2020 and 2021 have tossed the ingredients of everyday life into a cocktail shaker, given it a good mix, and strained those responsibilities and roles into a martini glass until the liquid flowed out of the edges.
What ingredients make me? I’m a father of two young boys (3 and 1.5-years-old), a husband, and a Growth Marketer.
Despite a reticence by some for a new normal it’s hard to deny that it has arrived. With that, I’m fortunate enough to have settled into a stable routine.
I’ve worked remotely since the start of the pandemic, and despite switching gigs at the vanguard of the Great Resignation, I continue to work from home. I moved from a large company to a smaller startup, and focus on the company’s inbound and in-app marketing. This means I work to build experiences and communications for our prospects, free users, and customers that attract, educate, and successfully get them working in our product. I also do a lot of work to make it as easy as possible for these folks to pay us money. Whether that’s transactionally or by connecting them with a sales team member over the channel and at the time that works best for them.
My partner also works full-time but has an hour commute each way outside of rush hour, and we both view our gigs as careers versus jobs. We have a full-time nanny with the boys during the day, and my schedule is shaped to meet the business needs while maximizing time with the kids, and accommodating my partner’s schedule.
So, here’s a taste of a typical day.
Standard weekday
6:00 AM - My wife is already off to work. I wake up with my oldest son. Brush our teeth, chat about the day, and collect his younger brother. Some days the kids sleep later and we don’t get out of bed until 6:45ish. Those are great days.
Post wakeup we go downstairs and do the usual early morning things. Turn on the local news to catch the weather, get the boys in fresh diapers or big kid underwear, and set them up with their morning chocolate milk. We let the dog out, clean up, and play with hot wheels and read books.
8:00 AM - The boys’ nanny arrives. I get changed and finish basic grooming, then I make a cup of coffee as the kids settle in for breakfast. I then head to the basement for breakfast and the start of the working day.
8:15 AM - I eat breakfast. Breakfast is easy. Either overnight oats or a grapefruit, banana, and tin of skyr. During breakfast, I settle in at my desk and listen to the NPR podcast, Up First, as I get my brain in gear.
8:30 AM - The next hour is spent completing daily admin. I take time to update my daily journal spreads and logs, as well as review my calendar and core tasks and todos. I then triage personal and work emails (including contacts that may have responded to automated messaging) and do the same across our other comms platforms. Lastly, I do a run-through of our highest volume automation and various dashboards in Salesforce, Marketo, and other tools, making notes on anything unique, alarming, or otherwise as I go. If things are running smooth, I try to then knock off a few low-effort items.
9:30 AM - Work block 1.
I put work into three buckets, and everything within sloughs into one of my two “work blocks’ for the day.
Deep Work: This is my core job and the day before I block my calendar to reserve 3-4 hours daily for this time, with minimum lengths of one hour. Ideally, these time blocks are 90 minutes to two hours long. This is my time to do the essential work. Typically this revolves around large strategic research and planning, or the tactical activities of building out the assets, experiment docs, and workflows for the specific plays. I often mute notifications and remove as many distractions as possible during this time.
Mechanical Work: This is the stuff that fills out to-do lists but fits into the margins. Pulling reporting, QA work, meeting prep, simple experiment check-ins. This is important work, but I do it when and where I can, and prioritize the time for deep work whenever possible.
1:1s, Standups, trainings, and other meetings: I sync and meet regularly with different colleagues up and down the organization. Additionally, while most folks are cognizant of meeting bloat, I still have to attend or participate in other meetings throughout the week. On average, this takes one to five hours a day and is the biggest challenge to getting the deep work done.
12:15 PM - I eat a light lunch. Often another skyr, or a prepackaged bag of salad. Often drink a Red Bull. I then either take a quick walk with the dog or otherwise step away from a screen for a few minutes. At 12:45/12:50 I head upstairs to put the boys down for their nap and then get back to work.
1:00 PM - Work block 2. Whatever wasn’t slotted into Work Block 1 goes here.
5:00 PM - Shutdown. I migrate over any work that I didn’t complete in my rapid log. Record any additional notes, time block the next day, and actively log off of Slack.
5:15 PM - Either cooking dinner or playing with the kids while my wife cooks. From there we eat and hang out together until 6:30 PM. At this point, my youngest goes up for stories and bed, while my eldest stays up a bit later. It takes until about 8:15 to have them both settled, and my wife and I alternate bedtime responsibilities.
8:15 PM - On nights where I put the kids down, this starts the “me” time. On my off nights, I spend 15-20 minutes cleaning up the house and get an earlier jump on this stuff. Two things I do most days are workout for 20-60 minutes and write for an hour. This is also when I get to edit podcasts, schedule blog posts, prep D&D sessions, draw, prep breakfast, and relax (something I’m increasingly bad at).
11:30 PM - I always aim to meditate for 10 minutes around 11:30 and then read until I’m ready to sleep, typically just after midnight. Working out at night gives me a big jolt of energy. This is great because it provides a boost to complete the things that don’t fit anywhere else in the day, but makes sleeping at a reasonable hour tough. Meditation and reading are the cool-down I need to wind down.
Typical - but not always
The above routine is typical and works out in practice 80-90% of the time. Other days are different. Sometimes the nanny calls out sick and my day is thrown askew, typically with way more kid time during the day and a few late nights of working. I go to the barber on a Friday afternoon once a month and spend an hour every other week chatting with a therapist. Every other Friday the night is given over to our long-running D&D campaign. Occasionally during the week, I bail completely on writing and watch a baseball game. Very rarely, I get to sleep before midnight.
I’m incredibly appreciative of the fact that I get to work from home, and that my kids are nearly always under the same roof as me. Rather than taking a coffee break around Boston, I’m much happier to pop upstairs for ten minutes in the day and cause mayhem with the kids or bring one of them downstairs so they can play while I work on lighter projects.
My days and nights are aggressively filled, but it works for me, now, at this tremendously full time of life. When it no longer suits the situation I’ll change things.