I often find myself thinking that I work too many hours. And when I’m not actually at work, I am often thinking and worrying about work. In large part it’s my own fault because I’m a naturally anxious person who doesn’t have much of an “off” setting, but part of the blame has got to be placed on the high-pressure environment that exists when you work at a startup that’s growing by leaps and bounds.

A typical day looks like this for me:

5:30 – 6:00am: Wake up. I don’t need to wake up this early but I am naturally awake by this hour, so I get up. I’m one of those weird people that doesn’t need an alarm clock to wake up, obviously.

6:00 – 8:45: Have breakfast/get ready for the day and work on my own projects. I get a surprising amount of work done in the early morning hours of each day! The work varies from knitting on a new design to posting on my various blogs to coding on a side project.

9:00am – 7:00pm (or later): Work. It’s very rare for me to leave the office before 7pm, and quite common to stay way later. If we’re working on a big launch, many of us end up working straight through the weekends doing 10-hour-days every day for a month! It’s exhausting.

7:30pm-11:30pm: This is the part of the day that varies the most. Some of the more frequent options:

  • a date
  • a tech meetup
  • knit with the girls out in Queens
  • go straight home and cook something complicated and then blog about it
  • go straight home to code on a project
  • go straight home to read, and sometimes the reading isn’t about tech. I’m currently reading a book about the psychological sources of chronic back pain. If you’re part of the majority of the population that has back pain (or actually any other chronic pain), you should read this book. It’s only $7 on Kindle! Speaking of which, I love my kindle-for-iPad app.
  • sometimes work people go out and get drunk together (we spend way too much time with each other considering how often we hang out outside of work!). I’m pretty much always in bed by 11:30pm, and sometimes way earlier (I’ve been known to get in bed as early as 9pm if I’m particularly fried from work).

Reading back through this post, I think one thing is abuntantly clear:

###My life is mostly about work right now.

And that’s (mostly) ok for right now. If I ever get married again and have a family, a typical day in my life will look very different than it does right now . . . but there’s no point worrying about that at the moment.

This post was inspired by Sara Chipps’ post on what a day looks like for her as a freelance developer