youtube video, daily show, etc)
      1:00-2:30pm : Making things (same as above)
      2:30pm : Walk (<2 miles on path in front of house, audio book or podcast)
      3:00-4:30pm : Making things (same as above)
      4:30-~5:30pm : Deliverables (commits, uploads, emails, calls)

I love working on music tech and just chatting with someone about it gets me stoked to start building stuff. Those morning meetings with clients and my associates really help me focus.

Wrote a little more here: [https://medium.com/@gmcerveny/my-daily-routine-for- music-tec...](https://medium.com/@gmcerveny/my-daily-routine-for-music-tech- coding-f17beccaa7e0)

<comment><USER17> Most healthy life plan I've seen so far. How did you get there? E.g. what brought you to meditating or taking a walk every afternoon.

<comment><USER61> Thanks for the note.

About 5 years ago I asked my friend to regularly sit with me. Mainly I just wanted the brain benefits of meditation. We looked up info online but then later visited some meditation centers in town. I happened to like the soto zen style the best and have adopted that practice since.

I work from home and although I'm on the edge of the city, there's not much near me except this awesome 7 mile paved greenway. So I mainly walk just to get out of the house. It's a nice time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Profession: MSc Student, Dpt. Experimental Medicine

[08:30] Alarm goes off, gussy-up, 2xPB on White Toast

[08:45] Arrive at subway, turn on my podcast queue

[09:15] Walk into work, give a quick check on human and bacteria cultures

[09:20] Pause podcasts, plan day out at desk

[09:30] Resume podcasts, throw on lab coat, gloves, begin work at bench

[09:45] Realise that todays plan overlooked some important fact and now makes zero sense

[09:50] Pause podcasts, avail self of PPE, attempt to plan day out again, dick around for a couple of minutes on HackerNews

[10:00] Resume podcasts, Throw on lab coat, gloves, begin work at bench/BSL cabinet once more

[13:30] Lunch w/ colleagues or YouTube for ~1hr, if I remember to have it

[15:00] Realise that I've planned too much, contemplate leaving early while browsing HackerNews

[15:30] One last experiment that will "take 1.5 hours, tops"

[19:00] Finish "1.5" hour experiment 3.5 hours later.

[19:15] Gawk at people in the subway

[19:30] Arrive home, supper

[20:00] Send out emails I should have sent out last week, possibly work on presentations that I need to give

[20:30] Hack on some side project while netflix/youtube plays in the background

[22:00] Hit roadblock, lay prone on bed contemplating employment options

[22:30] Back to side projects

[24:00] Code quality gets progressively worse, sudden realisation that almost every YouTube channel is cancerous in it's own special way. Make way to bed

</comment><comment><USER63> Profession: Mechanical Engineer - Full Time (large well known consumer product brand)

Workday:

-[8:00] Meeting, once a week with Italy (tool supplier), 2 days a week with US manufacturing (on site)

-[9:00-11:30] Catch up on emails, review 3D CAD for projects, individual casual meetings with designers, marketing, CAD etc

[11:30-1:00] Lunch with coworkers, usually go to local climbing gym or go for a hike

[1:00-5:00] Same as morning routine, sometimes have to help manufacturing team with production issues, usually schedule larger meetings to kickoff new projects

[5:00] Touch point call with Chinese counterparts for new projects

[6:00] Go home.. exchange email/wechat with China for a while

</comment><comment><USER64> Profession: Full-Stack Web Developer - Full Time, remote <Just me and the founder>

Workday:

        - [7:30AM] Wake up

        - [7:45AM] Get dressed

        - [8:00AM] Take a quick walk to the gas station for energy drink.

        - [8:15AM] Start reading my emails and conversating on Hacker News, Nim lang forum, reddit.

        - [9:00AM] Eat some breakfast.

        - [10:00AM] Start actual work.

        - [11:00AM (M, W, F)] Phone call with the founder to discuss progress.

        - [11:30AM] Start daily workout: Gymnastics/calisthenics(M, W, F), cardio (T, TH)

        - [12:30PM] Take Shower and eat lunch

        - [1:00PM] Get back to work. Mostly React and Django stuff at the moment.

        - [6:00PM] Finish work for the day,

        - [6:15PM] Start working on side projects, tutorials, learning, practicing etc. Sometimes I study math or Japanese.

        - [9:00PM] Play some overwatch, blackwake, beamNG, Persona, whatever. Sometimes spend time with the GF watching TV.

        - [12:00AM] Let a podcast lull me to sleep.

</comment><comment><USER65> Profession/position: Software engineer (web) - CTO < 10 employees and father

Workday:

\- [6:30] Wake up and get ready

\- Check my emails and schedule for anything urgent and deal with them if there is

\- [7:30] Get my daughter ready for daycare

\- [8:00] Drive her to daycare

\- [8:30] Return to my home office

\- Usually spend 15 minutes hunting HN and RSS for things that might be relevant to my business. I skim titles mostly using keyboard shortcuts in Feedly... it goes quick

\- [9:00] Make sure everyone on the team has clear objectives and is not blocked

\- [9:30] Create a checklist of the top 3 things I want to get done today and 2 nice to haves (sometimes it is business, sometimes it is HR, usually it is code or ops)

\- Deal with the tier 2 priority emails

\- Proceed to knock things off that checklist

\- [12:00] Lunch

\- Hacker news and RSS

\- More checklist items

\- Usually no more than a half hour of meetings a day

\- [4:45] Daily scrum with the team. No more than 15 minutes

\- More checklist items

\- [6:00] Wife comes home with our daughter

\- [7:00] Cook / eat dinner (my wife watches our child, I do the cooking)

\- [8:00] Play with my daughter for a bit and read her some stories (she's a year and a half)

\- Handle tier 3 emails if I'm feeling up to it

\- [9:30] Wait for my daughter to go to sleep

\- Watch a TV show on HBO or Showtime with my wife

\- [10:30] Half hour workout

\- [11:00] Shower

\- [11:30] Bed

\- Repeat

<comment><USER66> A little bit OT, but how much does a CTO pull in at that size company?

<comment><USER65> Really off topic but I don't mind. Sorry for the delay response. I wasn't checking in on this thread. In general, about the same amount as a senior software engineer at a larger company and significant stock options (1-2% for late stage, 5%+ for early stage, much more for co-founder).

<comment><USER66> Cool, thanks for being open about it. About what I was expecting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Profession: SaaS CTO (org sze 6 ppl) & Personal Trainer Location: SF Bay CA USA

My work life balance is not at all there.

Both Off-day (3/week) and Work-Day (4/week) start similarly:

-[630-730] Wake up when my 2.5 y/o son wakes up. Let my ex-wife sleep in cause I'd rather not be around her despite still living together.

-[7-9] Breakfast, Legos, epic Batman vs Spiderman vs Ironman battles with son, skim emails, review server stats, SC2/PUBG, HN-YT

-[9-12] CTO work at home: review code & merge submissions, answer support emails, possibly code or research or learn

"Off" Day:

-[12-130] Personal Trainer Session with client

-[130-3] Ex-wife in graduate school. Dad-life beckons. Return Home, make lunch, got to the park w/ son.

-[3-5] Nappy time

-[5-9] Personal training session & my own gym-time if scheduled or Legos, HN, Reddit, YT and TV if not

-[9-11] Drink a beer, watch any TV that isn't toddler approved, got to bed.

"Work" Day:

-[12-130] Personal Trainer Session with client

-[130-2] Grab Lunch on the way to office

-[2-3] Eat and interface with co-workers

-[3-7] CODE!!!!!!!!

-[7-730] Eat and code

-[730-9] Code, research, learn or play video games on my companies dime.

</comment><comment><USER68> Profession: Robotics Engineer

[06:00] Wake up, do a short programming session(either learning new things or doing some projects)

[07:00] Eat breakfast, prepare for the day

[08:00] Arrive at work, open up the place

[08:10] Catch up on news in the field

[08:20] Answer emails, project discussions, review pull requests

[08:45] People start slowly showing up

[09:00] Write or test software for robots/sensors/whatever I'm actually doing at a given time

[10:00] Everyone arrived, it's time for meetings, supporting other people etc.

[13:00] Lunch time

[14:00] Chasing mobile robots or flying quadrocopters

[16:20] Going home (unless there is a deadline approaching and I need to stay until 19)

</comment><comment><USER69> Software Engineer at Big Corp.

10:00 - get to work, check email, coffee

11:00 - standup: please the clueless Scrum Master by reciting the amazing work I did yesterday, which he has no clue about whatsoever. Usually finish with a "good job" praise

11:15 - peruse various newspapers

12:00 - check Linkedin, credit card accounts, Reddit/HN

13:00 - have a salad and coffee

13:30 - random crap: failing builds, random requests from people, pointless meetings. Sometimes interviewing people in this slot

15:00 - <USER5>

15:15 - more pointless meetings and random crap

16:00 - code review other people

17:00 - check the news/Linkedin/Reddit/HN again

18:00 - practice on leetcode (not looking for a job, just do it for fun)

19:00 - actually do some coding for the day

20:00 - call it a day, home.

The amazing thing is I still got more work done than most people, mostly because the code I write actually works and takes little time to be reviewed by others. Some people seem to be working all day but spend most of the time fixing their own/other people's crap.

</comment><comment><USER70> CEO - Full time, 6 (soon to be 8) people (Startup Internet Service Provider)

Workday (highly variable)

\- [7:00] Wake up, read Reddit / HN, check email (I'm trying to change this habit, it takes too long

\- [8:15] Go to the office / Starbucks. Respond to emails, check my task list, hop on chat and make sure people have activities for the day

\- [9:00] Try and do some sort of focus work, eg. Read and Sign contracts, write documentation, respond to emails

\- [12:30] Costco Hotdog / Solent / Grilled chicken lunch

\- [1:00] Go to Home Depot and pick up something we need

\- [1:30] Physical construction. Install customers, troubleshoot networking issues, drill walls, dig holes

\- [6:00] Try to remember to eat

\- [7:00] Do some sysadmin things

\- [8:00] Go to Lewis and Clark Brewery and discuss plans with co-founder

\- [10:30] Head home

\- [11:00] Read phone, brush and floss, sleep

</comment><comment><USER71> Profession: Web developer, self employed building own product / consultation.

Workday:

\- 7:15AM: Alarm goes off. Shut it off, go back to sleep.

\- 7:20AM: Ask wife and kids to keep it down, still sleeping.

\- 8:00AM: Wife and kids left to school / work, can finally get alittle more sleep / pupper doggo jumps into bed and cuddes.

\- 8:30AM-9AM: Wake up realize the time, and jump out of bed and get dressed.

\- 9AM: take pupper doggo outside, then head down stairs to office.

\- 9AM-11AM: Slack, IRC, Hacker News, Github Notifications, Email, Reddit review.

\- 11AM-1PM: Work on consultation work.

\- 1PM-2PM: Lunch.

\- 2PM-4PM: Work on consulation work.

\- 4PM-5PM: Wind down consultation work and start looking over tasks for my own project.

\- 5PM-8PM: Go pick up daughter from daycare, have dinner and family time.

\- 8PM-11PM: Work on own product.

\- 11PM-12AM: Watch an episode of a show I have DVR'd.

\- 12AM-7:15AM: Sleep.

</comment><comment><USER72> So, As a PHP senior:

[06:15]: First alarm goes off(It's random music as alarm tone) and wake up!

[06:20]: Get out of bed proper myself

[06:45]: Out of the door and always First i decide to change walking way to new street from home, This is very important for me, Not duplicate way like tomorrow!

[07:00]: First BRT and switch to Bus

[07:30]: Arrive office, breakfast bagel at my work and tea

[07:45]: Check my emails, Hacker News and start work ...

[13:00]: Break for 30 min to lunch and rest

[17:00]: Leave office and getting on bus to home(listen music and podcast)

[18:00]: Go to body building club

[19:00]: Arrive home

[19:15]: shower, shave ...

[19:45]: Start chatting on Telegram OR Call with my wife, Because she is far from me for 6 months :(

[20:45]: A bit eat like Nuts ...

[21:00]: Start read randomly a good book like "The Architecture of Happiness / Alain de Botton" until i sleep!

</comment><comment><USER73> Profession: Software Security Engineer (Work from home)

Workday:

\- [08:00] Wake up in a daze make breakfast

\- [08:30] Shower, get dressed and ready

\- [09:15] Start work (at home), read email / respond to email.

\- [10:30] Prioritize days work.

\- [10:40] Research first priority issue, read bz, take notes, read again, familiarize self with new area (almost every time).

\- [11:45] Eat lunch

\- [12:35] Attempt to write a reproducer for any given sec issue / understand any given issue. Expect 5 - 10 "calls" for bullshit in this timeframe.

\- [16:30] Take Dog for a walk.

\- [17:30] Resume work, finish daily write up.

\- [19:00] Play overwath / Powerlifting training (alternating)

\- [19:45] Cook dinner

\- [20:30] Wash up.

\- [22:00] Check work mail for emergencies in the morning, or surprise meetings.

\- [22:10] Shower.

\- [23:30] Read /r/netsec news.ycombinator.org check oss- security.

\- [24:00] Attempt to sleep.

<comment><USER74> You only play a half hour of Overwatch a day. I call bullshit.

<comment><USER73> This is why i'm silver/gold.

<comment><USER74> Fair. I am almost diamond and play like its a full time job when my girlfriend isn't around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Profession: "Software Engineer" who doesn't write code.

[0530] Wake up, pee.

[0535] Stagger into kitchen, begin making coffee. Toast bagel. Start eggs.

[0600] Finish breakfast

[0600-0630] Do the Three (3) S's.

[0700] Leave for work

[0720] Arrive at desk. Get another cup of coffee

[0800] Coffee buzz kicks in, read emails, look at agenda for the day.

[0900-1600] A combination of document writing, meetings, and making charts in PPT and Visio. Write absolutely no code (I'm a "software engineer" in title only at my current job).

[1700] Arrive at home, exercise, work on personal projects (actual coding, feel good about self for a while).

[2300-0000] Fall asleep either still working on side project, watching MOOC lectures, or reading bad sci-fi on my kindle.

</comment><comment><USER76> IT guy

-[6:30] : Wake up

-[7:55] : Arrive at work

-[8:00] : Check email

-[8:05] : Check support forum

-[8:06] : /r/aww+rarepuppers

-[9:00] : Frontpage of reddit

-[10:00]: Youtube vids

-[10:30]: Pause youtube to take support call

-[10:45]: Youtube resumes

-[12:00]: Lunch and nap

-[1:00] : Back to reddit/finish youtube subs

-[4:55] : God damn support call

<comment><USER77> Haha ... there's always that person that calls right before the end of the business day!

