How does your day/milestone flow?

Day

Morning

My partner is generally off to work before/around the kids wake up so I try to wake at 6am to walk the dog, the kids wake up about 7am. Once I'm back from the walk, make breakfast for the kids, drop them off at school (or summer camp). I'm generally back home ~9am.

If I don't have a super busy day I try to exercise some; when that happens I start work around 9:45am. If I have early meetings/very busy day I'll start work at 9am (that has been more the case lately). I really want to make more time for physical activity, I've been procrastinating.

Once at my desk I generally:

Check slack and 1)respond to messages addressed to me, 2) check #g_configure, #g_serverless, partner channels, and #product for any relevant content.
Check email and respond to anything sent by a human directly to me (quick scan, generally ignore 100 or so messages already there).
Check to do's to see if there's anything time-sensitive needed (generally from the team). I tend to ignore about 50 or todo's and try to catch up closer to the end of the week.
Check calendar, prepare for morning meetings. Schedule necessary meetings based on prior notes.
Work on configure items for ~1 hr (pending issues, new issues, customer follow-ups, etc).
I try to attend most group conversations to stay up to date on important company-wide things.
I may attend the company call but since my calendar doesn't show me busy at that time, very often I will have an overlapping meeting.

Lunch

I try to precook all my meals on Sunday for the entire week (lunches and dinners) so I generally heat something up and take about 30min to eat and disconnect.

Afternoon

Meetings (lots of meetings)
Lately, lots of interviews
Address any todo's I want to get done before the day is over. These vary from responding to issues, writing docs, etc. I generally follow my todo list and make sure anything time-sensitive is done.

Evening

On Tuesdays I take my oldest (Luciano) to swimming practice and stop around 4pm. Other days I work until I have to do school pick-ups, generally around 5pm.
Prepare dinner for everyone
Bath and bed time for the kiddos
Relax with my partner for a bit, sometimes check slack to see if there's anything urgent as by this time my notifications are generally off.

Milestone

I generally follow https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/#product-process. In fact, I added the date list shortly after joining and have a paper copy behind my monitor. Now that we've switched to CD, this process may change.

Disclaimer: I just realized that I had never planned in much detail how my day would go, but looking back I see some pattern

Day

Morning

Ideally, I wake up at 7:30, I have a short breakfast, go to the gym (3 days/week) , then start working at 10AM. When I feel like I'm late at my todos, I tend to skip gym and start working earlier.

1-1 meetings happen here.

Then I start by reading slack DMs, g_configure and also my GitLab todos. Then I go through my emails and read what's new. I don't necessarily address everything, but rather archive what I think it does not need my attention, or leave it in the inbox as "read" if I need to comeback to it later. All of this helps me to get a feel on what I must accomplish on that day and what can I post on Geekbot.

I usually feel compelled to do the smaller tasks first. So for the rest of the morning I'm most likely answering those comms, doing smaller tasks that show up eventually and I also try to do reviews in mornings.

Lunch

I go to lunch around 1 PM and I spend about 1h:30min before I comeback to work. Sometimes I cook (30min), eat (30min) then chill-out (30min). Sometimes I go out for lunch (1h) and chill-out (30min).

Afternoon

Team/Grooming Meetings are happening here.

I start working in whatever more challenging task I have on my plate. Usually an MR that needs more work or a thorough research on some topic that will be important for some specific task.

I guess after about 3 hours, my body asks me to stop and relax a little bit. So I take sometime to go to the balcony, have a snack and do nothing. Sometimes I play a FIFA match on my Nintendo Switch.

Evenings

Sometimes I change focus and do something more relaxed like watching a recording or cleaning inbox, but if what I was doing needs urgency and it's unfinished, then I comeback to it. I've been finishing my workdays around 20:30 sometimes 21:30. After that I prepare dinner with my wife and we spend some quality time together.

Disclaimer 2: Specially with summertime arriving, I'm not super satisfied with my current day. I'd like to manage to finish my day earlier and perhaps still have time to do some outside activities afterwards. So I'll try to re-arrange the current agenda. Curious to try to get some tips from other people. :)

Milestone

I believe I have room for improvement here. I try to tackle one or two stories at a time, but I'm usually only watching for these stories deadline. I think I have missed checking the impact of these stories on other stories. This'd be important so I could prioritize them better.

One concern is that, before CD, the 7h was a very well defined date do have in mind. Last release, which was the first CD, was very confusing for me. The cut date was a bit uncertain across the communications. So I still don't know exactly what to expect for the next release.

