Me not publishing until the afternoon is probably pretty telling of what my day was like yesterday.
Summary: Work, dinner with a friend, life changed by podcasts, sleep
People I talked to: Katie, Sarah, Vinita, Zach, Chris, Dan, and Christy
Christy and I splitting a bibimbap
Day 4, Wednesday
5:50?a. I wake up an unsatisfying amount before my alarm, as always.
6:00a. Alarm goes off and I check the weather. Strongly debate sleeping longer and taking a later bus but I remember I have to leave work at 5 and the thought of sitting in traffic for an hour and a half is even more depressing than sleep deprivation to me. I’m really tired though, I some how let time slip by…
6:08a. Have to get out of bed. Brush my teeth and get ready for work. I wear the dress that reminds me of the friend I’m missing today. The cut and color of it reminds me of a dress she had when we lived in Denver.
6:38a. Miraculously able to get ready in time to leave.
6:41a. Sidewalk shuffle. You always look down when you walk in San Francisco, not because eye contact is to be avoided, but because there is always organic matter on the sidewalk to avoid. And never step into the planters—100% pee.
6:58a. Board the bus. I get my seat in the back. I end up spending the whole time finishing the post from yesterday. By the time I pull into work, all I have to do I create an illustration.
8:00a. I get into work and decide to go to the cafeteria closest to the stop because they’re serving biscuits and gravy. But the biscuit is super super hard and chewy (I think because they just let it sit in a puddle of gravy the whole time). If you know my love of bread products, you would know this was pretty devastating for me.
8:17. When I leave there are no bikes, but I kind of want to walk anyway. I’m listening to the Invisibilia episode on personalities. I had a backlog of podcasts from when I was listening to my audiobook. I also wish that I could get to work earlier. When I got to work at 7:30 there were always bikes and the calmness of getting there before everyone else did was relaxing for me. That’s why I still like getting in before other people.
8:25a. Get into the office and make a 1/2 & 1/2 coffee with soy milk creamer and honey. I’m always afraid of becoming addicted to anything, including caffeine so when I do have coffee (which I like the taste of) I have decaf or 1/2 & 1/2. Except at coffee shops because we all know baristas throw shade.
8:30a. Get to my desk and open my computer. My plan is to quickly draw the sketch and publish the post. Scanning my emails I see some things that I want to fix immediately. I catch with a co-worker in London about it while I work. Then I have to go over to my teammate and explain what important parts I felt were still missing…basically I just start working. I have two meetings in the morning that I want to prepare for, especially since I find out I’m double booked for one. I often recall the this is fine meme at work.
9:50a. Trying to prepare a document to get part of what I’m working on user tested.
10:30a. Attend a meeting someone set up who is out of town right now…it’s no surprise that no one else comes. But when I check in with the other team they do need materials so I relay this information to another designer, which gets two more people involved as they try to figure out the requirements.
11:00a. Meeting with our UX writer to work out the text for this particularly tricky section. I kind of think it’s amazing that we have people dedicated to writing our work. It’s something that I think is really important and having someone able to focus on this and make our voice consistent across the product is such a relief. And she’s so amazing. I think it could be easy to be like “I have a lot of work to do so I’ll just hurry up and write something!” But she’s very considerate of all the information we need to convey and how to help users.
11:30a. Meeting with the research about what our goals are for the user study. This is an iteration of what we’ve done before, but we thought it’d be helpful to get some additional feedback.
11:50a. The meeting ends early and I have lunch schedule at noon with the intern I’m mentoring over the summer. Luckily, he wants to eat in the cafe in my building so that’s a lot simpler.
12:05p. We meet up and eat outside. We talk about what’s happening during his internship, how his experience has been outside of work. His parents will be coming from Shanghai and they’re doing a roadtrip around the area.
12:45p. We part ways and I go back to work. Only I only have a 45 minutes before my next meeting so I don’t feel like I have time to dive into anything too intensive, but I can kick out some low-hanging fruit.
1:35p. I have a meeting with my manager and we walk around outside on a path that surrounds what we call a swamp.
2:00p. General work stuff. I get more feedback on a project with an engineer on how something should work and will need to update the work I did on it yesterday.
4:00p. Meeting with engineer and designer to coordinate building the final design.
4:30p. Another awkward amount of time to kill before dinner with Christy.
5:14p. Christy said her meeting is over and we start trying to coordinate over text. Coordinating, buh. Not my favorite and, because I’m sneakily trying to work on other things.
5:34p. We pick a place to eat and Christy says it’ll take her about 20 minutes to get there.
5:50p. I think I work longer to fill up the 20 minutes, but the bike ride is short than I think, plus I’m not super good at math or time so I arrive 10 minutes later at the Korean restaurant.
6:15p. Christy arrives and we go in and end up splitting a main course and two appetizers. Christy explains to me what she’s been up to recently. She’s in town from San Diego just for today to meet with some people from work.
Christy and I were friends when we lived in Denver. We used to talk all the time since we lived kind of parallel design lives. She’s always full of sage wisdom and is very comforting. She talks about what she’s working on now, how she approaches it and the her daily life and I find it really fascinating to hear how she moves about in the world. She’s a really tremendous designer but we’ve never worked together. Hearing her describe her day, she reminds me a lot of my co-workers now and so I can imagine she’s the MVP of the design team. She also tells me about this working style test she and all her co-workers took that she found really helpful in revealing the way she works compares to other people. I was super interesting in taking it myself. It was really wonderful catching up with her. Her flight didn’t leave until later so we had plenty of time to talk. Although I admit I was getting anxious about getting either back to work or home.
7:55p. We part ways in the parking lot. Christy has this particular way of hugging where I would describe it as more sturdy than soft.
8:05p. I get back to my desk and two of my co-workers are there still! One comes in and leaves late and has a question for me. The other I feel bad about because I see he’s working on something I innocently asked about. Patron saint of design.
8:18p. After chatting with them, I realize I’ve missed the bus that comes exactly at this time, so will have to wait later. I finish some house-keeping stuff and return all the internet routers I was sent. Yeah, some how I had two internet routers to send back. Thanks, Obama.
8:40p. Walk off to the bus stop.
8:50p. Board and start bumping along home. I think my fatigue is catching up with me and I definitely don’t feel like being on my computer on the bus so I end up listening to the next Invisibilia podcast, “The problem with the solution.” Oh my goodness. It’s so amazing. I feel like every Invisbilia podcast changes my life. NPR has such good content! How is everyone not listening to it always?
9:47p. Bus arrives at stop. Doddle to my apartment.
10:00p. Arrive home and see my housemate’s and her boyfriend sprawled across the couch watching tv in the living room. Immediately go to take a shower.
10:24p. Watch a video Vinita sent me.
10:26p. I don’t see my nectarine that I brought home from work on my desk and I’m so sure it would be there, where would it be?
10:28p. Compost a squashed nectarine and wipe nectarine guts out from the inside of my backpack.
10:34p. Wanted to work, but feel like I should let nectarine dry off of my computer and I’m very tired now.
10:35p. Crawl into bed.