July 3, 2009
How do you work? How do you live?
Matt Mullenweg is the guy who, as a teenager, started developing WordPress, the terrific blogging/content management software on which Clusterflock runs. At the ripe old age of twenty-five now, Matt was the subject of Inc.’s column “The Way I Work” this month. And he’s posted a revised and expanded version of the piece, with links, on his own blog, because the third-person-interview-as-first-person-monologue format the magazine used came out strange (as one would expect). Some snippets:
On a good morning there’s no alarm clock. I wake up with the sun and do my best to resist the instinctive urge to look at the computer or check email for at least an hour.
My vice of choice isn’t coffee, but the Kindle. Its electronic shelves are filled mostly with the business books I read in order to grow up to be a real businessman (before someone figures out I’m not). At any point in time I have about 120 books downloaded. Interspersed between Drucker, Godin, and Buffett are classics like Seneca, which I wish I could read more often but only get to a few times a year.
. . . When you’re coding you really have to be in the zone so I’ll listen to a single song over and over on repeat, hundreds of times. It helps me focus. The other best way to focus is to turn off email and instant messenger. The moment that little toaster pops up and says “you’ve got mail” you’re taken out of the flow. You’re juggling variables and functions and layouts and the moment you look away it all falls to the ground — it takes you 10 minutes getting it back in the air again.
. . .
I go out for lunch whenever I can, which fits well with my preference for no meetings before 11 AM. There’s something very personal about sharing food with someone; it’s a deeper connection than shaking hands in a boardroom. . . .
In general, I’m pretty darn disorganized, late as often as not, and really bad at keeping a schedule. . . . Last year I was on the road 212 days and clocked 175,000 miles, which is seven times around the globe . . .
. . . For my 25th birthday in January I published a list of 2009 goals on my blog. It included learning Spanish, learning how to cook, and posting 10,000 photos. Cooking has been a total fail so far; I go out for every meal. If you open my refrigerator you’ll find Girl Scout cookies and barbecue sauce. Photos are blazing along, half-way through the year and I’ve taken 20,000 photos and posted about 4,000 of them.
. . .
I do my best work mid-morning and super late at night, from one to five in the morning. Some people don’t need sleep, but I actually need a ton. I just sleep all the time, catching naps in the afternoon or a 20-minute snooze in the office. Our business is 24 hours — folks in Australia start their day around 4 PM my time and our guys and girls in Europe get going around midnight. Sometimes I’ll go out at night, come home from the bar at 2 or 3 AM, and then go back to work.
—Matt Mullenweg, “The Way I Work, annotated” Jun 19, 2009
Dear clusterflock, is there such a thing as a typical day in your life? If so, what’s it like? How do you keep it together, especially if you live alone and work by yourself?
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I am waiting for someone else to go first.
Hint: This is not an idle question.
I am “freelancing” for the summer, and I fucking suck at it, and my way of life has no sense to it, in general.
My typical day:
Wake up around eight or nine to the alarm or the garbage truck or the neighbors yelling outside, consider getting up, go back to sleep for two to four more hours. Dash out of bed in a panic because I’ve finally remembered the thing that I really need to be working on.
Turn on the power strip to start the wifi router; open the laptop (“just to check my e-mail”) or sit at the iMac (if I’m making some pretense of getting right down to work). Get a glass of tea, if there’s already cold tea in the kitchen; otherwise, just sit down at the computer. Check e-mail, to see if anybody’s yelling at me yet; open five links in browser tabs. Check Twitter, open five tabs. Check CF, open five more tabs. Start reading some browser tabs, including the hundred or so that were already open. Open fifteen more tabs in the process, while closing only maybe ten.
Go make tea, if there wasn’t any. Maybe pour a bowl of cereal or make some toast to put Nutella on. It’s probably three o’clock.
Doorbell rings. Stand very, very still for a few minutes, pretending not to be home. Because I’m in my pajamas and have no intention of answering.
Go back to the computer. Check RSS feeds, opening twenty more tabs. Read tabs, opening more tabs.
Around ten p.m., eat some cereal or leftovers or toast with hummos.
Continue reading browser tabs, eventually achieving a net tab count that is about the same as what I started the day with—150 or so.
Eat a piece of cake or chocolate. It’s one a.m.
Either keep doing what I’ve been doing, or, if I feel sufficiently guilty enough, work for a few hours. Or check the Twitter, RSS, and so forth again, more likely.