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> CTO - 6 staff - <USER6>

6AM - Wake up - read news / email / Facebook

6.30 - Exercise on exercise bike for 1 hour

8.45 - Office - check PRs, slack, Pivotal Tracker

9.45 - Standup meeting

1pm - <USER9>

7pm - <USER8>

7.30 - Back at office

10pm - Home - movie / reading / sleep

I have no commute; my office is right beside my house. The only meetings we have are remote (slack / skype) which happen every so often. All communication is through slack allowing employees to work from home whenever they need.

Most of my work is working on the product across multiple projects. Code review on PRs and ensuring that the services are working as expected. We're a small team, it's hard to hide / slack off.

<comment><USER79> Kathmandu in Nepal? They have a tech scene over there too?

<comment><USER80> Kathmandu does have some tech scene. Its nowhere near to neighbouring indian cities, but considering how small and underdeveloped the country is, i'd say its pretty good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Profession/position: Sysadmin - full time, remote - < 50 employees

Workday:

        - 7:45am Wake up. Let the dog out. Slowly try to wear off soreness from psoriatic arthritis. Get coffee. Go to office.
        - 8am Check email, hipchat, reports and alerts that came in that weren't critical enough to SMS me.
        - 9am Do the needful from jira, that I assigned myself. I'm the only sysadmin/ITops/devops person. Add more tasks to jira. My sprint ends with more story points than it started with. I know, but I like using scrum and sprints even if I'm doing it all wrong. It's just me. I also like to schedule meetings between 9am - 11am.
        - 11am Keep plugging away at jira tasks, try to stay away from /r/sysadmin which will only add more jira tasks.
        - 1pmish 3 days/week go for lunch ride on the bike. < 1 hour/15 miles
        - 3pm Mon/Wed Meet with CTO to go over the needfuls
        - 4pm Start wrapping things up so I don't get stuck with a task that keeps me until 7pm.
        - 6pmish Eat dinner with kids. Play with kids. Go to the park or a walk with the kids if wife is working out, or we all go.
        - 8pm Watch too much godamn TV. Office re-runs, shark tank, something mindless to veg out on. I'm trying to switch this habit to an hour of reading non fiction.
        - 10pm-12am Go to bed. Read crappy pop scifi for an hour before falling asleep.

I love it. Very easy to get distracted, but I am distracted with work to do. I end up reading about some new vulnerability or 0day and I start checking to see if I need to worry about it. Or a new tech that could be useful. New feature was released in Azure/o365.

</comment><comment><USER82> Profession: Student + Software dude I'm constantly switching between working and learing from my coworkers & going to university. Work-day (3 months in a row): [06:45] Wake up, shower & get ready for work, drinking a cup of coffee [07:45] Out the door, 30 min to office (by car) [08:15] Arrive at work, checking mails & start getting up2date [09:00] Starting to seriously developing stuff and things [13:00] Lunch! Yes! [13:30] Back to work! Now is the time where some coworkes come to me and to ask some stuff about stuff I did [17:00] Officially finished the day [17:15] Getting out of the office & driving home

Student-day (3 months in a row) [07:00] Wake up and get ready for university + drinking some coffee [08:15] First lesson starts [13:00] Lunch :) [13:30 - 14:00] Lunch ends & next lesson starts [16:45 - 17:30] Getting home [18:30] Dinner-time! [19:00 - 23:30 (or later)] Re-read university stuff, studying, ...

University-Phase is way more stressfull, because we have to finish a semester in 10-12 weeks, instead of 6 months. But I just don't want to miss the work- phase, I love it! Learning so much stuff each day while being a "regular" team member :)

</comment><comment><USER83> Senior individual sales, full-time, in person, 2000+ person company.

[07:30]: Wake up naturally. Shower, shave, get dressed.

[08:15]: Walk 5-minutes with wife to work for breakfast.

[08:30]: Standup over breakfast with team, very boring.

[09:00]: Start working on new business outreach. Phone meetings and remote demos all morning in succession in large open space full of around 40 desks. I like the energy of the environment. I occasionally book a room if I want some space to work but mostly like the intensity.

[12:00]: Catered company lunch with buddies and/or wife

[12:30]: More work, same as before except more existing deal outreach and internal meetings in afternoon. Mostly go to a breakout space to get things done, peak energy during this time. This part is the most fun generally.

[17:30]: Walk 5 minutes home with wife. Sometimes take the long way.

[18:00]: Start and eat dinner, go for a walk again or to the gym.

[20:00]: Work on side project for 1-2 hours if time allows.

[21:30]: Read nonfiction with wife for an hour or two before bed.

[23:00]: Head to bed and hang out chatting before dozing off.

I do this everyday and would not change a thing with the exception of removing all formal training and most internal meetings and adding kids. Same as when I had a company except the part about nonfiction, side projects and standups was just grinding away instead.

</comment><comment><USER84> Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.

Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?

Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

</comment><comment><USER85> VP Eng at a small fitness startup (< 10 people). I also work as a professional musician.

6:45 - wake up, walk dog, make coffee

7:10 - practice double bass technique for 30 minutes

7:45 - run 5 miles to work, stopping for breakfast + coffee

8:45 - arrive at work. check email, slack, etc.

9:15 - code until lunchtime

12ish - eat lunch (usually homemade)

12:30-3 code

3 - sometimes gym, Code until 6ish

6-7, run home 5 miles, walk dog

7-8:30 - practice double bass technique and sometimes drums

8:30 - dinner with wife

9-10:30 either practice more, or talk or watch a show with wife, or work.

10:30 bed

I have a few meetings throughout the week but definitely not a ton.

</comment><comment><USER86> iOS Freelancer

I have 2 offices, so 2 schedules. Here is the one for the shared desk in the center of my hometown:

[06:45 - 07:00] Alarm goes off, most of the time have a shower.

[07:00-08:30] Wake up my older son, make him breakfast, prep for kindergarten and take him there (~50 meters). Also ready myself in the meantime. This is very intense because my son often does not really want to go, he'd rather stay at home. But being there he loves it - kids :)

[08:30-09:00] Eat (if not IF'ing), read up on HN and general news

[09:00 or 09:30] Off to the office (8m by bike), catching up on email and more HN/media

[10:00] Start billable work

[12:00-12:45] Lunch with friends in coworking space

[13:00-17:15] Billable work

[17:15] Cycle home

[17:30-19:00] Family time, dinner (Cooked by me, most of times), or, very seldom, billable work (putting out fires).

[19:00-20:30] Force older son to brush teeth and go to bed, then I surf HN or Netflix on the phone while we lay in bed and he listens to an audiobook; or I read or tell a story

[20:30-~22:30] More HN, often TV with fiance, very seldom side projects, sometimes billable work. Lately, playing with toddler daughter, but not as much as I should or wanted to.

Reading what I just wrote, there definitely is room for improvement.

<comment><USER87> how did you get started as an iOS freelancer ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Profession: Web developer - full time, remote flexible, team of 3 developers, 1 project manager, 1 designer

[7:00] Alarm goes off

[7:45] Actually wakes up, shaves

[8:00] Jumps in the shower, brushes teeth

[8:15] Gets dressed

[8:25] Drives to 7-11 for a Rockstar Zero and Quest Bar

[8:35 - 8:45] Boards the train

[9:10] Arrives at work

[9:15] Yells at computer with Black Screen Of Death caused by IT department remotely installing security updates, or keychain failing to update to my new password, etc.

[9:30] Actually gets computer in a working state. Dicks around for 20 minutes on Facebook & HN.

[9:40] Morning restroom time

[9:50] Team standup and then I try to actually get into my zone

[10:30] A minor issue happens with one of our services. Someone asks me how a piece of 5+ year old code works and why it's failing. Tracks down bug for a few hours.

[12:30] Lunch time

[1:30] Begins actual work

[3:00] Gets a request to quickly implement something because it "should be simple".

[5:00] Heads home

[5:45] Stops at grocery store to buy a block of cheddar cheese

[6:15] Arrives home, melts the cheese in the microwave, and eats it for dinner

[7:00] Works out for a few hours, often playing Xbox on my treadmill or working on shoulder strength with my total gym

[9:00] Has some Muscle Milk and some brazil nuts

[10:00] Takes a long shower because I don't pay for water

[10:25] Crashes on bed with laptop playing some lecture

<comment><USER64> > [5:45] Stops at grocery store to buy a block of cheddar cheese

> [6:15] Arrives home, melts the cheese in the microwave, and eats it for > dinner

That kind of threw me for a loop. Sounds like you may want to work on your nutrition. Don't get me wrong, I love cheese, but I don't believe it has all the nutrients necessary for a healthy body.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> Profession: Program/Analyst & Full-Time Student (40 hrs, ~13 hrs, respectively)

Example of one of my longer days:

[6:15] Alarm Goes Off

[6:16] Second Alarm Goes Off

[6:20] Second rounds of alarms going off, finally get up - hygiene stuff, take 200mg caffeine [3 wk on|1 wk off]/200mg L-Theanine to maintain the schedule throughout the week

[7:00] In the office, checking blogs, HN, Reddit, podcasts, etc.

[7:30] Finish up anything left over from the previous days, check work calendar, update desk calendar with upcoming due dates, tests, etc. for school

[7:45] People arriving in the office, a lot of noise

[8:15] Daily stand-up

[8:30] Focus in on tasks and begin working on them and fixing any bugs a user has pointed out

[9:45] Get ready to go to class, check HN once again

[3:00] Back in the office, might have a meeting, otherwise continue working on projects

[5:00] Almost everyone is out of the office, peace and quiet enues

[5:15] Office is empty - turn on a twitch stream for some background noise, and focus on stories for my project

[7:00] Eat dinner/get dinner at the office

[8:00] Prepare to go home, close out any tasks or bugs that have been fixed in the past couple of hours

[8:30] Get home and browse reddit/HN for a bit

[9:00] Turn on a game or TV show to unwind with, do homework, contemplate outstanding bugs from work

[12:00] Realize how late it is and how 24 hours ago I said I wouldn't stay up this late anymore, go lay in bed for 30 minutes thinking about school and work, eventually drift off

</comment><comment><USER90> Profession: SysAd- Full time remotr at company of ~800 employees

[7 AM] - Baby wakes up. Wife gets her and begins process of waking me up. Brings me some pre-workout. [7:45 AM] - The combination of unreasonable amounts of caffeine and my wife constantly prodding me finally gets me out of bed. Shower. [8 AM] - Head to the gym. [8:15 AM- 10:15 AM] - Work out. I'm already late. [10:30 AM] - Log in to Lync/Slack. I'm a half hour late, but nobody notices or cares. [11 AM - 2 PM] - Messages start rolling in. The QA environment is borked. Prod is screwy - better have an hour long meeting to discuss the ten minute fix. Someone wants to use me to unlock their account. Random questions. [2 PM] - Realize I've done a lot of bullshit but have accomplished nothing. Attempt to scrape up enough concentration to make a dent in one of my projects. [2:15 PM - 6PM] - Get side tracked and spend the rest of the day on unplanned work. [6 PM - ??? AM] - Relieve my tired wife of her motherly duties for a while. Catch up on TV. Do some programming. Play Zelda.

</comment><comment><USER91> Profession: Web developer (80-90% remote)

At Home:

[08:00] - Wake Up

[08:00] - Coffee and catch up on emails, news in bed

[09:00] - Walk or Run with the dog

[10:00] - Coding, bug fixing, calls with team

[12:00] - <USER9>

[13:00] - Coding etc. interspersed with house/ garden work (depening on work demands)

[18:00] - Prepare dinner for family and Eat

[19:30] - Relax/ work on side projects

[23:00] - <USER11>

Commuting to the office (2-4 times/ month):

[07:00] - Wake up

[07:30] - travel to work (mix of bus, ferry and subway)

[10:15] - Arrive at work

[10:30] - Mix of meetings, urgent work, pingpong, and sometimes beer

[17:00] - Leave work and reverse the journey home

[21:00] - Arrive home

[23:00] - <USER11>

</comment><comment><USER60> Profession/Position: CIO - full time, onsite - <50 employees

Workday:

[06:40] - Wake up, check a few headlines and get ready for the morning

[07:30] - Head to work, drive if my partner and I are carpooling, catch an Uber otherwise

[08:00] - Arrive at work, greet a few people, complain about someone forgetting to schedule the coffee pot. Check HN, Reddit, and a couple news organizations. Reply to a few important and/or quick to answer emails and Slack messages.

[09:00] - Get my hands dirty in whatever projects we have going at the moment, field emails and calls as they come in.

[13:00] - Working lunch, reply to emails and try to get some HN in.

[13:30] - Meet with CEO or whoever needs me then spend some time with different departments and jump in to help wherever I can be of use.

[15:00] - Start wrapping up for the day, clean around the office and lay out an agenda for the next day.

[16:00] - Head home

[16:30] - Power nap

[17:30] - Figure out where I misplaced my Blue Apron recipes and make dinner.

[18:30] - Usually try to get some work done, otherwise grab a controller and find a game if I'm feeling particularly uninspired.

[20:00] - Grab drinks at the dive with friends or co-workers.

[22:00] - Head to bed, get ready to start it all over again in a few hours.

It's not glamorous, but I've been fortunate to develop a schedule that keeps me productive the entire work day. There's only so much head-down work you can get done in a day, so taking the last few hours to help out in other departments and take some load off them keeps me engaged and always learning something new.

</comment><comment><USER92> Wow, for a real change: Profession: Materials Processing Technician. (pyroelectric and optics)

working for LCPG (Laser Components Pyro Group) <15 employees in our facility.

07:00 Alarm goes off, set it off for 30 min

07:30 Oh shit, I'm will be late!

08:00 Leave for work

08:30 Check in to work

08:30-09:00 Find out what's going on and what needed to be done.

Ok, no set schedule of the day, but general duties are:

-High vacuum deposition of NiCr and/or Gold on LTO (.025mm thick) or DLATGS

-Cutting Si filters, LTO, DLATGS, Germanium, whatever comes up

-Welding some detectors that were made by assembly

-Making Gold Black coating on our high level detectors

-Screen printing LTO

-Lapping down and further processing of DLATGS (from 1.2mm to .025-.010 mm)

-Maybe bubble testing some RMA detectors

-Scanning Si filter on FTIR machine

-Working some experiments with Engineering guy

12:30-1:30 Clock out for lunch, usually home made alone

1:30-17:00 Continue work

17:00 Clock out

17:30-18:30 Coming home (depends if groceries needed)

Rest of the day spending time with my wife, PC gaming, learning Python.

Actually right now trying to get transferred to FSU for BS in Electrical engineering. After that see two options: Personal start-up research while in college or: Get in Nvidia, Intel, AMD companies. Very interested in processing of Germanium substrates and modern electronics building.

