A colleague asked me yesterday what routines and practices I’ve been using to manage our new normal of working onsite every day. I typed up this response, and decided it was worth turning into a blog post so I could share it more broadly in case others were interested.

I’ve had all of three days to figure out this new routine, so it’s ill-defined in its current iteration. I’m sure it will get crisper over time, but here’s what I have been doing the past few days.

Before work

  • Prep everything the night before work. Meal, clothes, protein shake, etc. If I have to do it in the morning, it will be 10x worse.
  • Try to engage with a devotional each morning. For me, the value is reading something short but consequential, that helps me to see life is bigger than my work. And I like to engage with it by journaling about it, so that I’m actually spending time with it and allowing it to reframe my mind.

Starting work

  • I use all of my willpower to not open my email first thing.
  • I look at my calendar and my todo list. I make new todos if I will need to prep for any of today’s meeting.
  • I group my to-dos into either “in-progress” (should only be 1, maybe 2), “next up”, or “backlog”. When I do this, I try to be realistic about what I can actually accomplish today. Preferably, everything in “Next Up” can easily be done in a day, because it feels better to pull in more stuff from the backlog, rather than carrying over a bunch of todos to tomorrow.
A board view of todos

During work

  • I have a single text file called “Daily Log.md” on my computer that I open up every day as my scratch pad. Each day gets an entry, and then anything can go in there. I usually just log what I am doing as I do it. Sometimes I will log something I learned, sometimes I take meeting notes in there. When I am not sure where something should go, I put it in this text file so I can triage it to where it belongs later.
A sample of the daily log text file.
  • I have another text file called “Simmering.md”. I use this as a record of all the things that aren’t necessarily to-dos (they may be too big, or too undefined, or something else), but that I want to keep track of. A lot of these are “side quests” that I am working on, or want to work on at some point. Examples are: “improve user guide process”, “april travel request”, “coordinate collaboration with GRC SMA”.
A sample of the simmering text file.

Ending work

  • I want to get better at this one.
  • Right now I just check over my to-do list about 30 minutes before I end my day, to make sure I haven’t forgotten something critical that was due today.
  • I’ll glance at tomorrow’s meetings so I know what’s coming.
  • I will triage anything from my “Daily Log.md” that shouldn’t live there long-term.
  • I look back over meetings from today, and decide if there are any last-minute notes/thoughts I need to capture or share, before they are lost to the ether of my ever-forgetful mind.

After work

  • I do my best to leave work at work and be fully present for my family.
  • I use my commute home to decompress, which usually means listening to something not work related.
  • I’ll also start to transition to thinking about what needs done at home, or whether I need to do something restful and life-giving this evening.