For our Day in the Life series, we look at the daily work habits, schedules and routines from people in a variety of roles and careers around the world.
Corey Ginnivan, Product Designer & Developer at Appbot
Corey Ginnivan is a Product Designer & Front-end Developer at Appbot, a tool that aggregates app store reviews for all countries on iTunes, Google Play and Amazon stores and more.
I’ve been messing around with routines recently to find out what works better for me. This is roughly what a day looks like for me at the moment:
5am-ish: Wake up to do 15 minutes of stretching and just wake up a bit (I use Sleep Cycle which monitors my sleep and wakes me up during a light sleep, so it’s not as abrupt as a normal alarm).
5:30am: Jump in to “design practice + learning” – basically just reading articles, working on a side project, or writing up some Crash Course tweets. Gotta train that brain.
6:30am: Hit the gym for an hour.
7:30 – 8am: Have a protein shake for brekky, get ready for work, then jump on the bike and ride to work (only about a 5 – 10 min commute). Shower when I get there.
8/8:15am (depends if remote day): I make cold brew coffee at work, so I grab a glass of that and just start figuring out what I want/need to accomplish, get ideas out of my head on to paper.
8:15am – 4:30pm: Working! We’ve got a good thing going at Appbot where we don’t waste too much time with meetings, so most of the workday is actually knuckling down and getting things done.
Majority of my day is spent coding updates to our marketing site, working on new feature concepts, fixing bugs, planning out future updates or iterating on our design system. I take an hour for lunch somewhere in there with the team, or cook something if working from home.
4:30pm: Ride home and shower, then unwind a bit.
5pm – 6pm: More personal design work or learnings.
7pm – 10pm: Free time! Take the time to cook something nice, play games, chill with the housemate, head out for a beer with friends, play team sport (AFL or Netball generally), or just kick up the feet and watch some TV shows/movies.
10pm: Try and go to sleep, sometimes it’s a bit later though depending on what’s happening.
Additional:
- On weekends I try to fit in some more design work because I can get a good run at it, but most of it is just disconnecting and relaxing, or seeing family/friends. I also cook a proper breakfast.
- I catch up on any sleep debt on the weekend too.
Luke Storer, Web Developer at REVIEWS.io
Luke Storer is a web developer at REVIEWS.io, a review collection, moderation and management platform, where he’s working on new features and supporting customers.
Given the current climate surrounding COVID-19 my work days have changed a little bit recently. Initially I was working full time from home, and more recently I’ve been juggling days in the office with days at home.
I start my day at 09.30am and usually have a quick flick through my emails and assigned support tickets before completing my daily report.
It’s a quick rundown of what I covered yesterday and what I intend to work on today and gives our team an insight into what work I’ve completed and am aiming to complete. This has become increasingly essential with us all being distributed outside of the office.
I’ll pick up a lengthier ticket or two for the morning, and begin or continue work on a resolution. It can be anything from a customer having integrated collection services for a third party and needing some assistance in surfacing their reviews via our widgets to a more recent update to Shopify’s API meaning I need to rework some of our queries to better leverage their API. One of the things I really enjoy about the role is the varied nature of the tickets I’m working on.
I’ll grab lunch for about an hour, anytime between 12 and 2 and then pick up with assigned tickets and emails in the afternoon.
I’ll clock off at around 5.30pm but that can vary a little bit if I’m currently working on something I need to get resolved.
Enric Enrich, Senior Software Developer for Apple Platforms at Doist
Enric Enrich is a Senior Software Developer for Apple Platforms at Doist, the company behind Todoist and Twist, and also the creator of world time app Veern.
My day starts depending on what I have planned for that day. If I have a meeting in the morning I set a sound alarm to wake up at the desired hour. Otherwise I avoid setting a sound alarm to let my body wake up along with a light alarm.
After taking a shower and having breakfast I start working from my home office. I use the first 10-15 minutes to go through emails and messages in Twist.
After that I spend most of my time coding along with short breaks (when needed) to stretch my legs and disconnect for a little bit to fresh up my mind. During the day I either do exercise before lunch or go for a walk after my work is done.
Doist is a remote-first company so our team has been working remotely since the beginning. Having such freedom is fantastic to achieve work-life balance, but it’s not as easy as it seems from the outside.
It can take some time to adapt to this lifestyle and to find the right tools and routines to make sure you are focused when working and that you disconnect from work when you finish for the day.
Vladas Koncius, JavaScript Front End Developer at Wix
Vladas Koncius is a JavaScript Front End Developer at Wix. Over his career he has worked on both front and back end programming, SEO, UI and web design, and more.
Every day is different but wherever I am and whatever the situation around is I try to improve my skills in life as a person and professional as much as I can.
I plan my life, my work, my education, finances, health. I have a long term plan, a monthly plan, and a weekly plan that I follow and it helps me get things done. So to achieve the original vision, what is done during the day is often decided before.
An example of a recent workday – get a task (i.e. implement some functionality to a website).. analyze the requirements.. research the possible solution and talk with the team or product people about it if necessary. Eat some cashew nuts and drink milk. Create the solution (write code), rest, continue, test, deploy, repeat.
Rarely are tasks a single day mission.
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