My flow is still pretty unstructured.

When I don't know what to work on, I like reading the merge requests being discussed in #g_configure.

Day

Morning

I get out of bed any time between 7:30 and 10:00 depending on how I feel. I start my day with a coffee and catching up on life outside of work (general news, personal email, read a few webtoons I follow etc), then typically grab another coffee and catch up on work (emails, slack, early meetings, watch meeting recordings).

I then pick roughly what to work on and give my standup update.

Side note: I'm really into the idea of getting up a bit earlier and starting my day with exercise, but I've had limited luck as I just really like sleeping in.

Lunch

I have lunch around noon (12-13-ish). When it's just me, I usually just make something quick and get back to work. When my SO is home (3 days a week), we tend to eat something a bit nicer and watch an episode of something.

Afternoon

Catch up again on emails and messages and then keep working. Mostly free of meetings so far. Sometimes go to the gym to break up the day. Drink more coffee. I drink a lot of coffee

Evenings

If I still have something I feel like I should finish that day, I will do that after dinner. Otherwise, I try not to do any work and you will mostly find me at the gym or at home watching TV.

Milestone

I haven't really started thinking much about milestones. Looking forward to reading what the others have to say here.

Aside: It's difficult for me to describe my day as I tend to be the most effective at being reactive. I personally find most job satisfaction by answering questions or doing anything that helps someone else. As a consequence I'm always hoping to find an opportunity to help someone on Slack OR on an issue in GitLab. I don't plan out work for the next day often unless I had something really important that for some reason I just couldn't get to during this day. Very few things I work on take more than a couple of hours.

Day

Morning

If slept well:

Yes: wake up, go to the gym/run, eat breakfast with my wife, usually at my desk working before 8:30am but as early as 7am if I have a meeting. 7am meeting is pretty common these days.
No: wake up eat breakfast, go straight to my desk

The morning is usually the worst time for me to have a handle on what I am going to accomplish for the day because:

I'm usually straight into a meeting to accomodate US timezones
I usually have an inbox full of un-triaged work from overnight

I also commonly have interviews in the morning.

If I get only a brief moment to check email I will search for greenhouse to find the most time sensitive work which is related to hiring.

In an ideal morning I've cleared my inbox before lunch. Some mornings I can barely clear my slack notifications in between meetings. I will always prioritise Slack notifications over everything else.

Lunch

I often end up exercising before lunch because I might not have had time in the morning if I needed sleep. I do also regularly take quite long lunches because I feel this compensates for often working until 7pm (from 7am). So some days I will go for a run, pick up groceries, do other errands around lunch time and if I have no errands I'll sometimes watch some TV while eating lunch.

Afternoon

This is usually the time when I'll have the best understanding about how to execute on the most important tasks of the day. I'm most pro-active during this time and try to write code often enough to remain competent. I also sometimes use this time to review code. Sometimes I'm still catching up on email but if not I'll probably have a few priorities that will either relate to promises I've made to individuals on the team, my manager or random tasks that get assigned to managers.

Evening

I am usually finished around 7pm due to meetings. Ideally I'll be able to eat dinner with Jess and we'll almost always watch some TV before sleep. Watching TV is how I wind down. Some nights I try making new cocktails for Jess.

Milestone

None of my primary responsibilities in management are very focused on the release milestones. I put a fairly low level of focus on milestones from a planning perspective and I probably rely on others to schedule anything that needs to be done around the milestones (eg. planning meeting). The only responsibility I think I do regularly for the milestone is updating the company retro doc and ideally trying to pull action items out of it.

I would love to work in a way that completely ignores milestones. For some reason I do often let the stress get to me and still find myself hoping to cram things in at the last minute. I think it's theoretically possible to change our perception of this. I have a suspicion that we need to change our expectations around code review to change this culture. I see it's common where code review is very "curious" early on in the release and very "rushed" at the end of the release. It would be nice to find a balance throughout the release.

Day

Morning

My alarm goes off at 06:20 and I'll generally get up at 06:30. Get ready and wake up my daughter at 07:00 to get her ready for school and make her breakfast. Leave at 07:30 to drop my daughter off at school.

I'm back at around 07:45, I make breakfast and then read news while I have breakfast.

I'm at my desk by around 08:30:

I generally open up slack at around 08:30 and check DMs, g_configure, frontend, company-announcements and active threads that I participate in.
I triage my emails and todo's at around 08:50 and work through them (depending on the amount).
I normally have a good idea of what I'll accomplish for the day after working through email and todo's, so I'll start working on whatever is most important on my list.