Around three or four a.m., make myself go to bed. I’m not tired, but I figure I’ll set my alarm and get up at a normal time tomorrow (aka today), and then maybe “tomorrow” I’ll get my life back on track and do all the shit I’m supposed to be doing.
It’s not working out very well.
Oops—three o’clock! Time to make breakfast.
This is a good question, India. Since I find myself driving my own days lately, I’ve been trying to find a better way to motivate than to wait for that urgent email to pop into my mailbox in order to start doing something (around 1pm.) B
Because I see myself as engaged in some form of cultural production, I’m also working hard to see “watching the Goonies/John Adams/Rio Bravo” at 1pm before going to the studio as “work.” Maybe it’s a lie, but there’s really something soothing about planning projects while watching something as familiar as Goonies. I identify with Matt Mullenweg that in the 1-5am zone I’m most productive. It’s like I can finally turn off all the other alarm bells “I need milk! … Have to get that bottle of Granache I saw on sale… I should really fix the sink today…” all of those tasks are moot at 2am and I can cruise on until 5 or 6am like that. Just finally getting stuff done. That’s IF I have shit to get done.
My recent problem is that I’m working on a project so large and mysterious in scope, I’m not actually making anything. I’m just planning. Oy, that’s a bitch. I find my bouncy ball a great help in planning. And there’s no rhyme or reason to when or how a fitting idea comes to me. Sometimes it’s making origami, or watching Arrested Development on Hulu. Or talking about the project outloud over a few beers at 1am. The innate chaos of the world and lack of structure for inspiration is my problem.
Lately, I’ve just been trying to lean back on the reins and stop freaking out that I “should” be doing something. Instead, I’m probably doing what I should be doing- I just have a funny time table when I don’t have a boss breathing down my neck. I don’t know- it’s all a work-in-progress at this point.
Yeah, that 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. slot is crucial. The distractions tend to stop rolling in as quickly (having friends in other time zones is a problem, though—if I stay up late enough, Elisabeth, Jorunn, and Eirik start tweeting), and half the things I ought to be doing can’t or shouldn’t be done in the middle of the night (e.g., I try not to respond to work-related e-mails at 2:45 a.m., because the time stamp will make me look as crazy as I actually am). So sometimes during that period I can actually trick myself into getting some work done.
On Wednesday night (aka Thursday morning), the trick that worked was to set a timer and say, “Okay, I’m only going to work on this for thirty-five minutes. Then I have to switch to this other thing.” At the end of 70 minutes, I switched back to the first project, which I’d been reluctant to stop, and then I stayed up until 11 a.m. doing that, by which time I could e-mail a file to the client without seeming like a nutjob. Then I stayed up a few more hours, napped for an hour, and went out for drinks and barbecue with friends. A banner day: one whole business day’s worth of work, albeit actually performed between the hours of midnight and noon.
Oh, those time zones. I like to blame the time zones. See, if friends were not anywhere from a couple of hours behind me or from 6-8 hours ahead of me, I would not be distracted continually and would be much more productive.
It’s the time zones. Really. It is.
Cooper gets stuff done. Let’s ask Cooper.
Cooper? Oh, Coo-o-ooper!
I think he’s busy getting something done.
I’ve already said more than enough about my schedule. But, Mary Jeys and India, I did work “from-the-home” for a couple years. And I hear ya. I floundered until I found a rhythm my own.
Clearly, the secret steps missing in my life are “pet the cat” and “kiss Danny on the forehead.” Those two things would make every day better.
A rhythm divine.
Okay – uh’nuf. To quote India, “y’all’re making my teeth hurt” – and I’ve been off sugar for 3 whole days, now.
Pleez – where are the spikes?
I do Internet (which includes running elimae) throughout the day. The broader schedule is like this:
Get up between 8 and 9. (I got up before dawn for years and often drove to work as the sun was coming up. I don’t have to do that anymore.)
Breakfast
Morning walk (with some light weightlifting every other day)
Shower
Morning snack
Drawing
Lunch (including posting drawings to Flickr)
Writing/reading/afternoon snack
Afternoon walk (with some light weightlifting every other day) including visit with Jessie and Ed
Shower
Supper
Evening reading/TV/snack
Bedtime about midnight
(And if you’re wondering about my weight–I’m skinny: I eat small amounts)