<comment><USER93> I have no idea what most of this even means :-)

What kind of customers do you tend to work for, and what do they do with what you produce ?

<comment><USER92> Generally it is oil industry and gas analysis. Like flame detectors or CO2, methane, N2 detectors. All of our devices used there. Some devices include FTIR scanning machines.

[https://simtronics.eu/flame-detectors/multiflame-dm- tv6-t#ap...](https://simtronics.eu/flame-detectors/multiflame-dm- tv6-t#applications) 3 colored circles in the center is our detectors with filter configurations, 3 of them :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> I'm in a dev-ops/developer/architect role at SAP cloud infrastructure.

[09:00] Alarm goes off. I'm totally not a morning person, but because the alarm is so late, I usually convince myself to get up immediately.

[09:40] I leave my apartment and read a newspaper on the tram.

[10:00] Upon arriving at work, I fire up my PC, but let it sit while I visit colleagues and chat with them about our progress and impediments. Sort of like a standup, but much more personal because of the 1-on-1 setup.

[10:30] Catching up with mail and Slack. That's where most of the team is since we're scattered across at least five locations.

Then there is not much structure. I just do what's on my plate, or help others when they're stuck.

We don't have a daily standup, but we do have a weekly all-hands that's mostly used for syncing up with our manager. We report on the important tickets, and he reports about new requirements coming in from other teams.

We also have about a dozen weekly "work stream" meetings where those who deal with a certain topic meet to discuss technical issues regarding that topic. Since we do OpenStack, most of the workstreams are named after OS services, e.g. "Neutron" or "Swift", but there's also cross-topics like "Documentation". Everyone decides by themselves which work streams are relevant for them.

[16:00] is about when I leave. My day is rather short because my contract is for 70% part-time, but I might consider going for full-time again in the future.

[16:30] Upon arriving home, I immediately set a timer for 30 minutes and sit down for my daily meditation. (That's a new routine. I'm in the fifth week right now.)

Then it's dinner and free time.

<comment><USER95> Are you seeing a lot of benefit from daily meditation? Does having it be firmly scheduled help it become a regular habit?

<comment><USER94> It's certainly a project that spans more than one month. Right now, it's still sort of explanatory: I'm getting to know various states that my mind can apparently enter.

<comment><USER94> Urgh, I meant "exploratory". :|

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> Profession: Web Developer/5 axis CNC programmer

Wake up: Sometime between 7 - 8, at work sometime between 8:30 - 9:30

Warm up Machines.

Plan jobs for the day.

Set up machines

Get both machines running.

Plan new jobs and design/edit prototypes in Solidworks

Program prototypes and design fixtures.

If no prototypes: Either work on the company website or order stock or work on creating my part/job travelers

Lunch time varies, if I'm not too busy I'll have lunch if I am too busy I will skip.

Leave anytime from 5 - 10 PM

</comment><comment><USER97> Profession: Software "Engineer"

[07:35] First alarm goes off but sometimes I wake up at 6:30 a.m. randomly because traffic noise.

[07:45] Wake up, drink coffee and brush teeth. Never eat breakfast. Maybe work on some music for 20 mins before work.

[08:15] Get on bike and go to work.

[08:35] Arrive at work. Sometimes fetch breakfast, usually eat potato chips.

[09:00] By now I'm usually working unless i'm still on HN.

[10:00] Irritating that daily standup happens in the middle of the morning but whatever.

[12:30] Return from lunch, now work "really" starts. Usually code a whole bunch while listening to Boards of Canada

[17:00] By now I'm either mentally or physically absent from work, as is everyone around me. Get on the bike and ride home.

[17:30] Now it's beer and food time. After that, music or biking or maybe just arguing about Ancient Greece with my friends.

[22:00] Shower and drink a Nalgene of water.

[22:30] Either I'm still feverishly working on music or falling asleep to something on [https://www.nfb.ca/](https://www.nfb.ca/)

</comment><comment><USER98> Medical Physics 4th year PhD student

Workday:

\- [Variable] Wake up, shower, make coffee, read news.

\- [10-11 AM] Take the subway to work (15 minutes)

\- [11 AM to 5-6 PM] Work on Monte Carlo simulation or optimisation code / write paper if it's one of those days

\- [6-9 PM] Eat dinner with GF while watching something on the computer

\- [9 PM - 1 AM] Do some more work (most common option) or play piano or play Rocket League if some friends are around

<comment><USER99> Could you elaborate on what does studying medical physics entail? This is the first time I'm hearing about it and I'm curious since this appears to be at the intersection of two unbelievably complex fields (to me at least)

<comment><USER98> In general, the field is split into imaging research (MRI, CT, Ultrasound, optical imaging) and radiotherapy research. It's a very applied field, the _fundamental_ physics has been figured out a long time ago except for some really niche areas. For example, some people are trying to model particle transport inside DNA itself at the nanometer scale, where the transported particles have very low energies. There's still some physics work to be done there, but it's pretty marginal and the lack of theory in those areas is mostly due to theoretical physicists losing interest rather than the theory being too difficult.

I personally work in radiotherapy, making simplified (faster) Monte Carlo particle transport algorithms for use in treatment planning, and also finding more "modern" optimisation techniques to handle the many degrees of freedom available on radiotherapy linear accelerators to produce higher quality treatment plans compared to what we can do right now. It's hard to define what a high quality treatment plan is without a lot of background, but basically we try to find ways to put more radiation in tumours while sparing the healthy tissue all around the tumour. My "research" is like 95% programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Profession: Founder / hacker

Critically, I wake up naturally. Usually I research a little before doing anything. If I wake up before 3AM, I tend to sleep again by 6AM. After 4AM I tend to power on through. Depending where I am, I might eat/shower/dress. If I commute it is usually by bike, whereas in hotels I swim.

I avoid phones and IM services like the plague. If coding, the most important thing for me is focus and I work until that leaves, I get tired, or there is something pressing. If doing business stuff, I tend to finish mid to late afternoon and socialize or go home and do nonbiz work.

A fully static/repetitive rhythm is not for me. Though when I get in that mode I often get flow time, these days I focus on writing less code smarter. When I was younger I rethought 1000 problems there were existing solutions for, learned a lot, but in reality wasted a lot of time being 'busy'.

</comment><comment><USER101> Position: DevOps - full time, mostly in office, >500 employees in energy sector.

[06:00] Wake up when rooster starts crowing. Let dogs out, get wife coffee, shower, dress.

[07.00] Out the door, 30-minute 25-mile commute. I live in the country and the office is in the country so no traffic.

[07:30] At office. Get through security, grab breakfast taco, check email & overnight issues.

[09:00] 30-minute operations meeting to discuss and get awareness of issues and planned work affecting operations.

[09:30] Short standup with on-call team members to discuss any events/actions during past 24hrs.

[10:00 to 04:00] Mix between planned project work and issues. One hour for lunch somewhere in there. Short breaks as needed.

[04:00] Out the door to head home.

[06:00 - dark] After dinner, general work around the ranch, check and feed livestock.

[after hours] I'm on call for general production problems one out of every three weeks. I'm always on call for anything affecting power grid operation.

</comment><comment><USER102> Profession: Infrastructure Engineer

\- [7:15] Wake up, get ready, eat and leave

\- [9:10] Arrive at the office, make coffee, catch up with colleagues

\- [10:00] Check emails, Reddit/HN

\- [10:15] Start up EC2 Instances to test things on

\- [10:30] Search GitHub, SO for code, paste into Atom

\- [13:00] Lunch

\- [14:00] Show team what I've done, get feedback

\- [14:30] Make improvements, test

\- [17:30] Go home

\- [20:00] Mind drifts back to work, start Googling an idea

\- [23:30] Shit, where did time go?

\- [00:00] Bed!

</comment><comment><USER103> Profession: Grad. Engg. Trainee- Software Development

fall asleep while browsing through playlists. alarm on. wake up. get up. look out for clothes. brush teeths. wear shirt,jeans collect pen, pencil, IDs, ATMs, Credit Cards, smartphone, earphone, few change banknotes and coins. wear shoes (without socks). pick-up bag ith a notebook. gulp down a glass of cold water. buy mentos from Jmart. ask for lift. walk to office. shows ID to security guard at the complex. choose a path with less sunshine. walk. wait for the lift where i could be adjusted w/ my bag. greet and smile to the floor guard. punch-in. plug-out earphones. smile and greet every1 on the way pulls- off the bag press turn-on button of PC bypass disk encryption three finger salute bypass OS login F5 F5 F5 three hand salute go and re-fill water bottle

(...to be described more, gtg now)

</comment><comment><USER104> Profession: Lawyer (Telecom regulation).

Workday (times after 9:15 are generally fictitious. Who knows what's going to happen at a given time on any given day.)

[7:30]: Wake up. Skim news, including industry news sources like HN, and more specialized law/politics stuff like Communications Daily and Politico.

[7:50]: Shower, get dressed (business casual), leave the house.

[8:30]: Commute. listen to a podcast, read a book, or on busy days (or on days when I'm feeling highly motivated) read some work-relevant thing (an FCC document, industry whitepaper, you name it. There's always something.)

[9:15]: Arrive at office. Catch up on email, if there are any I missed on the commute. (Of course, I'm generally reading, and trying to respond to, email at all times, whenever I'm awake and my inbox isn't empty.)

[9:40]: Write. This is usually some sort of regulatory comment or letter.

[12:15]: Lunch with a bunch of coworkers.

[1:30]: Conference call with a client to share intelligence on the status of an issue we're working on. (Usually this means the status of a regulatory proceeding at the FCC, but not always.)

[2:30]: [On good days] Conference call with a client to strategize about a some new issue they're concerned about. This involves the client explaining what their current problem is, and a little on the spot thinking about how I can help them to it under the FCC's regulations. Either they have a new product/service they want to launch with some possible regulatory issues, or have longer term regulatory ideas they want to start looking at (think, for example, Net Neutrality, TV White Spaces, etc.).

[3:00]: Back to writing. Most writing projects take a day or two, so I won't typically finish writing anything on a given day.

[4:00]: Research. Look into legal issues, technical background, or other types of information relating to a new project. Try to become an expert on whatever that thing happens to be.

[6:15]: Record time, in 6 minute increments, all the time I spent working for every client that day.

[6:30]: Head home.

[7:15]: Arrive home. Eat dinner.

[8:00]: Mop up things I forgot to do while I was in the office.

[8:30]: Play video games, read, watch TV, work on side projects.

[10:30]: Read in bed.

[11:30]: Sleep.

<comment><USER105> Very interesting. I can imagine accounting for your time at 6 minute intervals is an acquired skill.

You mentioned you work on side projects in the evening. Are those projects related to law? Wondering what something like that would consist of.

<comment><USER104> Yeah. The time accounting is pretty annoying. This is a surprisingly big part of the reason that people leave firms for in-house jobs of the government. It's a significant source of stress for a lot of lawyers.

As for side projects, it's usually not law related--although there is sometimes a nexus with the legal issues I'm working on. I did a lot of coding before law school, so it's sometimes that sort of project. One common theme: the FCC actually does a pretty good job of making all of its licensing and other data publicly available, but the interfaces are clunky and the raw data comes in all sorts of different crazy formats. So I'd like to put a system together to integrate all of that elegantly, but it always winds up seeming like more than I want to take on in my free time. :)

I've also been doing some homebrewing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> I'm amazed by how early you all get up!

Profession/position: Software developer - full time, office-located* - <USER12> are remote but boss is local - <10 employees

[9:45-10:30] wake up, shower, breakfast

[10:30-11:00] either cycle to work if there are any bikes/slots in the local bicycle rental system, otherwise walk

[11:00-12:15] sometimes we have a video meeting with the remote coworkers at this time, otherwise, mainly procrastinate/ do email

[12:15] boss drops in for a chat before he has lunch

[12:20-14:30] work- usually developing some new feature to report at the next video meeting, bug fixes, whatever is needed

[14:30-15:00] lunch

[15:00-15:30] work

[15:30-16:00] go for a walk

[16:00-18:30] work, easily my most productive time of the day

[18:30] boss usually leaves, we chat for a while

[18:30-19:30, or beyond to 20/21 if needed] finish up work

[19:30] head home, hope to be able to cycle again

[20:00-21:30] make dinner, eat, clean up, watch youtube, make lunch, do laundry

[21:30-01:00] play video games, spend time online, whatever

[01:00] try to fall asleep

I kind of hate my job honestly, there are no processes at all, no supervision, no contact with coworkers outside of meetings, no structure, no collaboration or code review. But equally, there is basically zero pressure or stress either, no deadlines, I just have to be fairly busy and make good reports in our meetings. Basically I'm making good money(in comparison to my needs and my family's background) and have things fairly easy, but I desperately need to move on if I want to get any real career progression. Or a social life or contact with real developers I can actually learn things from. Sick of working on my own in isolation writing code that no one but me will ever look at, previous job was the same too.

<comment><USER107> Quit. You will thank me.

<comment><USER106> I wouldn't quit without having another job lined up. But like I say, I'm definitely (maybe) semi-planning to move on this year. It's the three year anniversary and I feel I've learned enough. But interviews suck and all the jobs I see advertised I'm either not qualified for or they look worse than this, or they just look boring. Eventually I'll have to bite the bullet and do it though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> Profession: Web Developer - full time, @large corp > 300 people at this office

Workday: \- Alarm goes off about 7:15, snooze until about 7:50 or 8:00. \- Quick Shower / Prep \- Commute for 30'ish minutes \- Usually at work around 8:50, make tea eat whatever snack I brought with me, check Hacker News \- Fetch / merge from upstream \- Work on whatever tickets or code review anything assigned to me \- Repeat until lunch around noon \- Go back to work an hour later. Usually I'm most productive from this time until 30 minutes before 5. \- 4:30 Shoot the shit with coworkers until 5. \- Go swim or climb after work before heading home.

I would really like to improve upon getting up and being productive in the morning before work. I'm definitely loosing out snoozing for 40 - 50 minutes a day.

</comment><comment><USER109> Profession: Software Developer - Full Time < 100 organization

\- 06:30 Wake up and walk the dog

\- 07:00 Help get daughter up, fed and ready for school and then get myself ready

\- 08:30 Drop daughter off at school

\- 09:00 Start work: for me this means coffee and reading some news

\- 09:30 Work on current project (right now I'm doing maintenance on an existing project)

\- 10:00 Standup, usually 10 minutes

\- 10:15 Work on current project

\- 11:45 Check in on email'

\- 12:45 Lunch, sometimes I bring in and other times I walk into town; somedays this is like 15 minutes and other days maybe 45 minutes

\- 13:30 Work on current project

\- 17:15 Head home

\- 17:45 Help get dinner ready (maybe set the table, maybe wrangle child, somedays do some prep, etc.)