Lunch

I leave at 13:30 pick up my daughter from school, we're usually back at about 13:45 (sometimes I'll take a chilled drive or walk at the beach with her first).
At 14:00 I prepare lunch for my daughter and me, and she usually takes a nap from around 14:30.
I start work again at 14:30.

Afternoon

I'm at my most productive during this time, so I usually put my headphones on with music that helps me focus and block out any outside noise. Carry on work on issues that are assigned to me, prep for meetings if I have any and try to accomplish my goals for the day.

Evenings

I'll work until 17:30 and start prepping food for the family unless my wife hasn't done so already.

At around 18:30 if we feel like it, we go watch the sunset and relax after which we have dinner together.

At 20:00 is story time for my daughter and we put her to bed by 20:30. Then I chill and do whatever I feel like (usually chill with my wife, read/watch the news, watch a movie, have a beer/wine).

Milestone

My process will probably change now that we switched to CD, but this is my current workflow:

During the first day, I get a decent idea of the work that is assigned to me. Usually, this entails reading through issue descriptions and comments until I feel comfortable.
I then triage my issues, I usually take on the low hanging fruit (smaller issues) first to avoid distractions when I start work on the bigger issues.
I generally work on up to two issues at a time depending on the size, limiting this helps me stay focused. I normally take on more issues as I assign MR's over to reviewers, but the MRs in review usually takes priority over newly started work when I get feedback.
I try to have the bulk of my work done during the first two weeks of development, and try to have my MRs assigned to reviewers by week three.
By week four I ideally have all of my small MR's merged and big MR's assigned to maintainers.

Day

Morning

I wake up most mornings between 7:00 AM and 8:00 AM. My morning routine consists of:

10 minutes mindful meditation.
Checking on/Watering my plants.
Preparing/Having breakfast and coffee.
Checking newspapers and other, less useful updates on the Internet. I try to cap this time to 15 minutes at most.

I start working between 8:30 AM and 9:00 AM. I check Slack and email to build my TODO list. I try to skim instead of reading everything in detail, and if something catches my attention, I add it to my TODO list.

I try to organize my day’s TODO list in the following way:

Unblock people: Review MRs, reply to questions I’ve been mentioned in, help with problems posted in #frontend if I can, etc.
Unblock my MRs: By addressing code review feedback.
Tasks I could not finish from the day before.
Work I scheduled before that requires less immediacy.

Following this order is still a work in progress for me, but I’m getting better at it.

After organizing the day, I usually have 1-1.5 hours of focused work. Most days, I have a meeting that occurs between 10:00 AM and 11:00 AM EST and last around 30 minutes too. After 2 hours of work, I take a 20 minutes coffee break in which I have a snack and play guitar, or a videogame to disconnect for a bit. Afterward, I work for another hour before lunch.

Lunch

I take 2 hours for lunch. My SO comes home every day to have lunch. We eat lunch, watch a 30-minutes tv-show, nap for 20 minutes, and finally share a coffee before going back to work.

Afternoon

I start working again at ~2:15 PM. I check Slack, and email to see what requires attention, and update my TODO list. I do another 3 hours of work with a 20-25 minutes coffee break in-between. On the best case, I can finish my day at 4:45 PM, go to the gym and buy groceries for dinner. If I feel behind, I work for 1 hour more and push back the gym to 5:45 PM.

Evenings

I try to be deliberate about going out one or two nights per week and hang out with friends, try out a restaurant, watch a movie, or a play. Other days, we just watch a TV-show, and after that, I’m reading a book or just reading stuff on the Internet.

Milestone

My manager assigns my deliverables for the current milestone. I’m also starting to develop an insight into what is needed in my stage and the front-end department.
I spend two days assessing them: looking for opportunities to break them down into smaller pieces, finding out who I should collaborate with, discovering blockers, and starting conversations to unblock the deliverables early in the process.
Finally, I pick up the easiest deliverables first and work in that order.

Day

My day generally consists of reviews, issues assigned to me, and then other tasks such as QA and interviews.

Morning

Mornings start around 7.30AM (or 8AM if I had a later night). After breakfast and sending kids to school, I'm back around 9AM. Sometimes I make it by 9AM for meetings, sometimes school conversations, etc means I'm delayed making it back.

