Day in The Life Of a PM/High School Coach
Two jobs that require lots of time and attention. Here is how I structure my days.
5:00 am:
The alarm goes off, I hit the snooze. I wait for my true alarm to greet me.
5:15 am:
Must not be urgent let's continue this glorious snooze.
5:16 am:
My alarm digs his elbows into my bladder and flops his head across my chest. Mars, my 1.5 yr old Goldendoodle, thinks now is the time we need to wake up.
5:30 am:
After getting my workout clothes on and drinking a glass of water, Mars and I head out for our usual .84-mile walk.
6:00 am:
After our walk, I feed Mars and head out the door again to go to the gym for my morning workout. Mondays are legs, Tuesdays chest, Wednesday arms + cardio, Thursday shoulders and back, and Friday deadlifts.
7:15 am:
I am home from the gym and start making breakfast. Every day is the same. Mushrooms, peppers, onion, and 2 eggs covered with cheese then rolled into a burrito. Accompanying this is a protein shake with frozen strawberries and bananas ( Mars gets some frozen banana every day here too), powdered greens, and honey.
8:15 am:
Now that I am full and showered, I make my k-cup coffee and head down to my basement office to start the day.
9:15 am:
Morning stand-up with the squad. This is where we give a recap of the work accomplished yesterday and see what the plan is for the day.
It's at this point my days could go in many different directions. I start each day the same as routine is very important to ensure I start each day on the right foot. From this point until 3:00 pm I will give an accurate example of a typical day but not an exact reproduction of one.
10:00 am:
Most days in the mornings there is a meeting where different teams will meet to coordinate and give high-level overviews of what each team is working on and if there are any dependencies on other teams. Or I will meet with other PMs to talk about roadmaps and timelines.
11:00 am:
I know I just ate but I try to eat lunch at about 11 each day with my wife, who also works from home but from the upstairs office. After lunch, we take Mars on another .84-mile walk ( takes ~15–20min).
12:00 pm:
Once lunch and the walk are over I head back to work and usually have an hour of heads-down work time. Here I will work on making sure we have our goals for our next sprint set up and ensure they all still build towards our ultimate goals as a squad and as a business unit. I try to find time each week to talk directly with our customers and this happens in the afternoons as well. As we work with hardware as well as software I am using this time to catch up on manufacturing timelines and so that our delivery dates stay on track.
1:30 pm:
Early afternoons are when I have manager or squad sync ups and talk to my direct manager or the department head, or have a squad activity such as planning, refinement, or retros.
2:30 pm:
I start to button up loose ends and finish off conversations from the day as I have to head out to coach just after 3 pm. I use this time to also write in my notebook what tasks I need to finish that night after dinner.
Here is where my day gets back to normal routines. I coach Track and Field (Shotput and Discus) and Football at a local high school so we have practice or workouts most of the year.
3:15 pm:
Head over to the school for practice. This goes until about 6 pm, the last 30 min or so during the season is meeting with other coaches and talking about that week's meets or game. When it's over I head back home for dinner with the wife.
7:00 pm:
With dinner done, and me all cleaned up from running around at practice, I spend 15 min playing with Mars before heading back down to the office. Usually in the evening I catch up on Slack posts and emails and look at our data for the products we have recently rolled out. I ensure we are hitting or trending towards our goals. If we are not, I dive in a bit to try and understand why. Did we make the right assumptions? Are things working how we expect? Is there anything we need to investigate to ensure we can get to the outcomes we set out to achieve? This is a big part of being a PM, are you working on the right things to get the desired outcome. For me, a lot of this work has to come outside of normal hours as I am in a lot of meetings and take off to coach every day for a few hours.
During the football season, this is when I try to get a little film study/opponent scouting done. The day job takes priority and that is what I work on first. Any extra time is spent on coaching.
9:00 pm:
Catch an episode of whatever our current favorite show is with the Wife and Mars before bed.
10:00 pm:
Bedtime, get my mind and body ready for tomorrow