\- 18:00 Eat dinner

\- 18:45 Clean up after dinner, load dishwasher, etc.

\- 19:00 Feed the dog

\- 19:05 Spend time with child (sometimes TV, sometimes video games, sometimes walk to park, etc.)

\- 19:50 Put child to bed (every other day)

\- 20:10 Put the dog to bed

\- 20:15 Spend time with partner (sometimes TV, sometimes chatting, etc.)

\- 22:30 Go to bed

</comment><comment><USER110> Software engineer, full-stack, part-time on site (dev team 6 ppl):

       [6:00] wake up + breakfast (oatmeal porridge, w important!)
       [6:30] work on music
       [8:30] leave for work (30min commute)
       [9:00] arrive at office & start work
      [10:00] stand-up meeting (5min)
      [11:30] go for lunch (1h)
      [12:30] back from lunch & work some more
      [13:30] 15min nap
      [18:00] end of work day, commute back home
      [18:30] 15min nap at home
      [19:00] workout (jogging or swimming) / dinner / social time / netflix / etc
      [21:00] bed time

Work 3 days a week + 2 days exclusively on my own projects (music production) + 2 day weekend. I keep the 6AM schedule throughout the week (also on weekends).

Physical exercise 1 - 2x per week.

</comment><comment><USER111> Profession: Software Engineer

Fiancee, pet hedgehog, and no children

[0645] First alarm, summarily ignored or slept through

[0700] Second alarm, usually get up here and get dressed

[0725] Say goodbye to sleeping fiance

[0730] Arrive at work - catch up on email, HN, Webcomics, JIRA, MatterMost, and get my tasks laid out for the day

[0830] Daily Standup

[0845] Sound-eliminating headphones go on, Electroswing starts playing. Interruptions only if I need to ask a question

[1100] - [1300]: Somewhere in here I take anywhere from 30-60 min for a lunch. Go home and make food, grab fast food, etc

[after lunch] Back to work. See "[0845]"

[1530] - [1600]: Leave work

[1600] Get home, relax for a bit (internet + videogame du jour)

[1800] Make dinner with fiance, watch Hannibal (or whatever show we are into at the time)

[1845] Shower for next day (I hate morning showers)

[1900] Play videogames with fiancee, hang out with our hedgehog, code, nap - My free time!

[0000] - [0200]: Go to bed

</comment><comment><USER112> Backroom-Target 3:00 am - wake up 4:00 am - work starts Pull the over night replenisment, shove it on to carts and out to the floor - between an hour and 3 hours depending on the day and season 6:30 am - pull all the palattes of case stock marked as overstock as it came off the truck, stow it in shelve another hour or 2 8:00 am take a 15 minute break 9:45 am take lunch 11:30 am take another 15 12:30 ish go home

everything from 8:15 to going home is stowing all the loose overstocks that comes back from the stockers and pulling various crap as it runs out on the floor or if they're reseting an aisle/section.

shift that to a 2:00 am start for november and december, move "go home" back to about 9-10 for january to may.

</comment><comment><USER113> 1\. Wake up, take shower, get dressed.

2\. Uber to work

3\. Get coffee immediately on arrival

4\. Check email/calendar

5(a). start working on current iteration tasks

OR

5(b). go to a meeting

6\. more work on tasks

7\. Lunch

8\. work/meetings

9\. more coffee

10\. more work/meetings

11\. Leave work, go to Starbucks or Barnes & Noble, etc.

12\. Work on the startup project for 2-4 hours

13\. Go home.

14\. Eat.

15\. Read for a little while

16\. Go to sleep.

17\. GOTO 1

</comment><comment><USER114> Profession: Software Engineer (Remote, currently in Nunavut, Canada)

[06:00] Woken up by cats poking my face, I roll out of bed & feed them a little bit of food then head back to bed.

[08:00] Alarm goes off, I get up, grab a quick shower & take the dog out for a quick morning walk.

[08:40] Feed dog & cats their breakfast. Make a coffee with Irish Creamer (It makes the coffee taste like it has booze in it).

[08:50] Start my first block of uninterrupted coding time at home. I'm a few hours ahead of my colleagues, so this time is my most productive. I listen to an audiobook or podcast to avoid talking to myself.

[11:00] Make another coffee & prep for morning standup call.

[11:10] Sit down on my sofa & start the call.

[11:40] Coffee #3, tell myself I should plan out my afternoon, then promptly start dicking around on social news sites.

[12:00] Make lunch, then take the dog for 1h of exercise. Dog decides its ball should be split in two.

[13:20] Head to the shops to grab food for the next few days & a new ball for the dog.

[14:00] Saw I had a unread message from my Mum. I give her a call to remind her I'm still alive.

[14:30] Finally back to coding. Spend way to long debating about a 4th coffee.

[18:00] Start a load of washing & take the dog out again.

[18:40] Feed animals (saving a little bit of cat food for later), then cook dinner.

[20:00] Remember about washing, then figure out plans to go out for dinner tomorrow with some locals I've met.

[21:00] Decide I should burn some evening oil on getting to a better place for work tomorrow. End up thinking more about side projects & catching up on TV.

[22:30] Sun still hasn't set outside. I take the dog out again for a quick pre-bedtime walk.

[23:00] Feed cats the last of their dinner in a hope they'll let me sleep in a bit more tomorrow.

[23:15] Catchup on news in bed, then sleep.

</comment><comment><USER115> Profession: Web developer - full time, Bogotá - ~10 person startup.

\- [6:30] Wake up. No alarm clock, usually just the sun.

\- [06:30 - 07:40] Guitar and drawing practice

\- [07:40 - 8:15] Getting ready and walk to the office

\- [08:15 - 08:45] Catching up with emails/conversations I didn't get to the last day. Make coffee.

\- [08:45 - 09:15] Daily standup. Brief follow-up discussions

\- [09:15 - 12:00] Work.

\- [12:00 - 13:00] Lunch. Usually outside of the office (tons of affordable restaurants in the area), to get some fresh air and actual break from work.

\- [13:00 - 18:00] Work. On average about half an hour of meetings per day.

\- [18:00 - 23:00] I try to keep my evenings as unplanned as possible, so i can spontaneously go out with friends. Otherwise more Guitar/drawing practice, reading, watching tv series.

</comment><comment><USER116> For a different take: Management Consultant

Workday:

\- 8 AM - Wake up, shower, shave, etc.

\- 8:30-9 AM - Ride the subway in to the office

\- 9-12 PM - Calls, meetings, data analysis, output creation (primarily in word, powerpoint, and excel)

\- 12-12:30 PM - Lunch (but this can shift around widely based on meetings)

\- 12:30-7 PM - Calls, meetings, data analysis, output creation (primarily in word, powerpoint, and excel), usually with a half hour break at some point

\- 7 PM - dinner is delivered to the office

\- 7-~9PM - finish up work for the day

\- 9-9:30 - head home

\- 9:30-12PM - unwind (internet, side projects, video games, etc.)

It's hard to define an average day, as my end time can be 6 PM, 9 PM, or 1 AM, but 9 PM is probably close to average. The work that I do on a given day can also vary widely. I've got a light day today, hence the comment.

<comment><USER117> How does one become a Management Consultant (and how much experience would one need to become one) ?

Is it something you enjoy?

<comment><USER116> There's two major entry points to management consulting, straight out of college and post-MBA. I did an internship after my junior year, and took the full-time offer. Most firms also hire out of business school. There's certainly exceptions to this rule, especially when firms are seeking industry expertise, but those make up the majority of folks.

My level of enjoyment varies based on the cases I'm on. It's generally interesting, it's certainly fast-paced, and I very rarely count down the hours before I can leave work (there's no face-time policies). But after almost four years here, it can definitely get monotonous. Still, I've learned more than I would at almost any other job, and it's taught me a great work ethic, so I'm grateful for that.

<comment><USER117> What sort of skills would come in use for such a position?

I'm a Software Engineer (graduated in 2016) and considering a full time MBA (2 yrs) next year. This sounds like something I'd enjoy - just wanted to get more info from someone in the field.

<comment><USER116> At the pre-MBA level, interviews often just test for the right mindset and approach to problem-solving. Very little hard skills are expected prior, unless you're applying somewhere with strong expertise (life sciences comes to mind).

Post-MBA, they'll still hire from most industries and backgrounds, but take into account prior experience. The interviews will have case questions, where you'll walk through a small case with an interviewer (e.g. a multi-step case on a company, looking at their profit levels, expansion strategy, and similar). There really aren't that many hard skills required. However, the difficulty is in getting an interview. They generally recruit primarily from top 10 business schools, although the largest firms likely cast a wider net. I'm not entirely clear on the post-MBA recruitment process and what exactly they look for. I'd imagine coding skills would not be a negative, provided you could convince interviewers that you were actually interested in consulting, but I'm a little doubtful they would be seen as a strong positive either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER118> Profession: Third Tier Technical Support, full time, 200+ employees

This is a typical day although I have omitted the constant stream of distractions at 2 to 5 minute intervals.

[07:00] alarm goes off

[07:30] stagger out of bed and browse the internet for awhile

[07:45] shower, shave, brush teeth, etc.

[08:15] start the walk to the bus stop

[08:30] arrive at bus stop

[09:00] finish commute and arrive at office

[09:01] first cup of coffee

[09:02] second cup of coffee

[09:03] third cup of coffee

[09:04] Look at my ticket queue, is there anything due later today or several hours before the ticket was assigned to me?

[09:06] Check the team ticket queue, are there any unassigned tickets that I can handle?

[09:06] Read and reply to emails from coworkers who work nights and weekends

[09:10] Get breakfast

[09:20] Skim the ILTA[0] mailing lists for new threads

[09:25] Check my team mailing list to see who will be out of the office or leaving early

[09:30] Check mailing list for new assignments and respond to those that I can handle

[10:30] Respond to support requests by phone or email

[11:45] Take my 15 minute break by leaving early for lunch

[13:00] Return from lunch

[13:01] Respond to more outstanding tickets and emails

[18:00] Leave the office

[18:30] Return home and work on assignments for a programming class, watch Pluralsight videos, or read HN.

[19:30] Place my usual order at the local Thai restaurant

[19:45] Walk to the restaurant and pick up my order

[20:00] Dinner, more homework, Pluralsight videos, and HN.

[23:30] Sleep

[0][https://www.iltanet.org](https://www.iltanet.org)

Edited to add my schedule after work and a few details

</comment><comment><USER119> Profession: Physics graduate student (experimental atomic physics). ~15 people in our group, 5 in our lab.

Workday:

[07:30] Wake up

[08:00] Swim, bike, run or climb for an hour

[09:00] Bike to work, shower, read papers

[10:00] Turn on experiment, align optics

[01:00] Lunch with labmates and advisor

[02:00] Back in the lab, more laser aligning, bug fixing, realizing nothing works.

[07:00] Dinner at student center or Chipotle

[08:00] Data taking starts (sometimes we're lucky and it starts earlier)

[10:00 - 12:00] Data data data. If it's super late (4am), then I'll get up late tomorrow

Meetings can last over 5 hours, especially if it involves writing papers. The schedule usually shifts to later hours as the week progresses. We barely wake up in time before the Friday 11am group seminars. 15 hour days are fairly routine.

</comment><comment><USER120> Software Developer (mainly web). Full time. Sole developer in a 3-4 person department. Our consulting company (15-20 persons) was recently acquired by a much larger (1300 persons) but hasn't had an affect on us (yet).

[05:30 or [06:00] - wake up

[06:00]-[07:00] - make coffee and watch tv while I work out

[07:00] or [0715] - <USER13>

[08:00] get to office (5 minute drive)

[08:15] - wait for my computer to finish starting up and be usable

[08:15]-[11:30] - work on assigned tickets, could be projects or bug-fixes or client meetings or anything in between

[11:30] - [12:30] - go home and make a sandwich for lunch, try to have a ~30 min nap

[12:30] - [17:00] - more assigned work

[17:00]-[23:00] - usually gaming and dinner, sometimes tv, errands

[23:00]-[05:30] - sleep, variable from 22:00-00:00 but consistent wake time.

Emails and chat are open all day. Not used much so it's not really a distraction. Some days I get to work 15 mins early and then I wait until Friday and leave early. I am one of 2-3 people who is here after 4:30 pm.

Most of the work is integrating custom functionality into the Umbraco CMS. Sometimes I get to write stand-alone apps though, which is nice. I get to do all the code and SQL and half the time figure out IIS stuff. We also support many clients that have outdated systems (ASP, ColdFusion) but those are usually bug-fixes to keep them running as best we can. Ever since the acquisition there has been very few days where there is enough work to fill a whole day (many many very big projects are just sitting at various stages of approval/planning/etc).

When I don't have enough work to do I build out functionality on my site or write an article. I do the coding here and we have a designer so I am getting to learn a lot more about CSS and layout that I don't get to do usually. Very rarely I will just pick up a tutorial to work through. My site has taken enough time to get to where it is that this is pretty rare.

To some people it sounds great but I would like to have consistent work and coworkers who I can actually talk to, even though we all are in cubicles next to each other, we are not a communicative group and the designer wants nothing to do with code (even though I'd like to get cross trained on design work). I've never been part of a code review and it's depressing not getting feedback about anything.

Sorry for the wall of text.

<comment><USER121> "5 minute drive"? Buy a bike and chuck out 0600-0700!

<comment><USER120> I very strongly considered it. Or just walking (3 miles). The two hold ups are that I don't want to turn up to work all sweaty (or wet, or frozen etc) and to a lesser extent carrying all my stuff (purse, wallet, coffee, lunch).

Also going home for lunch is highly convenient and I really like that nap.

I wouldn't have to bike/walk every day of course. I am still considering it (clearly).

<comment><USER121> I'd certainly try it out for a day or two a week, backpack / jersey pockets for stuff.. easier if you have a locker or showers at your work. Hopefully you wouldn't arrive too sweaty after 3 miles which should take you about ~15 minutesish.

Win-win though, exercise and if you get in to it less fuel costs. Could easily clock up 30 miles a week and extend your route on nice days.. no brainer!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER122> Profession: Flight test engineer, full time, a huge organization you probably know...

Workday (test days): -[5:00] Wake up, try to catch a shower, eat -[6:00] Prepare for the days test events -[7:00] Brief the team, test points, priorities, safety, etc... -[8:00] First flight period -[11:00] Debrief, eat lunch, prepare for second period -[13:00] Second flight period -[16:00] Shutdown flight ops -[16:30] Debrief with test team and air crew -[17:30] Dinner -[18:00] Data analysis, planning for the next day -[20:00] Brief plan for next day to leadership -[21:00] Send summary for the days events home -[22:00] Relax and bed

<comment><USER123> Sounds like a great job. Do you enjoy it?