I mostly float on emails / TODOS. I'm making the mistake currently of having to read each GitLab.com notification twice, one in email and once in TODOs which I need to rectify - probably should archive all GitLab.com notification emails

My first priority is unblocking others, then working on my current MR.

Afternoon

Lunch is usually left-overs from dinner or a yummy sandwich. If I feel I need fresh air, I take a walk to the local bakery :)

Continue working until it's time to pick up kids from school at 3PM. If the day looks great in summer, we spend the next hour outside.

Evening

After dinner and bedtime, I restart work from 8PM to around 10.30PM. This is usually my most productive time. I can happily spend this time investigating deep problems.

Friday evening is different - no work - it's movie night

Milestone

I now generally pick the top-most issue from the board and spawn multiple MRs from it. Normally this happens near the start of the milestone.

If that issue gets done, I move on to the next one. Simple.

I'm also subscribed to ~Configure and 'master::broken' issues so sometimes I might jump in and help if I see that issue is critical towards this month's release.

Day

Morning

I usually get out of bed sometime between 6:00 and 7:00, closer to 6:00 on Tuesdays (our weekly meeting is at 7:00 in my timezone). The first thing I do is make coffee, and then I'll be online somewhere between 7:00 - 7:30 to catch up on whatever has happened overnight. This usually just means going through my inbox and checking Slack mentions, but could occasionally involve watching a meeting recording. After this I'll know enough to post my standup update, which serves as my todo list for the day.

Some days I go to a co-working space in the city (roughly two days a week, and only if the weather is nice). Getting there takes about an hour, I leave around 9:00 to skip the morning rush on the train.

Code reviews come first, followed by any smaller things I can get out of the way quickly (such as responding to discussions I've been tagged in, or code review suggestions on my own merge requests). Once I'm done with these I'll move on to my current deliverable.

Lunch

Lunch is sometime between 1:00 and 2:00pm. If I'm in the city I like to find new places I haven't been to before.

Afternoon

Keep working on current deliverable. Occasionally I have meetings around this time too.

I usually finish work at around 4:00pm or 5:30pm, depending on whether I travelled to the city or not.

Evening

Sadly in the Winter it is dark quite early (~5:00pm), so I'm usually stuck inside. I'm looking forward to the Summer months where there is enough time after work to go outside.

Milestone

I try not to let release milestones influence my routine too much, whenever I complete an issue I will just pick up another. When assigning myself an issue from our board I'll either pick the top unassigned one, or the one that makes the most sense for me to pick up as it follows on from something I've worked on previously. Sometimes if I am blocked on an issue I will pick another to work on in parallel, but I try not to have too many (>2) assigned to me at any one time.

Day

Morning

My alarm would go off at 8:30am, but generally the sound of my kids in the hallway will wake me up before it has a chance to go off. I usually help my wife get the kids dressed and bring them downstairs for breakfast before preparing something for myself and then eating by my desk. I'm usually by my desk around 9:00am, but it can vary day to day.

Often I'll check Slack notifications on my phone before I get out of bed. Generally I check to see if anybody has DM'd me something important that's worth responding to urgently before dealing with the kids, but otherwise I'll wait until I'm at my desk to respond.

I'll usually work on clearing out my email inbox, triaging a todo list for the day, and catching up on Slack until the company call starts at 10:30am my time. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have earlier blocks of meetings so this triage process sometimes gets deferred until after or during the team call.

After this I will start working on my todos, usually with the following prioritization:

Maintainer reviews and other issues that are blocking progress for my colleagues
Requests for feedback that is blocking progress for others (I get pinged a lot for FE architectural decisions and frontend build/test tooling issues since I have a lot of experience in this area)
Work on my own deliverables
Work on other assigned issues

Some days I will spend entirely on reviews. I'm working on time-boxing this better going forward so I can spend more focused time on deliverables for the configure team and issue assignments from the webpack working group I am now a part of.

Lunch

I will often have lunch with my family around noon. My wife stays at home with the kids and they are not school-age yet, so they're all still at home at this point.
Sometimes I will go out to eat someplace nearby and then transition to work at a coffee shop if I need a change of scenery.
If I got off to a particularly late start or I have something important to do, sometimes I'll eat at my desk while I continue to work.

Afternoon

This is usually when I'm most productive. I start going through my todo list one by one and I try to mute notifications to avoid context switching.

Evenings

I get off of work sometime between 5pm and 6pm, then I help my wife with dinner (generally one of us watches the kids while the other cooks), and then we put the kids to bed (we trade off every other day between watching the baby and reading books to our two older kids).

