I wake around the crack of noon each day. (This moves around, actually. Sometimes I'm waking at 9-ish, every day, while other times it's later than noon. Right now it is about 11:30.)
I stumble into the kitchen and put on the kettle. Dump a cup of food into the dogs bowl. Dump some cereal into my bowl or put a boiled egg onto a plate. Dump milk over cereal or salt/pepper onto egg. In the winter grits or oatmeal may replace cereal. By the time I finish my cereal, the kettle is boiling, so I make jasmine green tea. This is pretty exciting, so far, isn't it?
I spend about two hours on most days reading and responding to customer email, tickets, and forum posts, before getting down to other work. Customer support is about 50% of my work day, though I'm trying to figure out ways to make the ratio go down. I also check reddit and HN during this time (way too much time goes to reddit and HN).
Then I try to spend an hour or so on some sort of development before I break for "lunch". An hour is rarely enough to do much useful, but I can sometimes get some bug fixed, or an install issue figured out. Right now, "development" means "work on migrating the website from Joomla to Drupal", and doesn't actually touch our products at all.
Working lunch. Answer more emails/tickets/forums. Read reddit and HN.
Then I tend to spend some time figuring out what people are saying about our products (mostly) and our competitors products (only in passing) on the web. I get Google Alerts, and I have Twitter searches setup on my iGoogle home page. Sometimes folks will post frustrated messages on Twitter and I'll try to point them in the right direction.
More time reading reddit and HN (I need to do something about this).
More development.
More email/tickets/forums.
Maybe send out an email to a hosting provider that I think would benefit from our software (because they currently offer Webmin, but would be better served by Virtualmin). They might then want to become a reseller, so I'll spend an hour or so getting them setup and informed about the process.
Lately there's been a lot of "reboot the damned computer again because the new video card caused another lockup", and wait while the idiotic and unreliable ASUS motherboard takes 5 minutes to go through its bootup checklist and maybe fails or freezes. I think maybe a new machine is in my near future.
Walk/run with the dog for about an hour. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. But, we walk every day. This is probably better for my productivity than anything else I do.
Special days:
First day of each month is billing day, where I invoice and process payments for our resellers. This is a nuisance, and I hate it. But, the proceeds average out to a couple of really good days worth of normal sales (and it's growing faster than daily sales, now that we're focusing on signing on resellers), so it's a nice chance to see real monetary gains from our work. This takes a few hours, because I usually have to contact at least one or two resellers to get them to update their billing info or correct something or ask questions about usage. Refinement of processes is important here...we need to do more work on this. I get nothing else done on billing day.
Friday is Rock Band Taco Night. I usually stop work early on Friday, and get together with friends for something fun.
Weekends used to be "catch up on email" days, but I've been successfully doing inbox zero for a couple of weeks now, and the "catch up weekends" might be a thing of the past. I don't think it's actually increased my productivity, in general, but at least I'm not always running two or three days behind on some emails. Customers seem to be happier about this.
So, now weekends are more leisurely, and spent doing research and more development.
About the HN and reddit problem, I found it helpful to add this to my /etc/hosts file to prevent the timesuck:
127.0.0.1 reddit.com www.reddit.com news.ycombinator.com
Of course I comment it out during weekends, and permitted "play time".
Thanks for the kind words, and I'm glad you're finding Virtualmin useful! We certainly try to provide the best support in our industry, and when we screw up we apologize and do whatever we can to make it right. The bar for support among market leaders in our industry is pretty low, but I think in an area this complex, great support can be a very good differentiating feature. So, we're never tempted to think, "Well, we're providing way better support than Plesk or cPanel, so we can rest today."
I've got a todo list a mile long for things we could be doing better, but we're getting there.
Magic happens. Not an iPhone app, but an iUI based theme that works really well on iPhone, and pretty well on Android. We do actually have plans for standalone apps, but it's an area where we're not particularly experts...so it might be something we have to outsource (which we tend to avoid for programming stuff). I've just bought a Mini 9 for Hackintoshing, so I'll soon have an iPhone dev environment, so might give it a try.
Comments
I wake around the crack of noon each day. (This moves around, actually. Sometimes I'm waking at 9-ish, every day, while other times it's later than noon. Right now it is about 11:30.)