<comment><USER122> Absolutely! It's a great mix of day to day problem solving and exploring the limits of the aircraft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER124> My realization from this post - basically everybody else is working harder than me.

<comment> le-mark Same here, I've been in software for 15 years, and I don't do shit. I code on average an hour a day. Some weeks not at all, some days I'll put in 6 hours, for a deadline or whatever. Wtf is wrong with these people?

</comment></comment><comment><USER125> Profession: IT Admin & Aspiring programmer

0500 - Wake up, grind coffee beans and put kettle on

0515 - Pack gym clothes, french press coffee

0605 - Arrive at work, check emails/calls for urgent requests

0620 - Check HN, Reddit, Bloomberg & Jalopnik

0720 - Do a bit of daylighting with some programming practice and/or homework

0930 - Work existing trouble tickets & take customer calls

1100 - One hour lunch, play MTG with coworkers (yeah, we're those guys)

1200 - Back to browsing the web and doing FreeCodeCamp challenges to keep awake

1300 - Work various customer issues and projects

1530 - Gym time, go hard to ensure sleep that night

1630 - Drive 45 minutes to school (CS Major)

1730 - Computer Science courses (x2)

2130 - Drive home

2145 - Pickup food from Panda Express or Noodle Co.

2200 - Watch netflix and eat dinner

2230 - Shower, shave

2245 - Head to bed

</comment><comment><USER126> Software Developer, Full Time, on site, ~10 employees.

Workday:

\- Wake up, get ready

\- Get to work 15 mins late

\- Review communications and determine what my work goals are for the day, usually takes an hour or less

\- Get coffee from the nearby coffee shop with coworkers

\- Start writing code

\- Get lunch, typically 30 mins

\- Continue writing code, but switch to PR review as necessary (especially if I'm getting tired of my own code)

\- Read some HN while waiting for builds

\- Try not to get bogged down with answering questions from devs about best practices, etc.

\- Try to organize work into atomic commits and push

\- Open a PR, feel a sense of satisfaction for a brief moment

\- Review my own PR and realize I forgot to do some things, add comments to it so reviewers know what I forgot

\- Leave late, since I got in late

</comment><comment><USER127> Profession: reverse engineer

<100 employees organization

Workday:

\- wake up (09:30)

\- go to work

\- try to do something productive, but fail miserably, because I'm still asleep - so I fall back to reading tech blog posts (oldnewthing mostly, I love it) (till 13:00)

\- eat something, feel better (13:00-14:00)

\- waste half an hour doing random non-work stuff to get in the mood

\- 14:30-17:30 -> peak brain activity: here's where the reversing happens

\- 17:30 to 19:00 -> read mails, help colleagues, fix minor bugs, or anything that allows me to relax

\- 19:00-21:00 -> go home, eat, have a small break, watch some shows

\- 21:00 -> gym

\- 22:00 -> dinner

\- 23:00 -> HN, reddit, etc

\- 00:00 -> sleep

I couldn't even begin to imagine arriving at work before 10AM. I have no idea how any of you do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your post, reverse engineering is pretty cool! I used to do reverse engineering CTF challenges, but never thought about improving past this.

Can you please elaborate on what your tasks are like?

</comment></comment><comment><USER128> I was a "Professional Blogger" for a while.

\- [11:00] Wake up, sit on desk, first thing on the morning, write until I get tired

\- [14:00] Usually I get tired 3 hours after, then I stop working, cook food for the day and procrastinate lots of things that I was planning to do in my free time in previous day, and thinking about how I would do 3-5x more money if I spent more time working on my blog, but I'm lazy / I want to work as less as possible to earn money to live and spent my time doing whatever I wanted to (which turned out to be nothing relevant)

\- [21:00] Gym

\- [00:00] Watch funny videos until sleep

\- [02:00] Sleep.

<comment><USER34> > _I was a "Professional Blogger" for a while._

If you don't mind me asking, how was the pay?

I'm delving into this now, and it's coming along nicely. I'm also writing for magazines and selling photos, so that helps the bottom line.

<comment><USER128> Adsense. Not very smart, but it was paying the bills nicely and I was lazy enough to don't search others form of income.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER129> Software Development Co-op at a financial recordkeeping company

[5:45] Alarms start going off

[6:00] Actually get up. Get dressed, pack my bag to take to work

[6:30] Take trolley to train station

[6:45] Arrive at the train station, eat breakfast (either pre-prepared the night before or bought from somewhere in the station)

[7:00] Take train to train station closer to work

[8:00] Get off train, take bus to work

[8:20] Arrive at work. Clock in, use the alone time to get a bit of work done to have something to report ahead of standup

[9:15] Standup

[9:30] Resume whatever I was working on pre-standup. Maybe some meetings. All day meetings if it's end of sprint.

[10:00] Coffee

[12:00] Lunch

[12:30] Resume work and/or meetings

[1:00] Probably more coffee

[4:30] Leave work, take bus to subway station

[5:15] Take subway to central transit hub

[5:40] Take trolley to gym

[6:00] Gym

[7:00] Take trolley home

[7:20] Get home. Relax, unpack bag.

[8:00] Cook breakfast and/or dinner if I'm out of prepped meals

[9:00] Shower

[9:15] Free time (TV, video games, reading. Normally too tired from work to do side projects, despite constantly wanting to)

[12:45] Bed

As you can see, I spend a lot of time commuting, about 3.5 hours per day. On the way to work, I'm pretty unproductive with it, because I'm still waking up - napping and reddit, or read the news or listen to NPR if I'm feeling more alert. On the way home, I usually read on my kindle, and maybe check HN if I haven't been on at work. I'm not particularly happy about the commute, but I didn't really have many better choices available, and this job paid the best.

I also don't get too much sleep - it's not great, but it's not particularly troubling to me, either. If it catches up to me, I'll go to bed earlier for a day or two, but usually it's not really a problem.

</comment><comment><USER130> County IT Analyst (Basically a software engineer without the fancy title) - full time, office

\- Wake up at 6:30 am

\- Head out at 7:10 am

\- Enter office at 7:30 am

\- Check emails, take unassigned servicenow tickets that came in later from the previous day.

\- Make coffee, get productive around 8:30am.

\- Work on anything I'm assigned on and off. Distractions everywhere but I pull through and get a lot done. Take a break after 2.5 hours of work

\- Lunch at 11:30am

\- Production slows down, slog through the rest of the day, take a break around 3pm, write some notes if needed to remind myself the next day, get off at 4pm.

Sometimes meetings pop up now and then but it's usually like this every day.

</comment><comment><USER131> I'm a remote software engineer on a different timezone than my co-workers. So mine is a bit different.

[~08:30] Wake up [08:50] Make coffee and make some breakfast [09:00] Most days of the week do Spanish lesson. (I am living in a country in Latin America) [10:30] Take a shower and get ready for work. [11:00] check email, browse the internet, plan my day, etc. [11:30] join the morning standup and then chat with co-workers [14:00] break for lunch and hang out for an hour [15:00] work for the rest of the day [21:00] work on side project for a few hours

</comment><comment><USER132> Unemployed post-exit startup founder

-[4:30] Guess I'm awake now.

-[4:45] Hungry. Eat.

-[5:00] Read another article about automation and the collapse of the middle class on HN. Wait for the sun to come up.

-[6:00] Two-hour walk. Receive endorphin-fueled inspiration. Forget everything the moment I re-enter the house.

-[8:00] Watch Magic the Gathering streams. It's a nice game.

-[10:00] Hungry. Eat.

-[11:00] Read another global warming article on HN. Contemplate the future.

-[12:00] Watch an endless stream of whatever the YouTube algorithm feeds me. Kids these days are so talented.

-[18:00] Hungry. Walk to store. Eat.

-[19:00] Friend calls. Flip coin. Tails. Don't pick up.

-[20:30] Feeling sleepy. Floss and go to bed.

</comment><comment><USER133> Project Manager - Large tech company.

\- 6:30AM Awake

\- 7:00AM Leave home, work on transit if needed

\- 9:00AM Arrive at office

No typical day, but typical activities. Day is divided into about a dozen 30-minute and 1-hour chunks )(so, no getting into The Zone like programming), mostly dictated by existing meeting schedules:

~60% meetings

~20% communication, solving things over E-mail when I can, hounding people in person only when I must.

~10% going over the issue tracker, to get a picture of project health, look for warning signs, stay on top of things

~5% writing various reports

~5% working on automation to help me do more of the above

\- 6:00PM Leave office, work on transit if needed

\- 8:00-8:30PM Arrive at home and collapse

<comment><USER134> 4.0 - 4.5 hours of commuting every day?

And I thought my 1.5 hours, 3 days per week was bad.

I do not envy you.

<comment><USER135> I came to comment about that too. I use to drive 2 hours total a day. Absolutely terrible. I hope you can fix that in the near future!

<comment><USER133> Welcome to the Bay Area. I've made the conscious decision that I'm not willing to pack my family into a 1000 sq.ft. shoebox, which is all that's affordable anywhere near employers, so commute it will be.

<comment><USER136> Try to make your commute part of your workday? Even if you left at 7am, worked on the train, worked in the office till 4 then home at 6, it would make a big difference to your life.

Source: had a 1.5hr commute in London (bus, tube, train, bus). 1.5 was best case scenario. I will never forget the sheer happiness I gained from changing jobs to a more reasonable commute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER137> Software Developer. ~100 people org.

Weekdays, wake up 6:45am. Shower, shave every other day. Take dogs outside. Have breakfast. Drive 25 minutes to work, make sure to be there before everyone else (guaranteed if before 8:30am).

Read HN, LinkedIn, check email. Browse through development items, get stuff done. Have salad for lunch. Some more browsing and some more working.

Leave 4:30pm. Drive ~30 minutes back home.

Get home, have dinner, get ready for other work. The really interesting work, from 6:30pm to 11:30pm-midnight.

Weekends - do more of that really interesting work. At least 8 hours both Saturday and Sunday.

<comment><USER138> Why do you make sure to get there before everyone else? Is it that important to you that you be the first one in? Or is it another reason?

<comment><USER137> It is paramount. This way I can leave 4:30pm (or earlier) minimizing the perception that I might be slacking off (which I am not). Other guys that get here after me stick around way past 6pm, which for me is a no-no. Since no one has any idea what time I came in, it gets harder to judge. I wish this was not necessary but it is my defense against company culture (8 solid hours, no working from home, regardless of your current work load).

<comment><USER138> Fair enough. I was wondering because I am basically the opposite, which was probably obvious due to the nature of the question. I like to show up late and leave late (10-6ish).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER139> Profession: Laravel Developer - <USER14>

[7:45] First alarm.

[8:00] Second Alarm.

[8:15] Third alarm...sometimes final..sometimes I wait till 8:25.

[8:45] Morning Standup.

[9:00] Spend an hour on hn/reddit.

[10-12:00] Try to get an hour in.

[12:00-1:00] Lunch

[1:00] Try to work if i'm in the right mindset, or HN/Reddit.

[2:00] Ditto

...

..

.

[1:00 AM] Bed.

I'm usually always at computer trying to get work in, and catching up on the weekends--my wife hates that part, but can't grep the fact that my mind can't just code like a machine whenever I'm 'on the clock'..

I have aspergers/add and focusing is a major issue. We use a time clock tracker for work that tracks activity/time so I just pause that when I'm in distraction mode.

</comment><comment><USER140> Profession: Software Developer

[5:30-6:15] Get up \--- [6:15-6:35] bath and espresso [6:35-7:00] commute \--- or --- [6:15-6:45] make breakfast for the family [6:15-7:00] Wake wife and kids [7:00-7:30] Family breakfast [7:30-8:15] Commute \--- Mostly I work uninterrupted until lunch.

[12:00-12:30] Lunch [12:30-14:30] work and/or meetings [14:30-14:45] daily stand-up [14:45-15:50] uninterrupted work [15:50-16:30] Commute [16:30-19:30] family time

I work a couple of evenings as well - mostly only when I'm inspired - <USER15> never before the kids are in bed.

<comment><USER141> I've heard of showerbeer, but never showercoffee. This has completely changed my outlook on consumables taken while bathing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER142> Position: Software Development Manager

Full-time, in-office, 3000 employee international software company

Workday: 07:45-09:15 - Emails/Slack, try to write code*

09:15-09:30 - Morning stand-up

09:30-12:00 - Attend various meetings (so my employees don't have to), write code* (if time allows)

12:00-13:00 - Eat some lunch

13:00-16:00 - Attend various meetings (so my employees don't have to), write code* (if time allows)

16:00-17:00 - Write code*

These days, "write code" could be anything from actually writing code, to creating tests, high-level design work, or building a POC for something I dreamt up the night before.

</comment><comment><USER143> Profession: Civil Engineer - Water and Wastewater (Consultant)

[07:50] Wake up, dress, drink lots of water, drive to work

[08:30 - 09:00] Arrive at the office or a treatment plant. If at office, read through emails and review my plans for the day (I currently use WorkFlowy)

[09:00 - 13:00] Get work done __. Usually not enough. Get distracted by HN and subreddits of interest.

[13:00 - 13:30] Eat some lunch alone (but not at my desk) or with some coworkers. Make small talk about clients, deliverables, the news, and our lives

[13:30 - 17:00] Back at it, usually in the office. Do more work __. Go do some field visits if schedules allow and the weather is nice.

[17:30 - 19:30] Get home. Hit the Gym. Do chores. Take care of chickens and garden if needed. Make Dinner.

[19:30 - 22:30] Enjoy time with wife. Watch some TV. Read. Work on podcast, EWB, or other non-profit work. Spend time with friends some nights. Research programming and data science, contemplate a career change.

[22:30 - 23:00] Start making my way to bed. Journal. Meditate/Pray/Think. Hopefully fall asleep within an hour.

 __Work generally entails: Early in a project: meeting with our clients, convincing them to do some necessary work, early research about technologies and design options, site visits and inspections, coordinating with surveyors and sewer inspectors, talking to vendors, visiting other treatment plants and utilities to see how they do things, early conceptual designs, watch videos of sewer inspections.

Mid Project: Laying out and detailing designs, detailed research in to alternatives, hydraulic and process/chemical calculations, equipment sizing and selection, cost estimation, writing specifications for equipment and materials, sketching drawings for our CADD drafters, use CADD when they get too busy to help, coordinating with subconsulting disciplines that are not our expertise (structural, geotechnical, etc), meet with clients and give progress updates, etc

Late Project: Project gets bid and awarded to a contractor to build. Reviewing submittals from general contractors to ensure they supply the correct equipment and materials, visit work site and meet with construction managers, constantly put out fires and answer questions.

