My week in review: week #1

Every week, people ask me what exactly I do and how I balance my time. As such, I've decided to keep track of my work related activities and to record the time that I spent on them. The next four weeks, I'll try to post a weekly summary of my work week (e.g. Monday - Friday).

Activity	Organization	Hours	Comments
Business development	Acquia	2	Meetings with (potential) Acquia partners
E-mail	Acquia	4
Human resources	Acquia	1.5	Career guiding, interviewing potential hires
Management meetings	Acquia	5	Strategic planning/brainstorming/review meetings with sales, marketing, engineering, etc
Product / engineering management	Acquia	4.5	Roadmap planning for Drupal Gardens, Acquia Cloud, Acquia Network and Drupal Commons
Research	Acquia	2
Sales meetings	Acquia	2	Meetings with (potential) Acquia customers
Transportation	Acquia	6.5	Driving to work and driving to meetings
Investor relations	Acquia	0.5	Communicating with investors
Writing code	Acquia	0
Attending conferences	Drupal	6	Gave one keynote at Harvard Club and one presentation at the IBM Innovation Center for IEEE/ACM
Blogging	Drupal	2	Processed my DrupalCon pictures and wrote 3 short blog posts
Drupal 8 initiatives	Drupal	3.5	Talked to potential initiative owners and read up on proposals
Drupal Association	Drupal	4	Drupal Association board meeting, phone calls with other Board Members, and working with Executive Director in preparation of the board meeting
E-mail	Drupal	7.5
Preparing presentation slides	Drupal	3	Gave 2 presentations that required preparation
Radio interview	Drupal	1	Interview with Federal News Radio to talk about Drupal in government
Reviewing Drupal core patches	Drupal	0.5
Transportation	Drupal	1.5
Writing code	Drupal	0
E-mail	Mollom	1
Management meetings	Mollom	1	Weekly planning/review meeting
Product / engineering management	Mollom	6	Reviewed the results of the last engineering sprint, and coordinated the next engineering sprint
Writing code	Mollom	0

This week may have been slightly more busy than normal. Also, most weeks I spent more time reviewing Drupal patches -- this week most of that time went into starting up the Drupal 8 initiatives and catching up with things after DrupalCon. Other than that, this was a pretty common week.

March 19, 2011 - 21:20

Add new comment

Comments

Bryan Williams (not verified):

Looks something like my own week, except I got 30 minutes to talk with my wife. ;-)

March 19, 2011 - 22:30

Philip Paeps (not verified):

Writing code: 0 ... three times.

What fun.

March 20, 2011 - 00:35

Dries:

I still really like to write code -- that is where the weekends are for, I guess. I spent most of last night (Saturday evening) reviewing patches to catch up with the Drupal 8 issue queue. It is still not writing code but at least I've been reading code and tickling Git.

March 20, 2011 - 12:34

Sergey Demidenko (not verified):

65 hour week if anyone is curious.

March 20, 2011 - 04:21

Dries:

I didn't do the math but that sounds right. I usually work 13 hours per day, which adds up to 65 hours per week.

March 20, 2011 - 12:33

Larry Garfield (not verified):

Eliminate all that driving time and you've got a whole other day in which to code! :-)

March 20, 2011 - 16:04

Tom Tran (not verified):

Thanks for sharing Dries, looks like an impressive workaholic passion driven work schedule.

How do you handle all the different projects and how strictly do you stick to the planned hours?

E.g:
Sales meetings Acquia 2 Meetings with (potential) Acquia customers

Investor relations Acquia 0.5 Communicating with investors

Those customer-related tasks mostly end up killing much more of my time than expected.

March 21, 2011 - 02:55

Oriol (not verified):

13h working + 7h sleeping => Only 4h for photography, family, sport, movies, theater... ;(

March 21, 2011 - 23:48

Dries Buytaert