I stumble into the kitchen and put on the kettle. Dump a cup of food into the dogs bowl. Dump some cereal into my bowl or put a boiled egg onto a plate. Dump milk over cereal or salt/pepper onto egg. In the winter grits or oatmeal may replace cereal. By the time I finish my cereal, the kettle is boiling, so I make jasmine green tea. This is pretty exciting, so far, isn't it?
I spend about two hours on most days reading and responding to customer email, tickets, and forum posts, before getting down to other work. Customer support is about 50% of my work day, though I'm trying to figure out ways to make the ratio go down. I also check reddit and HN during this time (way too much time goes to reddit and HN).
Then I try to spend an hour or so on some sort of development before I break for "lunch". An hour is rarely enough to do much useful, but I can sometimes get some bug fixed, or an install issue figured out. Right now, "development" means "work on migrating the website from Joomla to Drupal", and doesn't actually touch our products at all.
Working lunch. Answer more emails/tickets/forums. Read reddit and HN.
Then I tend to spend some time figuring out what people are saying about our products (mostly) and our competitors products (only in passing) on the web. I get Google Alerts, and I have Twitter searches setup on my iGoogle home page. Sometimes folks will post frustrated messages on Twitter and I'll try to point them in the right direction.
More time reading reddit and HN (I need to do something about this).
More development.
More email/tickets/forums.
Maybe send out an email to a hosting provider that I think would benefit from our software (because they currently offer Webmin, but would be better served by Virtualmin). They might then want to become a reseller, so I'll spend an hour or so getting them setup and informed about the process.
Lately there's been a lot of "reboot the damned computer again because the new video card caused another lockup", and wait while the idiotic and unreliable ASUS motherboard takes 5 minutes to go through its bootup checklist and maybe fails or freezes. I think maybe a new machine is in my near future.
Walk/run with the dog for about an hour. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. But, we walk every day. This is probably better for my productivity than anything else I do.
Special days:
First day of each month is billing day, where I invoice and process payments for our resellers. This is a nuisance, and I hate it. But, the proceeds average out to a couple of really good days worth of normal sales (and it's growing faster than daily sales, now that we're focusing on signing on resellers), so it's a nice chance to see real monetary gains from our work. This takes a few hours, because I usually have to contact at least one or two resellers to get them to update their billing info or correct something or ask questions about usage. Refinement of processes is important here...we need to do more work on this. I get nothing else done on billing day.
Friday is Rock Band Taco Night. I usually stop work early on Friday, and get together with friends for something fun.
Weekends used to be "catch up on email" days, but I've been successfully doing inbox zero for a couple of weeks now, and the "catch up weekends" might be a thing of the past. I don't think it's actually increased my productivity, in general, but at least I'm not always running two or three days behind on some emails. Customers seem to be happier about this.
So, now weekends are more leisurely, and spent doing research and more development.
About the HN and reddit problem, I found it helpful to add this to my /etc/hosts file to prevent the timesuck: 127.0.0.1 reddit.com www.reddit.com news.ycombinator.com
Of course I comment it out during weekends, and permitted "play time".
Wow, this is brilliant.
I am definitely going to try this. And will also add facebook.com and techcrunch.com to the list!!
Awesome idea. Why don't you use a cron job though?
I have a 25 hour work day.
Does "0 * /25 * * *" work?
I was inspired by your post to find out what startup you worked on.
Virtualmin is totally awesome and I use it on a near daily basis. I've bought a pro licence and have also been blown away by your support.
Rock on.
Thanks for the kind words, and I'm glad you're finding Virtualmin useful! We certainly try to provide the best support in our industry, and when we screw up we apologize and do whatever we can to make it right. The bar for support among market leaders in our industry is pretty low, but I think in an area this complex, great support can be a very good differentiating feature. So, we're never tempted to think, "Well, we're providing way better support than Plesk or cPanel, so we can rest today."
I've got a todo list a mile long for things we could be doing better, but we're getting there.
I hope an iPhone app is on that list. :)
yum install wbm-virtual-server-mobile
Or:
apt-get install webmin-virtual-server-mobile
Magic happens. Not an iPhone app, but an iUI based theme that works really well on iPhone, and pretty well on Android. We do actually have plans for standalone apps, but it's an area where we're not particularly experts...so it might be something we have to outsource (which we tend to avoid for programming stuff). I've just bought a Mini 9 for Hackintoshing, so I'll soon have an iPhone dev environment, so might give it a try.