Yes, I took the weekend off. My blog was silent. My bad. The past two weeks have been busy for me and, I admit, I needed a break.The truth is, I rarely take a break and this has nothing to do with being a workaholic. I simply enjoy what I do and about the only way to make me stop is to put me in a situation where I'm doing something else I enjoy as much or more. Later today I'll be posting about how I catch my breath. Right now I'm going to take some time to answer some questions which were posed to me at the SF Emetrics Summit.
I think my favorite question was "What do you do with your day?" I heard this in many ways. "What is your typical day like?", "What makes up a 'Joseph' day?", "What, exactly, do you do?".
Well, let's see...at the risk of boring people...
My day starts sometime between 7 and 7:30am. There's two stacks of research journals that I go through. The taller stack contains journals directly related to my work, the shorter stack contains journals that I draw from to get ideas. People who work with me get a kick out of what I read and how much. I don't go completely through either stack and that's why they grow more often than shrink.
I'm usually in my office by 7:30am going through emails. People who know me will chuckle at that one because I'm a very slow emailer. The emails I go through are from people all over the world, most of them doing research in my fields and asking for comments, etc., on their work. I'm also looking for responses to my requests for comments on my work. Anyway, 7:30-9am is email time.
From 9-10:30am I'm out with my dog, usually walking through some country trails somewhere. This is actually when I do most of my thinking about NextStage's research.
Back in the office, 10:30am-12:30pm I'm actively going through our research, correlating it with what other groups have been doing, deciding what needs more data to be acceptable, deciding what is worth publishing, so on and so forth.
Then comes lunch. Ah, perchance to eat...
Afternoon, 1-3pm is when I'm doing my research. This research often makes its way into NextStage tools and sometimes simply goes on the shelf until I find a need for the results.
Between 3-5pm I'm contacting clients and sharing results and best next steps with them based on the results of our research, studies of their particular challenges, etc.
The end of my day is 5-6pm, when I'm writing columns, this blog, my book, whitepapers. Often my writing spills over onto the weekends, which is also when I get to read other people's blogs.
And of course, this all goes out the window when I'm traveling and such.
Hmm. This is the first time in years I've actually mapped out my day. Sprinkled here and there is managing the business, co-ordinating the move to our new offices, the usual distractions of life.
You know what? I work too much!
For some reason (perhaps because I did Budapest to San Francisco and back twice over two weeks) – the SF Emetrics “what do you do?” question, turned into a “how do you do it?”
My answer was RED BULL :-)
Cheers..
Dennis R. Mortensen, COO at IndexTools
My Web Analytics Blog - and my Emetrics SF comments
Posted by: Dennis R. Mortensen | May 14, 2007 9:38 AM | Permalink to Comment