</comment><comment><USER144> Profession: Software Engineer

[5:20] First alarm rings.

[5:40] Ok that's enough snoozed alarms. Time to wake up. Take a bath and start 30 min commute to work.

[6:15] Camp at a downtown Starbucks and catch up on HN. Work on a couple programming puzzles.

[9:00 - noon] Get to office. Fix a couple of outstanding tasks from the day before.

[1:00 - 3:00] Code, a meeting or two scheduled in this time slot a couple times a week.

[3:00 - 5:00] Code then go home.

[6:00 - 7:00] Dinner.

[7:00 - 11:00] Read more technical articles/books, moar programming puzzles, contemplate my career choices, fb/whatsapp with friends. Sleep.

</comment><comment><USER145> Profession: Software Engineer - Full time, On-Site, <50 employees

Live in Brooklyn, Work in NYC, 15-20min commute so workday is like:

\- [06:30] First alarm

\- [07:00] Pre-workout, Smoothie, Workout clothes

\- [07:40] Walk 15-min to a CrossFit box with my wife

\- [08:00] Workout, 1-hour, wife usually beats me in WOD

\- [09:00] Walk 15-min back home

\- [09:15] Shower, get dressed, protein or breakfast

\- [09:40] Put up my QC35 and silently get to work via train

\- [10:00] Arrive at work, get coffee/water, chat with coworkers, etc.

\- [10:05] Work, start with GitHub notifications

\- [12:30] Lunch

\- [12:45] Work

\- [17:30] Misc, prepare to leave.

\- [18:00] Headphones on, train home, music, mobile gaming.

\- [18:30] Dinner

\- [19:30] TV, Weight-lifting, Houseworks, Misc

\- [23:00] Sleep

<comment><USER146> Weight-lifting and cross fit in a day? How does you body handle that?

<comment><USER145> I mix it up - sometimes CF+WL, other days just CF or WL. Many CF workouts are more of a skill work rather than pure strength work that result in fatigue, I do not overtrain.

Unless steroids, then its no problem i guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER147> Profession: Senior Software Developer - full time, in office - <50 employees

Also a husband / father and run some revenue generating side projects

[08:00ish] Wake up, piss, weigh myself, brush teeth then read

[09:00] Shower, get dressed, etc

[09:30] Drive into the office

[10:00] Get some coffee, plan my day and get to working (standing desk)

[11:15] Get up and walk around

[12:00] Lunch (catered in)

[12:30] Back to the grind (sitting down)

[15:00] Another walk

[17:30] If it's Wednesday, there's some Whiskey about now

[18:30] Hit the road

[19:00] Get home, dinner with the family, sometimes a quick board game

[20:30] Do some burpees then get to hacking on side projects

[23:00] Read

[00:00ish] Sleep

Weekends are dedicated to more family time

</comment><comment><USER148> Profession: Software Engineer - FT - 1500 employees

[05:00] Alarm goes off;

[05:20 - 6:30] Gym;

[6:45 - 7:30] Get back from the gym, shower, make breakfast, leave for work.

[08:00] Get to work. Check email/news.

[08:30 - 9:30] Do actual work. Most of the office isn't in yet.

[9:30 - 11:00] Meetings, general discussions, some work sprinkled in between.

[11:15 - 11:30] Daily Standup

[11:30 - 12:00] Eat lunch on site.

[12:00 - 13:00] Transition back to work, have some work-related discussions.

[13:00 - 16:00] Dedicated no-meeting work time. Engineers are exempt from scheduled meetings after 1PM.

[16:00] Go home, eat, sleep, rinse & repeat.

</comment><comment><USER149> Profession: Research Assistant (CS - Systems)

\- [05:00]: wake up, coffee, breakfast, read

\- [07:00]: arrive at work - look for papers and read abstracts set the good ones aside to do a second pass on later

\- [08:00]: code / run experiments / simulations /etc (depends on what part of the project)

\- [10:30]: check HN, news, internet stuff

\- [11:00]: seminar / talks / meeting / lunch

\- [13:00]: review papers put aside, write documentation, project report, etc.

\- [14:30]: whatever needs more time from ^^^

\- [16:00]: Go home, read, watch tv, bike, exercise, eat, play go

\- [21:00]: Bed

</comment><comment><USER150> Profession/position: Lead Software Developer (Web) - Full Time, sometimes I work remotely, most times at the office. <10 Employees.

Workday:

\- 6:30 Wake up and have a small breakfast.

\- 7:00 Gym, includes shower.

\- 9:30 Have a large breakfast and prepare coffee ;)

\- 10:00 Start working on tasks for the day.

\- 13:00 Lunch.

\- 14:00 Get back to desk and procrastinate for a bit. I like to watch YouTube.

\- 15:00 Work on tasks, attend meetings, or pair up with our new-hire on things they're struggling with.

\- 17:00 Break.

\- 18:00 Work on tasks.

\- 19:30 Go home and unwind for a bit, or go see my friends.

\- 21:00 Dinner.

\- 22:30 Prepare gym bag and food for tomorrow.

\- 23:00 Bed.

</comment><comment><USER151> Profession/position: Senior Software Engineer (large private company)

[0720] Wake up

[0800] Leave for work

[0930 if Amtrak hasn't fucked up Penn yet this week] Arrive at work, grab cereal and coffee for breakfast

[0945] Arrive at desk, ease into tasks for the day

[1200-ish] Go to lunch

[1230-ish] Get back from lunch

[1500] Daily standup

[1820] Leave the office

[1935 (see Amtrak above)] Get home, figure out dinner

[2030] Done with dinner, do things around the house or play Fallout 4

[2300] Go to bed

My day-to-day at work is such a variable bundle of meetings, interviews, and other things that there is really no "typical" there.

</comment><comment><USER152> Profession: Software Engineer

[05:00] alarm / wake up

[05:05] eat breakfast with coffee, read personal email

[05:30] bathe and dress

[06:10] kiss my snoozing wife goodbye and out the door

[06:45+/-15] park and walk to office

[07:00] more coffee and business email

[07:30] review requests, competitions, progress of dev team; code; meetings; occasional walk to clear my head

[11:30] lunch

[12:00] review requests, competitions, progress of dev team; code; meetings; occasional walk to clear my head

[16:00] walk to my car

[16:30+/-15] arrive home

[17:00] personal email; budgeting; help prepare dinner

[17:30] dinner

[18:00] play video games; watch sports on TV; read

[22:00] to bed

</comment><comment><USER50> Profession: Web Developer (4 person software group, 30 person company) [06:30] Child runs into the bedroom and wakes me and my wife up. Shower and frantically get the kids fed and ready.

[07:15] Leave the house with my kids.

[07:45] Leave the kids school and drive to work.

[08:05] Get to work. Surf the web for an hour

[09:00] rest of the team gets to work

[09:00 - 5:00] Work, chat, lunch etc. Probably 4 - 5 hours of work

[5:15] leave work to get the kids

[5:45] get home, feed the kids, play, shower etc.

[7:30]Kids bedtime

[8:00 - 12] Study for future job, workout, chat with wife.

[12]Bed time

</comment><comment><USER153> Profession: sysadmin - full time, on prem - ~300 employees

Workday is really simple, and not really set to a schedule.

Arrive a bit before 8 and check email and the help desk for overnight issues.

Follow up on any outstanding issues from the previous day.

Review backup logs (This is not an in-depth review, just looking for errors)

Check for interesting articles on HN, Reddit, etc

Depending on what else is going on, lunch is usually 12-12:30

Rinse and repeat until 16:30 or 17:00.

If I make it until 10:00 without the phone ringing, it will be a good day.

<comment><USER154> Can someone tell me why OP's answer is being downvoted?

</comment></comment><comment><USER155> Profession: SRE - full time, remote - < 20 employees.

M-F

\- [09:00] wake up. make breakfast for child, myself and dog

\- [09:30] make coffee. cleanup kitchen / house. random chores

\- [10:00] nanny arrives. slack, email, github

\- [10:30] actual work begins

\- [14:00] make lunch

\- [14:15] make coffee, nap or take dog for walk.

\- [15:00] resume work

\- [17:15] nanny leaves

\- [18:00] make dinner. wife is back from work. spend time w/family

\- [21:30] child is asleep. walk dog or go for a run

\- [22:15] resume work

\- [00:00] sleep or time for side projects (1 hour)

Some days have more consistent blocks of work time but this has recently been the norm.

</comment><comment><USER156> Profession: Software Engineer, full time working for a big company in a small office

Workday: \- Wake up, shower and walk to the office \- Arrive in the office and bake some breakfast \- Start doing actual work at ~ 9:30 \- Work is usually predefined tasks + reacting to specific customer/management requests \- Team meetings happens 3 times a week \- Code review over the day \- Around 6pm start walking back home

</comment><comment><USER157> Profession: "Web Engineer"

[6:10] first alarm. snooze twice.

[6:45] makes morning tonic, does some yoga

[7:15] gathers stuff and joins dad for ride downtown

[8] arrives at office. sets up workplace, browses reddit + HN

[8:30] gets a quick workout in. nobody else gets here til 9. feels good to be paid by the hour to get pump on.

[9] coworkers arrive, pretends to be doing techy stuff. wordpress yadda yadda...

[1030] go sit in the sun for a while on rooftop

[1] gets some whole foods

[430] leaves work

[5] yoga class

[630] metro

[730] home, piano, cryptocurrency research, instagram, keep up with friends...

[1030] bed

</comment><comment><USER158> Profession: Software Engineer (medical software)

start:

[07:50] First alarm

[08:10] Out of bed and getting ready

[09:05] 10 minute trip to campus + 5 min walk to office

[09:20] Catch up with Slack, Email

[09:50 - 12:30] Work with regular interruptions

[12:30 - 12:45] Eat a quick lunch

[12:45 - 17:30] Coding, or meetings with some interruptions again.

[17:30] Head home, cook, have dinner with my wife and talk with her, do dishes.. (or, go swim 2x a week and short dinner)

[19:30] Play around with some other projects

[21:30] Play a boardgame with my wife, talk, watch something

[00:00] Read a bit and sleep.

GOTO start;

<comment><USER159> Wow, I haven't swam in years. I should see if there is a YMCA close to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER160> Running my own SaaS with 1 co-founder. Every day is different but in general:

\- 9:00: Arrive at the office after a 50 minutes commute.

\- Bookkeeping, coding, support, administration, legal and answering emails.

\- 11:00: Go the gym.

\- 13:00: Lunch.

\- 14:00: Rocket League.

\- 14:30: Same as #2.

\- 16:10: Take the train home.

Even though the effective working hours in a normal day are few I do get a lot of stuff done during those. I'm also compensating for the occasional crunch periods where I work 12 hours a day and weekends.

<comment><USER56> That's a badass schedule. I've often wondered/daydreamed about running a company with a similar schedule.

E.g. Extremely focused, productive mornings for writing code, meaning no interruptions if possible followed by lunch until whenever, then afternoons are flex time for meetings/planning/whatever the business needs.

<comment><USER160> Thank you! Yes, during the effective hours I get in everyday I get more done than on my previous job where I had to do 8 hours.

<comment><USER56> May I ask what you're working on?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER161> Profession: Software Developer - full time, Remote from Asian metropolis, with a US based company <20 employees.

I work 9hr days Mon-Thur, and 4 hours on Friday morning. A lot of my work is lone ranger type projects.

Typical Workday:

[09:00] Wake up, maybe shower, maybe just drink tea.

[09:30] Skype session with language teacher.

[10:00] Start work.

[11:30] Take 15 minutes for me. Maybe, skim HN, or practice a skill that has nothing to do with work or programming.

[13:00] Clock out. Go for a walk and have some lunch. Shower if I haven't done that yet.

[15:00] Work more, usually from a cafe.

[17:00] Clock out, have some fun, eat some dinner, go home.

[19:00] Clock in, it is now 6AM at the home office. No one bothers me until 8-9am.

[20:00] Take a 15 min break, usually give my wife some attention. Do a house chore, or chit chat.

[20:30] Check in with the upper echelon. Sometimes it is just an IM giving a status update, other times it is a meeting going over the beginning or end of a project.

[23:00] Clock out. Go get a massage, or late night snack. Work on personal project etc.

[01:00] Go to sleep.

Probably once a week I cut out that 1pm-3pm break, so I can have a longer afternoon break. Those days, I'll see a movie or have something planned with friends in the afternoon.

</comment><comment><USER162> Profession: Software Engineer

[7:30 - 8:00] Wake up & morning exercises & breakfast

[8:00 - 9:00] Time to work on personal projects

[9:00 - 9:45] Commute to the office

[9:45 - 10:00] Cup of tea (actually, I have tea like ~7 times a day), catch up with what happened yesterday

[10:00 - 11:00] Working

[11:00 - 11:10] Daily standup with the team

[12:00 - 13:00] Lunch

[13:00 - 18:30] Work, meetings

[18:30 - 19:15] Commute back to home

[19:15 - 00:00] Dinner, family, maybe going out, reading articles/books, movies, etc. Let's call it - free time.

</comment><comment><USER163> Up at 6:30. 5 minute drive to the ocean. Code for 14-16 hours. Go home, unwind.

<comment><USER164> How do you charge your laptop?

<comment><USER165> Much like coffee drinkers know where all the power outlets are at their local coffee shops, I can't speak for OP but I know exactly where each power outlet is in the picnic shelters at my local county parks. I also have a pretty good idea which locations have good data reception to tether on my phone.

Unfortunately I live in a climate where the weather is subjectively "bad" 8 months out of the year, so on one hand I'm not "out there" most of the time, but on the other hand when the weather is unusually good I certainly am out there all day sometimes. Sort of like is the glass half empty or half full argument?

My open office is really, really open. It can be distracting when deer or raccoon wants my lunch. Raccoons are kinda scary, they are alpha scavengers and they know the local gun laws as well as a hunter or police.

Strange but true facts: I travel everywhere with trash bags because I need a way to get my gear home dry when there's a downpour. Also I dress up to go to the park, so rangers won't think I'm homeless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER166> Profession: Freelance/Contract iOS Engineer + Working on a Startup

[6:40] Wake up and feed the dog (she is my alarm clock)

[6:50] Workout for 30 minutes

[7:30] Eat breakfast, make protein shake, take vitamins

[7:40] Shower

[8:00] Get the dog exercise walking the neighborhood or trail

[9:00] Head to 1st coffee shop to work

[12:00] Grab something to eat somewhere

[2:00] Head to a new coffee shop and work

[4:00] Head home and feed the dog/toss the ball in the backyard

[5:00] Find some more food!

