A Day in the Life
Efficiency and time management are lost concepts in this atypical look at a typical day.
6:00am. One of the more controversial decisions in our household: Do we get a separate business line for our home offices or have one phone number for all incoming calls and multiple lines for outgoing calls? We chose the latter and for the most part, it’s been a brilliant setup. On a nice spring day, I can take business calls in the backyard. Everyone has the same number for us—Corel’s new president Derek Burney, as well as our baby-sitters.
What makes the strategy work is that we normally turn off the ring on our phone upstairs. We forgot this morning, and so our day began a bit earlier than usual.
“Hello?” I didn’t even try to do the business thing.
“Yes, I need help with CorelDRAW 10.0. It keeps crashing when I try to print."
“You need to call Corel Corp. for that."
“Oh, I thought I did."
“No, this is the CorelWORLD User Conference. Call 800-77-COREL.”
You neither want nor need the complete details, but let’s just say that if you take this conversation and multiply it by about 15, you have one component of our business day: taking calls from people who think they are calling Corel.
7:15am. I am normally successful in my attempts to take a shower, having had a bit of experience in this department, but my 7:45 conference call was moved up 30 minutes and the e-mail message notifying me of the change was waiting patiently in my mail queue. Those East Coasters—they think everybody’s day starts at 8am ET. Thanks to a cordless phone, I take the call on the way to the shower. I mean this literally, as in about 10 steps from the shower. Were this a video conference, the question that you all have been asking for years would have been answered: Boxers or briefs?
8:30am. Work begins on our next brochure. I have open at once CorelDRAW, PHOTO-PAINT, Word, and Internet Explorer, where various pieces of the brochure are in mid-assembly. Oh, I also have my mail program open, which dings to tell me about new messages…
…request to be placed on our mailing list…anonymous note to tell us that there is a typo on one of our Web pages…direct e-mail marketing works!!...conference call pushed up 30 minutes, thank you very much…tennis on Thursday…increase length and duration of—whoops, delete...question about DRAW 10’s scripting tool…patch to Internet Explorer available at Microsoft site…an off-color joke from my mother.
I have been dutifully following my New Year’s resolution to take care of small details as they come up instead of letting them pile up into an unimaginably miserable collection of tasks. Therefore, I take ten minutes out to update our mailing list, fix the typo, download the Explorer patch, and thank my mother for her contribution to the fabric of my daily life.
I install the Explorer update, but as it concludes, it asks me to restart Windows. This means, of course, that all of my open files must be closed and their applications shut down. The 10-minute break becomes 20 by the time that I return all applications to their earlier positions. I get in exactly seven minutes of quality time before it’s time to walk Erica to school.
9:20am. More e-mail. That clickable banner I created for someone-out-there.com needs to be 450 pixels wide instead of 500. I’m tempted to just scale it down, but I know that the fidelity of the image might go to hell, and besides it is an animated GIF file, requiring more hand-holding. It takes 30 minutes, and I’m already close to chucking my New Year’s resolution.
I get 10 more minutes of creation time before a 10:00am meeting with our contractor, electrician, and cabinet-maker. Oh, I forgot to tell you, we’re remodeling a room in our house. That means that for the next two months, there will be men and women traipsing through our home offices, banging, clanking, and making messes. For those two months, I won’t be able to work at the unusually high rate of efficiency that distinguishes my normal work process, as described so clearly to you here.
11:45am. Meeting over—time for lunch. Normally, lunch is defined as whatever we didn’t finish from the previous night’s dinner, the Living section of the paper, and 10 minutes. But today, Becky and I need to figure out who has to buy which appliances, when, where, and how. So we go out.
1:00pm. I return to the CorelDRAW project. I’ve been up since 6:00am, and have accumulated a total of 38 minutes of time spent on the brochure. Not bad…I’ve done worse.
1:07pm. I open the Symbols roll-up and notice that several of the symbol fonts are missing. That reminds me that I need to fix the typeface directory assignments since the day last week that I installed that new font manager. And that reminds me that I need to call the company and ask them for that update to the program. And that reminds me that I promised to visit the company’s Web site and provide feedback on the new design. And that reminds me that I promised another client to create a few backgrounds to use on a new site. And that reminds me that I forgot to invoice a client for last month. And that reminds me that my client database really needs to be updated. And hey, isn’t there a new version of my database program that I should have received by now? And speaking of new versions, I’d better call Corel and find out if or when we’ll see a version 8.5 of VENTURA Publisher. VENTURA…oh my goodness, I promised VUEPoint Magazine an article about VENTURA, and I think it was due last Friday!
2:30pm. Having taken care of those loose ends, I return to the Symbols roll-up. I forgot why I went there in the first place, but at least I have returned to it.
2:35pm. The phone rings. It’s my sister Jan, who is about to purchase a new car and wants me to help with the negotiation. And because my cable modem is faster than her dial-up, she wants me to download a bunch of research from the Web. While I’m there, I visit some discussion groups to hear what recent buyers are saying, and cross-check invoice prices and rebates from two consumer-oriented sites.
4:30pm. Okay, ready to get back to work...
4:35pm. The phone rings and Jody is on a call on Line 2. “Good Afternoon, this is Rick.”
“Wow,” comes the reply. “You answer your own phone!”
You have no idea how many times I’ve come close to saying it, but I haven’t yet. One of these days…“Yes, my parents taught me well—you use your non-dominant hand, clasping the thin part, and hoisting it slowly to the ear of your choice.” Once again, I resist, choosing instead the more staid route of “How can I help you?”
“Yes, I’m interested in getting some information about CorelWORLD.”
These are the kinds of calls for which I drop everything. “You’ve called the right place, sir—what questions can I answer for you?” That query proves to be a big mistake.
“Well, it sounds interesting, and I’ve always liked the program. Except when it doesn’t show me the colors that I ask for. Say, can you tell me why when I ask for blue I get violet? It only happens with certain drawings and I’ll be darned if I can figure it out. I have some printouts; could I fax them to you? Better yet, I can send you the files. What’s your e-mail address? And can I also ask you why the Print dialog doesn’t remember its settings? And how come whenever I try to select a node…”
5:30pm. Erica and Jamie return home from school, and in the time it takes for the front door to close, I transform from Rick Altman to Dad. Hugs and kisses are usually on the menu, followed by requests to do this puzzle, play that game, or just wrestle on the bed. If I’m on the phone with some blowhard salesperson, it’s the perfect excuse; if I’m in the middle of a javaScript project and every ounce of brainpower is focusing on which semicolon is in the wrong place, it can be very jarring. I really don’t know the concept of down-time—I like being efficient with my time and I love the fact that my commute doesn’t exist, but sometimes I long for some transition time…maybe being stuck in 10 minutes of traffic might not be so bad.
8:30pm. “Good night, sweetheart.”
“"But Daddy, I’m scared of the dinosaurs.”
“Dinosaurs don’t live on Earth anymore.”
“I know, but I’m still scared. Will you sleep with me? Will you stay here until I fall asleep? Will you make sure that no dinosaurs come into my room?”
9:00pm. Relieved of dinosaur duty, I return to my brochure. Better make one last check of e-mail, just in case. Only one message, answering my query about a new mailing list service. I’ll pay it a quick visit.
11:35pm. Ready to return to that brochure.
Wait, isn’t this the night that Dennis Rodman is on with Jay Leno…?