This is a response to the question at The Learning Circuits Blog:
What is your typical day like? How do you do all you do with elearning learning, elearning technology, techempower, work literacy and all the consulting and still remain profitable while having a LIFE? Ok, so that is more than one question, but hopefully you get the drift. What are your thoughts here?
Most of the respondents are independent consultants. My position, as a corporate employee, is slightly different. But I’m fortunate enough to be a corporate employee who works at home and one whose role includes R&D and promoting innovation.
The main thing I have to manage is balancing this part of the role with BAU (‘business as usual’) which can include consultancy for elearning projects, script work, coding or, a lot of the time, designing and building websites. I work across three PCs – my ‘home’ one, a development server for working on, and a locked-down corporate standard issue for getting corporate email.
What I tend to do in a typical day is allow the period 8:30 – 9:30 for reading private email, blogs related to my music and blogs related to elearning. It’s during this time that I’ll blog myself, if I do. I subscribe to a lot of blogs in Google Reader, grouped as elearning, music, ideas, friends and fun. Some days I let the current carry me more to one, other days to others. If I find something I want to spend more time on – usually something from an elearning blog - I switch to Google Calendar and look for half hour slot not too far away to check it out.
No later than 9:30 I boot up the two ‘work’ machines and their separate inboxes (we’re expressly forbidden from amalgamating inboxes or forwarding, so I have to maintain three inboxes, one hidden behind no less than three passwords!). Then it’s into the day which tends to be either development or teleconferences. Being a corpo I feel the ‘duty’ to be available to my colleagues in normal office hours.
At lunchtime I often fit in some exercise, reading, guitar practice or domestic duties, but sometimes it’s just a case of getting a break from the computer seat and returning as quickly as possible.
I rarely allow corporate work to intrude on my evening or weekend (I’m unusual in my team for this and and if any senior management read this I’ll probably be marked down as showing insufficient commitment – tough!) although elearning or software R&D will sometimes take my curiosity. Evenings I’m often back on the same seat in front of the same desk working on music or idly browsing.
As for the rest of the 2.0 world, I visit Facebook and LinkedIn maybe twice a week at most, and Twitter has pretty much disappeared from my radar.
It is interesting that your work habits mirror mine, although we are in different fields.