[6:00-8:00] Depending on the day, head back to the coffee shop

</comment><comment><USER167> Profession: Business Analyst / Product Owner

[2:00] - Wake-up, coffee, and eat fresh fruit.

[2:30] - Personal projects, read tech news in between.

[5:00] - Exercise.

[5:30] - Personal projects, read tech news in between.

[6:45] - Write diary on some days.

[7:00] - Morning Walk.

[7:20] - Make Lunch, have breakfast and get ready.

[8:15] - Drive to Office.

[8:30] - In Office.

Each day is different

50% Meetings with Devs, Stakeholders etc.

30% Writing Requirements, Stories.

20% Some Data Analysis and running reports.

[4:30] - Run errands and drive home

[5:00] - Back at home, catch up YouTube, TED Talks, Reddit.

[6:30] - Go to Bed.

<comment><USER168> Bed at 1830hrs and up at 0200? This is amazing! Why?

<comment><USER167> A couple of reasons for it.

I was wasting my time in evenings on useless stuff and was mentally drained to do any productive work.

I need to change the type of industry I work in, so I feel the solid block of time in the morning with a fresh mind is the best time to learn new skills.

Also, I am single and got divorced last year. I found myself wasting time, contemplating mundane things, reading psychology forums in evenings. It was not helping me get out of the hole I was in. So I changed my schedule.

<comment><USER168> Really interesting. I find I'm most productive in the evenings. Do you happen to agree with the research suggesting people have natural inclinations towards more/less sleep and different productivity rhythms during the day? It seems like reading between the lines you've augmented your sleep patterns from what they normally are.

<comment><USER167> I think the sleep and productivity times vary with age, food, and stress levels. I used to be a late nighter almost all of my teen life into the early 20s. But have now become early(rather super early) riser.

As expected light plays a huge role in altering sleep cycles. All my devices go into blue light mode around 5:30 pm, and same with Hue lights at home. And the lights turn on to 6500K ~30 mins before my alarm goes off. If for some reason my lights do no turn on I still find in hard to wake-up at 2 just with an alarm.

As for food, I've noticed on days my diet is heavy in red meat, and fats I tend to sleep longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER169> Profession/position: Web advisor - full time, public education, 600+ employees

Workday:

        - Wake up & prepare myself.

        - Read and reply emails.

        - Always atleast 1 meeting every day, sometimes entire day full of meetings.

        - Look in my notebooks for Todos, and do them

        - Read and reply emails

        - 30 minute break. 7 hour work day.

</comment><comment><USER170> Profession: Contracting Specialist in the USAF < 40 people Workday: \- [06:30]: Alarm off \- [06:48]: "Shit!" jump in the bed and sprint to the shower \- [07:30]: being late is serious. Run into my building, and just beat my supervisor to her desk. \- [08:00]: After coffee and email, build my task list for the day. Review anything thats on my desk, and get contracts reviewed that I need to solicit or award that day. \- [10:00]: My day is pretty much finished. Read a book until 12:00 (on Read.amazon.com, i have to look busy) \- [12:00]: Play some board game with Finance downstairs, grab some lunch and take a power nap in my truck. \- [13:45]: Sit back at my desk, do any corrections that i have come across my desk in any of my contracts. \- [14:30]: Read some more, HN, Code a side project, general bullshit. \- [15:15]: Get dressed for PT, and go work out until 1700 and then go home.

</comment><comment><USER171> Profession: Consulting Structural Engineer

[7:00] wake up, shower, dress

[7:20] drive to office

[7:50] coffee, light breakfast, browse hn

[8:00] fret about the 15 pressing issues I need to deal with

[8:05] work on something else

[9:00] sites call for their RFI responses that i promised them last week. Look at RFIs for first time - everything is fucked. Tell them how to unfuck it.

[12:00] lunch

[1:00] model / analyze / design structures

[1:30] calls and emails

[2:00] model / analyze / design structures

[1:30] calls and emails

...

..

.

[5:00] go home

[6:00] eat, relax, work on side projects

</comment><comment><USER154> Cisco Pre-sales working from home

[08:15] wake up, shower

[08:30] start working (reading/writing emails)

[09:00] breakfast

[09:15]-[1pm] writing design documents, puting quotes together, puting estimates for man-days for projects

[1pm] lunch

[2pm] - [5pm] Dreaming about launching a startup, then back to work calling sales guy and complaining about their promess to the customer

[5pm] go to the gym

[7pm] play some PS4

[9pm] watch better call saul with the wife

[11pm] reddit/HN/..etc

[12am] time for bed

</comment><comment><USER172> Profession: Developer

[07:30] Wake up, prepare for day

[08:15] Leave home

[08:30] Arrive at work, figure out what the hell I'm working on today

[09:00] Standup

[09:15] Walk across the street to the diner, order an omelet, begin working

[13:00] Walk back to work, since my battery is dead

[15:00] Leave work again, head for a park

[15:15] Hang hammock, begin working again

[17:30] Realize I'm a half hour late shutting down, pack my stuff, and head home

</comment><comment><USER173> Some of these posts are very interesting, it makes me think there would be value in defining what you would like to be able to post (how you want your day to look) and make changes to achieve that. Likely that would identify manageable and achievable goals, which are worthwhile to you.

</comment><comment><USER174> UI / UX designer checking in:

\- Wake up and exercise 30 min-1h \- prepare and have breakfast \- get on laptop, check email, Trello, slack and Skype \- take care of any communication or quick follow-ups \- respond to any new business inquiries and draft proposal if any \- Start working on ongoing projects from 11 \- have lunch around 1 or 2 \- work some more with breaks in between until about 5 \- take an hour break and get ready for dinner around 6 \- work a bit more after dinner till about 7 \- work on personal projects or portfolio or anything else that will help me land new business till 8pm \- rest of the time I just chill, watch TV, snack wind down until bed time around 10:30 or 11:30 \- rinse and repeat until weekend . I take weekends off to avoid burnout.

</comment><comment><USER175> Profession: Support Analyst - Investment Bank - Electronic Trading

|8:00am| Wakey wakey

|8:30am| Feed Dog > Walk Dog > Shower

|9:00am| Leaving for office

|till 11:30am| Meetings - Drink much coffee - ponder existence

|11:30 - 2:30| Projects (Infra, Automation of reports, scripting etc)

|2:30 - 6:00| Release prep / Incident Response / handover work to APAC Counterparts

|6 - 7| G Y M

Rinse and repeat.

</comment><comment><USER176> Profession: IT-Auditor - full time, >10k employees

Workday:

\- 6:30 Wake up & prepare myself

\- 7:30 ~ 8:30 get to the office / client location

\- 8:30 - 9:30 check latest mails, discuss the day with colleagues

\- 9:30-12 work/meetings/analysis/testings/documentation

\- 12-1 lunch

\- 1~7 work/meetings/analysis/testings/documentation

\- 7-8 get home

\- 8-8:30 eat

\- 8:30-10 TV, Games, Books, Relax...

\- 10 sleep and repeat

</comment><comment><USER177> Profession: Part-time remote software engineer small company

Workday:

[6:30] Wake up and read stuff on my phone

[7:00] Make coffee eat breakfast

[8:00] Open laptop and work on prioritized list of tasks

[10:30 or 11] Stop Working

[11:00] Lunch

[12:00 to 3:00] Un-fun personal stuff (chores, bookkeeping, laundry, etc..)

[3:00 to 3:30] Nap

[3:30 to 7:30] Exercise - Surf, Mountain Bike, Run, Hike, etc...

[7:30] Dinner

[8:30 to 11] Movies, read more stuff, etc...

</comment><comment><USER178> Software Engineer

\- Awake at 7:00 am

\- 8:30 am - on the train

\- 9:30 am - at the office. Start working on my projects, join any meetings about any existing or new projects that affect me.

\- 4:12 pm - leave work

\- 4:30 pm - on the train back home

\- 5:30 pm - home working side projects, work work, or trying to unwind.

</comment><comment><USER179> Senior dev, full time remote.

[0700] wake up, get out of bed

[0720] ok now get out of bed. breakfast

[0800] leave kids

[0830] start work

[1200] eat something microwaved. take a walk.

[1600] maybe pick up kids, or work another hour if wife picks them up. Make dinner.

usuall at least one skype call takes place during the day, a bit of chatting, and 2-3 emails.

</comment><comment><USER180> 1\. Wakeup early. Go to work. 2\. Do nothing but work for 8 hours. \- Check Ethereum and altcoin prices \- Read crypto news \- Read something else interesting like philosophy and marx 3\. Go home.

Note: got no project, but I'm getting paid, lucky me

</comment><comment><USER181> Profession: Marketing

Position: Sr. Digital Marketing Analyst at [http://www.spaceotechnologies.com/](http://www.spaceotechnologies.com/) a mobile app development company in India.

Workday: -Wake up, breakfast, swimming

At Office [9:30 to 10:00] Planning the day

[10:00 to 11:00] Checking social media channels, checking latest app related news using Google trends, and redditing.

[11:00 to 1:45] Trying to automize my work, checking on-page of our website, technical discussion of GA.

[1:45 to 2:30] Lunch, reading

[2:30 to 6:30] Working on special assignments and updating the daily reports to track the work progress

Well, apart from this, we have sometimes different activities which I like the most.

</comment><comment><USER182> -Awake at 04:00

-Start remote work at 04:30

-Gym at 10:00, followed by shower/lunch

-Resume work at 12:00, finish at 14:00

-Side-projects from 14:00 on.

<comment><USER183> What time to you go to bed?

<comment><USER182> around 21:30 or 22:00.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER184> Profession: Remote Software Engineer (REST APIs).

[06:00] Start work.

[07:00] Actually start work.

\- Sporadic work, youtube, walks, and, today, HN.

[13:00] Daily Stand up.

[14:00] Doubtful I work past this point.

I don't have to maintain hours. I just happen to wake up at 6 so I might as well work then.

</comment><comment><USER185> Profession: "Software Engineer Team Lead"

[5:45] Wakeup

[6:15] Make breakfast

[7:00] Out the door

[7:30] Drop wife off at work

[7:40] Drop dog off at day care

[8:00] Arrive at work

[8:45] All office standup, not useful

[9:15] Team standup

[9:30] Coffee

[10:00] Meetings or code

[11:30] Lunch

[12:00] Meetings or code

[4:30] Leave office

[4:45] Pick up dog

[5:00] Pickup wife

[6:00] Get home, start dinner

[9 or 10] bed time

</comment><comment><USER186> Man.. people are not getting enough sleep.

</comment><comment><USER187> [04:30] Wake up

[04:30-05:30] eat breakfast

[05:30] drive 30 minutes to work

[06:00 - 08:00/09:00] arrive to work, read HN, access bank accounts, read more.

[08:00-09:00 to 12:00] begin doing work, read email (work+personal)

[12:00-12:30/13:00] eat lunch, go for a walk

[13:00-15:30] do more reading, work

[15:30-16:15] drive home

[16:15-17:30] hang out, "veg"

[17:30-19:00] relax, then workout, or vice-versa

[20:00 or 20:30 - 04:30] sleep

</comment><comment><USER188> Profession: Freelance computer programmer

[5:00-10:00] Wake up (no alarm).

[+:10] Grab coffee cup, walk to casita.

[+:5] Make coffee.

[+8-15 hours] Sit at desk.

[+:01] Leave casita.

I have a very solitary career.

</comment><comment><USER189> Full stack dev

8:15 wake up

8:25 drive to work

9:00 check emails/reddit/facebook

10:00 code/reddit

12:00 lunch

13-14:00 code/reddit

16-17:00 head home.

17:40 bike ride/exercise

18:30 personal projects

20:00 game

23:30 bed

</comment><comment><USER190> Wake up at 6, code until 9, walk until 10, work at cafe until 13, break until 18, code until 1.

</comment><comment><USER191> Profession: software engineer, building SaaS and mobile apps, as well as part- time contracting (remote)

[04:00] wake up (I only need 6h of sleep; attempted uberman sleep schedule in the past but incompatible with social life first time around, with family life in recent years)

[04:05] drink water, meditate, blue light therapy in winter months, drink green tea, read personal email, check the weather and comics (avoid the news); look at plan for the day (prepared in the evening)

[04:30] make latte, go to standing desk in home office, work on SaaS, email communication with my dev+sales team, focus on marketing

[06:30] greet and gently wake wife and two daughters (ages 8 and 2); tell them what weather to expect, so they dress appropriately; prepare breakfast table for everybody: fresh fruits, nuts, berries

[06:45] return to SaaS work

[07:40] exit home office, load daughters into car, drive to their two schools (switching to single school in the Fall, 5-minutes away from home), listening to audiobook of their choice, or classical music; yell at dangerous drivers

[08:30] back to home office; switch to (remote) contracting work, read business email once, eat quick lunch away from desk; regularly step outside to breathe and appreciate nature (pull weeds, sit in the sun, observe plant growth); check HN front-page twice, in case there is something relevant to my streams of work (open tabs for delayed reading)

[15:00] pick up one or other daughter from school; twice a week, aikido practice at dojo with elder daughter, otherwise return home, leisure time with wife and daughters

[17:00] prepare dinner, usually grilling, enjoy a glass of wine with wife, listen to daughter's wild stories, insist on proper table etiquette, abandon all pretense of control

[18:30] put daughters on path to bed, laugh, read books, insist on personal routines

[19:30] clean up kitchen, living room, and play room; review the day, journal, plan the next day; read

[21:00] talk and/or stream series (or half-movie) with wife

[22:00] go to bed

Twice a week, play soccer 1h with friends either at noon or early morning (indoors during winter). Three times a week, 45m weight lifting while reading previously-opened tabs from HN. Once each weekend, 1h mowing lawn and yardwork while listening to podcast. Once a week, 5am-meeting with my coach. On weekends my Saas work ends by 7am, when I go groceries shopping for the week; the rest of the weekend days are spent playing with the girls, culture outings, board games, etc. Every Sunday, review the week, plan the next (setting my compass according to quarterly goals); once a month, review progress on my quarterly goals, revise them or set new ones for the next quarters. Every few weeks, cook dinner for friends. Every quarter, host a season-driven party (equinox, midsummer, equinox, Lucia/Xmas). 2-3 times a year take full week off with family, without work.

<comment><USER192> Wow, that's the kind of work/life balance most should strive for. Congratulations on making it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER193> For some reason, I am getting really depressed reading this.

</comment><comment><USER194> Profession: Web and Graphic Designer (aka UX Designer), part-time, remote and onsite at <20 employee group in 3000> employee organization.

### Morning ###

Wake up with feline alarm clock and his sister, both of whom are fed, given fresh water, spoken to and pet.

