How I Work

I have had two people ask me in the last few months “how do you get all this done?” or “how long do you work a day?” So I thought I would peel back the curtain a bit and give you an inside look at how I work.

I do this simply as a sharing exercise, and I hope you might get involved and give all of us a view into your day down below in the comments. It would make this post that much more meaningful I think.

So here it goes…

I get up about 6-6:30 and the first thing I do is get coffee going. For the typical day, coffee is going to be big.

While the coffee is brewing I will check the news online. I never watch the local news since I am not a fan of the “if it bleeds, it leads” motto most news directors have.

After checking the news briefly I will check email. With so many sites under management, I want to make sure everything is good to go with the rest of the team and clients as well.

I will schedule any emails I need to address for follow-up since this is only to put out any fires.

Now I move on to either posting for my blog for the day, or I start doing my social media community management for social media clients.

If I am doing a blog post, I am either editing video, writing copy picking images, then uploading it. The entire process takes about a half an hour.

Then I schedule my own social media campaign for the day to promote the post I just created, content I find through RSS that I think you might like to read, as well as some old posts of mine that I think would help you. With over 700 posts on the site, there is no way anyone has seen everything.

By now its around 9, working on the second cup of coffee and now I am working the social circuit responding to twitter mentions, blog comments and Facebook mentions.

This takes until about 10 or so, where I start writing content for some of the online and offline magazines and industry groups I provide content to.

By noon or so I am ready for a quick break since I already have about six hours in. I run to the market of take care of whatever errands I have to get done.

By early afternoon I am back in front of the 27″ Mac and I am in sales mode following up with prospects who have reached out to me to provide information on our services. I have a motto, I follow-up with you until I get either a yes or a no, so if you call me or email me in the future, or have in the past, you will know what I mean.

By now it is 2 or 3 in the afternoon and I am again following up on any twitter mentions or Facebook updates I might have missed and I respond to them as well. This is for both myself and clients social media programs.

I review any current projects we are working on (usually about 10-15 at a time) myself to see how we are progressing. Checking code, checking SEO and always evaluating the content.

I usually speak with Bob our head designer around 3 or 4. This can either be a 5 minute “how’s everything going?” call or a one hour full-blown state of the union call or problem resolution call.

After we wrap that call I will update Basecamp, our project management software with any changes to projects we have made.

I constantly update OnePage CRM (our contact management solution) throughout the day as well as the calendar for the rest of the follow up items that have come up.

I will do some content writing and upload it to Basecamp for Bob to load onto our project sites.

Michele, our writer, is always working on content and is constantly uploading to Basecamp as well, so I will review her work, add some things, take some things away and finalize the content for Bob to load as well.

By now it is 5 or 6 and I will take another break. I figure 12 hours in is a pretty good time to decompress. I will usually eat, chill out, check emails or just do nothing until about 8 or so.

About 8ish I will check emails and respond, schedule action items and follow up items for the next day, and push emails out to whomever they go to and schedule a post for my blog.

Now we are looking at 10pm or so. I will schedule some social media posts for my accounts as well as my clients for the next day or two and I will give one final run past email to make sure everything is good to go.

About 11 or so I will shut it down for the day, a full 15-16 hours since I got up. And oh, by the way…that’s everyday. I don’t understand people who say “thank God it’s Friday”. I don’t know why a Friday is any different from a Saturday or a Tuesday.

If you are thinking there is no work/life balance here, you are correct! But I am sure many of you keep these kinds of hours yourselves, so you understand.

So that’s a typical day for me. How about you? You don’t have to get as detailed as I did, but let us know, we all like to pick up tips that might help get through our days a bit better.

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