They're usually asleep (or in bed being quiet) around 9pm.

After that my wife and I will hang out (usually with the baby who just sleeps whenever he feels like it) and watch some TV or chat about our day. She'll go to bed around 11pm and I'll have an hour of free time to myself before heading to bed.

Sometimes I'll put in a little more work at this point if I didn't feel I got enough time in during the work day or if there's something important/urgent to work on, but otherwise I'll relax, play a video game, exercise, or watch a TV show.

Milestone

I am still adapting a little bit now that we've switched to CD, but generally I will have a good idea of my assignments for the next milestone before that milestone starts. Often in the configure team there isn't a ton of frontend-specific work to do, so I will also take on issues with gitlab-ui, backstage stuff, build/tooling changes, or frontend dependency updates. I usually speak to my manager to get a sense of priorities about them.

However, as noted before a large chunk of my time is spent in my role as a maintainer, not only reviewing code but reading corresponding issues, adjusting my dev environment to test branches, etc.

Day

Morning

I typically wake up around 6:30-7:30 am, depending on when my first meeting starts. I often check Slack first thing to wipe notifications and unreads. I'm usually at my desk a half hour after waking up.

It is common for the first couple of hours to be filled with meetings. I generally try to read through email between calls and respond to quick pings. After calls, I look for any issues or MRs that may be blocked by me and prioritize those.

After resolving any blocking issues, I spend a little time whittling down my email todos more. This includes answering questions from other UXers and providing clarity on Pajamas efforts. I feel satisfied when I am helping others so I feel productive in the mornings.

By this time of day, I usually know what is most important for me to focus on from my own deliverables. This could be:

Configure issues
Serverless issues
Pajamas issues
UX OKR efforts
Misc (meetings, interviews, etc.)

Afternoon

Tuesdays and Thursdays I workout during lunch. Sometimes I skip these if I am feeling overwhelmed but generally this is a sign that I need a break so I try not to do that. On those days, I'll eat lunch at my desk after I get back. Other days I make an effort to get away from my desk during lunch. Usually I eat at home because we almost always have leftovers from dinner the night before, but sometimes I will go out to eat.

After lunch I continue to work on whatever it is I found to be highest priority for that day. Around 3pm is when I start to feel less productive and tired from the day.

Evening

I take a series of aerial classes throughout the week. The schedule can change every few weeks but these provide a separation between work and home, which is great. Currently, I have classes right after work on Mondays and Wednesdays. I also have an additional class Tuesday evening so I usually work late up until that class to make up for the time I took during lunch. Sometimes I have lessons on Fridays during the day, as well.

After classes, I make dinner with my partner and typically just hang out at home, watch something to unwind, or go grab a drink somewhere.

Milestone

Milestones semi-matter in my workflow. I use them to balance which effort I should focus on. I don't have a flat list of issues to work down, so milestones do give some sort of priority order among conflicting teams/deliverables.

Day

Morning

I wake up around 07:00, depending on when my children wake up. I shower, get dressed and help my wife get the girls ready for their school time (they do homeschooling). Weather permitting (it's currently winter here) I then take my dogs for a walk from 08:00 and usually get back around 08:45. I'll then have some breakfast and a cup of coffee.

I start my workday at 09:00 with an hour or so of reading through emails, checking Slack and identifying a TODO list for the day (I live my life one TODO list item at a time).

I tend to try and get the more menial tasks out of the way first thing in the morning to get a few tasks off of my TODO list.

Lunch

I break for lunch around 12:30 and try and use the time to connect with my wife and girls. It usually ends with me praising the girls for at least trying to eat something new (they love getting fist bumps and high fives ).

Afternoon

Early afternoons are usually free of meetings and so I use this as my 'focus' time for any tasks requiring deeper thinking.

From 3pm to 6pm is my meeting hot zone as it overlaps with early morning in the Americas. (I try and not do any meetings on a Friday if I can help it)

Evenings

From around 6pm to 8pm its family time. I'll either make dinner or take care of bathing the girls.

I try not to work in the evenings but don't mind a coffee chat or non-work/light-work related call after 20:30 as my girls are in bed by then.

I'm usually in bed by 11pm to try and get at least 7-8hrs of sleep.

Milestone

My day-to-day activities aren't really influenced by milestones.

mentioned in issue #20 (closed)

mentioned in issue gitlab-org/distribution/team-tasks#907 (closed)

closed

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