a day in the life (part one)

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Someone asked me what my day looks like: what I do, what tools I use to do it. Today is Thursday, 01 June 2006, and this is my day. Is it representative? Hard to say -- my days are almost never repetitive. Today is a bit more meeting-heavy than usual, but my trips to Redmond usually end up having more meetings than I have when I’m in Mountain View.

I arrived in Redmond yesterday. If it weren’t for the 9am meeting (which I felt guilty scheduling), I would’ve flown up on the first flight this morning instead of staying the previous night. My schedule for the day looks like this:

  • 9am: Present results from a usability study to the Entourage team.
  • 10am: Meet with my manager and my peer in Redmond to discuss what’s coming in the next fiscal year.
  • 11am: Meet with the PowerPoint and core teams to discuss their upcoming usability study.
  • 2pm: Weekly planning meeting, in which we discuss MacBU's future work..
  • 3pm: Weekly program manager meeting, in which all of MacBU’s PMs and a few others get together to learn about something relevant to us. Which reminds me, I’ve been asked to give a presentation about ethnography to this group, so I should actually write that up sometime soon.
  • 6:30pm: Fly back home to California.

The tools that I’ll use the most today are:

  • Entourage – Email, calendar, notes. This is the app that I use the most, and I can’t live without it. If it weren’t for the Project Center, I’d never remember where to go or what to do. I’m not one of those people who can keep their task list in their head.
  • Messenger – Quick conversations with all sorts of people.
  • PowerPoint – Presenting my study results always means that there’s a PowerPoint deck involved. The usability planning meeting will also make use of PowerPoint, since I’ve got some mocked-up screenshots that I need to show the others.

This is what I’m writing before the day has begun. Let’s see how well it holds up.