"A day in the life" of a Data Geek
| For one reason or another, I decided to keep track of my day yesterday on the little spiral bound notebook I carry in my pocket (yes, I'm a Geek and yes, that is my chicken scratch over to your right). This particular "Manic Monday" is a pretty standard Monday for me and is by far my craziest day of the week. I spend lots of time at meetings and driving to client meetings. I won't be able to divulge too many details of our client meetings, suffice to say that they are designed to get the team on my side (the contractor) on the same wavelength as the team at the client's side. We discuss what we accomplished the previous week, what we need to do in the coming weeks, any "hot" items (items which will burn you if you don't address right away) and future projects we all know we need to get to at one point or another. Here's a play by play of my day, are your days as crazy at this? Again, this is my "difficult day" and the week gets progressively "less busy" as each day passes, no wonder why I'm happy as a clam on Fridays.... |  |
| Timestamp (US - EDT) | Activity |
|---|---|
| 5:50 AM | alarm clock starts singing, telling me it's time to get up and get going |
| 6:15 AM | Heading out of the house, enroute to work I have to stop for gas (and Altoids), money at the ATM and breakfast |
| 6:50 AM | Arrival at work |
| 6:55 AM - 8:20 AM | "Morning Triage" Inbox has 65 emails: 46 emails are "system emails" which I scan very quickly 19 require heavy "reading" and lead to 5 new tasks to "manage" 0 Voice Mails - YES! |
| 8:30 AM | Meeting #1 - onsite at our office, an internal "prep" meeting to discuss our large client contract, which we will be visiting during the afternoon (like we do each week). |
| 8:35 AM | Meeting starts |
| 9:30 AM | Post Meeting - Client Managers meet without staff |
| 9:45 AM | Back to desk, 12 emails in Inbox, 0 Voice Mails (YES!), Snail Mail? 3 items in my "physical inbox" (on my seat), a brochure for some random vendor, a "DataFlux Ideas Insider" card (cool, not sure what it means though) and a personal note from my #1 reporting person who works remotely from us from "Stong Island". |
| 10:00 - 10:30 AM | Review a new database schema built by a software engineer, consists of 6 tables, generate Oracle friendly DDL and deploy to our development lab, generate ERD, good stuff! |
| 10:30 AM | Back to emails and misc tasks |
| 11:00 AM | Seems like the connections to our DB are timing out after an hour or so, build a script which loops a million times and logs a record in a table every twenty minutes, kick it off and hope it fails? Good stuff... |
| 11:15 AM | Prepare for afternoon at client's location, gather notes, print a few ERD's, etc... |
| 11:30 AM | Off to Client's site |
| 12:45 PM | Arrive at Client's site, LUNCH! (they have a nice little cafe in their building, sweet)... |
| 1:30 PM | Meetings begin |
| 3:00 PM | ...Still in meetings... |
| 3:30 PM | ......more meetings...... |
| 4:40 PM | Heading home, YES! |
| 5:10 PM | Traffic, UG... |
| 6:10 PM | I'm home, finally... |
| 8:10 PM | The kids are in bed, sit on the couch with the laptop... 40 emails in Inbox, 5 or 6 action items to follow up on... |
| 8:45 PM | Sign off for the night, TV time... |
Well, not very glamourous but it is what it is. Our afternoon marathon meetings were productive and I believe we did a good job highlighting the efforts of the team. The client seems happy, the program manager seems happy, overall a good day.
Until next time...Rich
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