Two Weeks in San Fransisco Alone, A Day in my Life
Two weeks ago I moved from comfort to San Fransisco. I moved away from my home-cooked meals and free rent. I moved to expensive meals and expensive rent. One week ago I published my thoughts on what it’s like to make this radical change in my life and what my goals were laid out.
In part of my “pursuit to happiness” something that I like to do is look at what I do, ask why I do it, then iterate and constantly improve my answers. It makes for great self-conversation. “crazy kid”. In reality, though, it makes me incredibly self-aware. It helps me to find out what I like to do and how to allocate my time throughout the day. I have a hypothesis that most people never find out what they love to do, thus you hear complaints about work life balances and struggle. Don’t let that happen to you, because I sure as hell won’t let it happen to me.
So I think it would be beneficial (at least for me, right) to go over a couple of days this week and figure out what I did and why I did it. I take notes everyday on what I do so this should not be hard…
Let’s go with a random day…Wednesday. Hump-Day. Some people hate Wednesdays. Here’s how it went.
this is based off of the journal I keep on evernote. I have written in it every single day for the past 170 days or so and i highly recommend it.
5:43 am me: “tired af” , “I feel really behind.”
What a start to my day. I guess I was feeling kind of lost.
5:43 to 7:00 am: I try to get a boat load done during this time.
- I published a bunch of words. Call it a blog post — it looks like this:
- I share my blog post on twitter, linkedin, and a few other places. (need more ideas for this part).
- I made a Product Hunt Collection
- I actually emailed 22 people. And I followed up with some awesome people that I met with the day before.
- I came up with this idea to make a program that text alerts people every time there is a mass shooting in the United States and prompts people to contact their representative. We can talk about this if you wanna do it, but couldn’t rationalize the startup costs.
- I showered (super clean).
- I listened to Gimlet Media , Startup Podcast
- I watched Casey Neistat , of course
- I did some work for a club from school, tedious
- I got to inbox zero!
- I wished people happy birthday :)
- Then I ran outside and hopped on the Muni (public bus) and went to work.
7:30 to 8:40 am:
After getting off the bus, I walk about 10/15 minutes in downtown SF. I pass the Yelp Building, Linkedin, Optimizely, and make it to where the office I work at is (on 2nd and bryant). From there I go up to the 5th floor terrace and find a place to sit (I am always the only one up there). I find this to be a great place to think and write. And so I like to use the next part of my day before work up there writing a blog post or whatever else I have to do.
Now another thing I use this time for is meeting / talking to other people. I love meeting in the morning at a coffee shop or something and I do it during this time.
Please let me know if you ever want to chat! It is one of my favorite ways to learn.
8:40 am to 6:15 pm:
I am at my internship working hard! Adding value or whatever you want to call it. Lots of fun stuff. Oh and I eat, that is important.
6:15 to 8:00 pm:
During this time one of two things generally happens…I’ll go through both.
The first option is that I meet someone for dinner or just to chat. Again another great time to meet people! I have met with 3 people during this time this week and learned a ton. Remember, formerly strangers, now people I love to talk to!
The second option is I use this time to go to the gym. I set a goal for myself to go to the gym 4x a week and I did that this week! Only the start. But I know how important it is to be healthy.
8:30 pm — :
I use the remaining part of my night to take the bus back home, eat dinner, and do some other work for loose ends that I have. Still ironing out this book-end.
So, after all that analysis, what are some conclusions I have about my day.
Well, there are two that jump out at me:
The first thing I think most people are thinking…is that every single day? Don’t you get bored? Too much routine?
My answer is no I don’t get bored and yes that is too much routine. I need to add some variability to my life. Though I try to do that by talking to unique and different people everyday, I also need to expose myself to different environments on a day to day basis. And lately I have been taking the same path to work and home but I need to switch it up. Noted.
The second thing that you may be thinking … is wow kind of a lot of stuff. My answer to that is that I think of things in their smallest possible form. I think you can get anything done if you break it into really small pieces. So in my morning to-do list I break it into as many pieces as possible so I can do as many as I can. A piece may be sharing something on twitter. But as long as it’s a piece I can check it off.
I like to start my day with a power hour of sorts. To me that is winning the day. I get so much done to start that everything else are sprinkles on the cake :)
Another thing — I have a lot of urgency.
Of course, reach out if you have any questions. Thanks so much for reading!
twitter — @jrdngonen