Light breakfast, usually yogurt and cereal or freshly-ground peanut butter on toast, and fruit. Stove-top coffee, black, no milk, no sugar, and accompanying glass of water. Meditate a little, not following any mantra, just trying to observe my thoughts with no judgment. Avoid looking at any screens, except to answer the usual call from my mother who lives overseas.

Depending on what day it is, either: ¶ Go out for long walks and photograph mostly people on the street; ¶ Go to office in part-time job, talk to people in person, draw and align things on paper and on the screen, print things and stick them on the wall and put them on a table where everyone can see them and often let them 'sit' for a day or five and live with them; ¶ Stay home and go out to buy fresh bread for breakfast. Look at paper planner to find out what I forgot I need to do and remember the context I am doing them in — Examples: update the color or redraw a line on a vector illustration, redraw and rescan a drawing, find a more appropriate typeface, change the wording in an InDesign or GitHub document, update the Google App Engine SSL certificate for a website, update or enhance a Wordpress or Django or Hugo website, make an HTML element display elegantly on a small and large screen, figure out a progressive enhancement with JavaScript while making sure it fails gracefully, find or craft a regular expression that matches a piece of text so I can search and replace it. Most of these involves looking up and also writing documentation to refresh my memory. ¶ I draw, align or write or choose things, around half the time for projects for other people and half the time for my own. Two current projects are a website about visual beauty and a book of black and white photographs.

Eat lunch often but not always consisting of heated leftovers from the previous evening's dinner which was purposefully cooked in abundance so there is also lunch the following or following-following day. A particularly tasty leftover food is black or brown beans and white or brown rice and a spicy sautéed vegetable. If it is not raining or cold I like to eat sitting on grass outside. Should weather and temperature be grim I stay in and read things on a few websites while noting down ideas for projects and blog posts on a paper notebook, which is something I tend to do throughout the day.

### Afternoon ###

Coffee after lunch, and sometimes a sweet, at least 70% cocoa if chocolate.

Check email and reply. If there is an email asking me to do something which I cannot do at the current time I either write down what I need to do and when I need to get it done by on my paper planner or I archive the email.

Mid-to-late afternoon I usually draw and look at things on a large computer screen and draft an email showing progress, often with screenshots and brief captions with questions. I make sure to go outside before the sky is dark and walk home looking at and taking pictures of things. I may also walk to a bar and have a beer or play basketball or tennis or throw a frisbee or go to an event with a friend (when I do not get to do exercise outside due to, for example, soul-threatening weather or laziness, I often do the '7-minute Scientific Exercise' routine in the living room before dinner). When I get home I look at, choose and sometimes publish a picture to my website and auto- post a link to it on social media websites that I rarely log into (this is called POSSE — [Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere]([https://indieweb.org/POSSE)](https://indieweb.org/POSSE\))). If I am home and it is cleaning day I take turns vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom, taking clothes to the washer in the building basement and setting up a line and hanging them in the living room, which makes it look Neapolitan and reminds me of the great food and people of Naples and of Pink Floyd's [Live at Pompeii]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Floyd:_Live_at_Pompeii](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Floyd:_Live_at_Pompeii)).

After dinner (which I take turns cooking or washing up after) and conversation I explore an open-world computer game with emergent gameplay mechanics or read a carefully-chosen book (I am lucky to have a partner who loves reading and writing). I also play with the felines, and talk to them and play music on the stereo for them — they particularly enjoy Kenny Burrell and Mozart — when I stay home during the day.

</comment><comment><USER168> Profession: CEO

Workday:

[0500] First alarm goes off and is immediately switched off by Daytime George, who is being expected to cash a check for being fine on 4.5hours of sleep which Nightime George inconsiderately wrote whilst reading the night before.

[0530] Reluctantly wake up and open laptop or phone if it's vibrating. Spend 60 minutes catching up on news, looking at schedule, preparing for my day. Lately have been waking up to texts from a friend in a different timezone, who has a toddler, with whatever weird thing the kid has been up to. It's the best way to start the day as someone who enjoys cute pictures of children with spaghetti on their face but has no intention of ever siring an heir.

[0700] Start on emails: mix of sending emails (I hold off from emailing my colleagues late at night because that feels more oppressive than early in the morning, so there's usually 5-10 here) and writing my own To Do list in my draft emails.

[0800] Arrive at wherever I'm eating breakfast. I try to have breakfast mtgs instead of lunch. If I'm not having a meeting I try to catch up with someone who I really like but don't see enough of.

[0930-1030] Depending on how long breakfast was, arrive into the office. Make sure dog has water in his bowl. Do emails and start with meetings.

[1100-1300] Depending on the day of the week I have my senior team meeting, catching up on all areas of the business (once per week), 1:1s with my direct reports (we go for a walk), or specific focus on an area of the business and how we can do better (marketing, product, sales). I just switched to a standing desk. It's making me more focused somehow.

[1330] Depending on the day will get about 30 minutes for lunch. Usually means a five minute walk with my dog to the park and one other member of the team. We use it as a chance to stretch our legs and talk about a mixture of work and personal stuff.

[1400] I go to the gym in this timeslot every day with no excuses, for 75 minutes. (My gym is about a 45 second walk from the office.) I started doing this in November and it's been great for my health and stress levels. Going after lunch and before I start on workflow.

[1520] Try to focus on workflow during this part of the day: no meetings or external distractions, just working on presentations, spreadsheets, forecasting, or whatever it is I need to get done. This is where I get the bulk of the work done where I can look back and think "I did a thing today". When I'm mentoring or talking through ideas or doing a 1:1 with someone, one of my big blind spots is not seeing that as "work". I think it's a mindset in a lot of startup founders who are used to their economic worth being judged by "output" as quantified by a volume of high quality tangible documents or assets.

[1700] Take the dog outside for a second much shorter walk.

[1715] We have a few meetings in the evenings which I usually gear up for here.

[1800] Evening meetings are usually fun ones - product review, design review, engineering review.

[1900] Order some food and wrap up loose ends. Trying very hard this year to thank people for doing good work and so might go back through my email inbox and send a "thanks" to someone who has done something great, or let someone know I appreciated an email. Also today using this time to answer interesting questions on Hacker News! :)

[1930] Walk home with dog. Sporadically use this time to speak to friends who want advice about their startup.

[2030] Home! Poker, TV, reading.

[0000] Daytime George won't mind 30 more minutes of reading, this book is just getting interesting…

Would say most common types of work I'm doing are: setting direction and mentoring with the team; feeding back on execution; suggesting ideas; UX and UI review; shareholder management/fiduciary stuff; and hiring.

</comment><comment><USER195> Profession - Data Science and Database Marketing for a Non-Profit Foundation (<25 Employees, Endowment ~1 Billion USD)

Workday

[6:00-7:30] Wake up ~60 minutes before work if I'm driving, ~90 min if I'm taking the train, ~100 min if I'm riding my bike. Commute is about 8 miles regardless.

[7:00 - 9:30] Arrive at Work (I prefer to put in extra time in the morning rather than after work)

[8:00] Start running a few processes that will take a few hours. Make myself coffee and check what I have coming up.

[9:00] Recurring meetings generally happen in the morning. I meet with our printer rep on Tuesdays and Fridays, the Director of the Foundation on Thursdays, and individual departments schedule other meetings around those.

[10:30] Wrap up daily data tasks. This includes tracking down issues that our constituents have found in their reports, or developing new reports.

[12:00] Lunch. I typically spend ~45 minutes walking around during this time. It helps me clear my mind, and I'll often solve problems I'm stuck on during this time.

[13:00] Working on in-depth projects, such as analysis or creating new processes. An example of a new process might be building a new marketing track for a particular group of donors I have identified as needing specialized attention.

[13:30] Longer meetings tend to happen during this block of time. These meetings tend to be much less common or one-offs, and tend to focus on organizational planning. Meetings for upcoming appeals and marketing efforts happen during this time, as do our semi-annual performance meetings.

[15:30] Wrap up my day. I'll occasionally stay till 17:00 or so, but I've found that I make more mistakes the later it gets, especially as I get hungry.

[16:30] Commute home

[17:00] Eat, do dishes, do any chores that need to be done.

[18:00] Free time. Work on one of my projects, spend time with friends, work out, play basketball, Etc. Whatever I need to do to stay sane and happy.

[22:00] Shower, brush teeth, go to sleep.

:Repeat:

Notes:

Once I leave work, I can no longer work as we are not given the ability to work from home.

It takes me about 25 minutes to drive to work, and 35 min to drive home.

Riding my bike takes about 45 minutes each way. Despite the added time, I find I am generally happier if I can ride my bike.

Riding the train takes about 35 minutes going to work and 50 on the way home, on account of how transfers work in the loop.

I have a lot of flexibility at work because I'm a team of one, and I am extremely productive in ways that nobody really understands.

On one hand, I enjoy the freedom, and I've been able to make the role my own.

On the other hand, I've started to really hit the limit of what can be done in this role and I'm starting to get really bored. On top of that, while I really enjoy the analytical and scientific part of my role, the part that other people understand best is my ability to build data processes, and over time I've been roped in to creating and supporting several CRUD applications.

While these applications do benefit the organization, I find maintaining and designing these applications fairly stressful, since I have next to no background in application design, UX, or anything that would really qualify me to design and build systems that are robust enough for other people to use. I create a lot of things that _work_ , but I recognize are clunky and somewhat fragile.

</comment><comment><USER196> Creating a throwaway account because I don't want any link with my public persona.

I am a research assistant in math in an institute somewhere in Eastern Europe. In contrast to western countries, you may have here a permanent (i.e. quasi- lifetime, ultra-secure) position even as you are still a PhD student. However, at that point you have a salary of ~$3.5k/year after taxes, which can be supplemented by being in a research grant or some other similar funding.

A productive day:

[06.30] My alarm rings, I wake up, morning daily routine.

[07.30] I leave home, I walk to the institute (somehow, home and work are positioned in a way such that any public transport lengthens the time for commute).

[08.20] I arrive at my office in which I am alone, turn on my computer.

[08.20 - 09.00] Read my mail, answer my mails, put in my schedule something I remember I have to do and could easily forget, check out RSS reader.

[09.00] I realize I don't have anything "urgent to do" (e.g. write an abstract for a conference, preparing a lecture) and may therefore work on an interesting problem.

[09.00-13.00] Productive work. This usually implies a lot of Googling and skimming through many, many papers to get a feel for the state of the art in a sub-sub-field of math. I may write a lot of summaries of theorems with pen and paper to understand what exactly are the differences between them and where are the main difficulties. I sometimes suddenly realize that there is something everyone missed and I might discover a new link. More frequently, I realize that my ideas are blind alleys. I may get some new ideas for that, then I search again for a lot of papers that may help me (becoming frustrated when some of the papers I want to read aren't even behind a paywall, but completely forgotten except for citations). When I'm very very well-read and very very very lucky, I find new natural definitions and interesting theorems and write papers about them.

[13.00-13.30] I go out, have some lunch at a canteen-like place nearby, get back to my office.

[13.30-17.00] Productive work like before. If everything goes well, I don't see anybody for the whole day.

[17.00-18.00] The road back home.

[18.00-22.00] I eat, I read, I watch movies et al.

[22.30] Shower and then sleep.

An unproductive day:

[07.30] My alarm rings later because I am very tired from something I did the last day so I had foreseen I might sleep more. I am somehow not yet rested so I go back to sleep.

[11.00] I finally wake up and I realize I have to go to the institute because I have some form to fill.

[13.00] I arrive at the institute, I fill the form, I eat something like in the above and then go to the university because I have some tutorial to teach.

[14.00-16.00] I teach.

[16.00] I realize I can't do anything interesting that day so I head home and feel a bit bad about myself.

[16.30-end] Like in the above.

Most of my days are a mix between the two "ideals" :)

</comment><comment><USER197> Profession: Sales (software and hardware) at a massive IT conglomerate

Day consists of sitting at a desk waiting for a customer to ask for something.

Otherwise I play games and wait to get fired.

Collect random commission checks and salary whenever possible

<comment><USER198> Great to see some variety!

<comment><USER197> Haha my pleasure!

That's what we do. Especially for inside sales.

Outside sales is mostly the same thing, unless you have great accounts. Only difference is you sit at your house and not your desk.

And you also do fake travel and bill it to your credit card for points, and wait to be reimbursed by your company, who think you are out like actually visiting customers lol

Some people do great work and are very skilled but the rest of us are benchwarmers

<comment><USER137> Your honesty is refreshing. I wouldn't be able to do it, though, it requires a special skill set that I do not possess.

<comment><USER197> Anytime, friend.

Perhaps you would be interested in "sales engineering", which deals more with the ingest of customer information and needs, and outputs a configuration (from you) that will solve technically whatever challenges the customers is having.

Sales representatives like me are responsible for portraying an image, telling a company story, and manipulating people into doing quickly that which a rational person wouldn't do at all.

The knowledge base can be learned, but soft skills and truly psychopathic levels of manipulative ability can only be cultivated with intensive experience.

It is basically a performance art at that point :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER199> I'm an engineer at one of those YC companies.

I begin my morning working on a priority-sorted list of tasks. Then at some point, a 25-year-old DMs me on Slack to do something urgent and fucks up my entire day/week.

<comment><USER200> Plot twist: you're 21

<comment><USER201> Plot twist: he/she is 5 and the 25 year old is his parent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER202> Full time remote system administrator for windows and Linux servers with management responsibilities between various groups.

Employer employs about 75 people.

My day can be summed up with:

Arrive to work (home office or at the office 2 days a week) and check status boards for any issues.

Review any overnight emails.

Conference call between two Jr Admins and a few roaming techs 5-10 min tops)

Review change requests and bounce to others for impact assessments.

Sort and route requests between vendors, contractors, and various managers etc.

Write reports on all work and update milestones for all projects.

Keep the place humming. It's kind of a unicorn employer/job.

</comment><comment><USER203> It's a bit depressing to me that I'm 22 and on my first dev job I have a nearly identical day as a CIO. It makes me think there won't be any changes to my daily life if I continue on this path (I mean, I can get some different hobbies but the majority of the time will be spent like this)

Funny enough this motivates me to try to become a startup founder. Even if I fail, I'll at least have some emotion in my life and will not be playing it safe coding away until I'm old.

</comment><comment><USER204> \- wake up

\- grab espresso from resort cafe

-catch up on emails, drinking espresso overlooking the carribean ocean

\- fix a quick bug in my queue.

\- go for a quick swim in the ocean, dress and make a green tea

\- code for 3 hours

\- swim in ocean again, eat something light

\- code for another 3 hours

\- call it a day and go hangout with women and read.

\- sleep and repeat

<comment><USER205> This is amazing!</comment></comment>