Monday, March 26, 2018

Day In The Life -- A Work From Home Day

I love "day in the life" posts and ever since I've had the option to do some work from home (it's been almost three years now (HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?!?!?)), I've wanted to document a work from home day. So last Wednesday, I finally took the opportunity. In case you're interested, the last time I documented a day in the life was here.

5:30am -- I always set my alarm twice -- once for 5:25am and once for 5:30am. I've never loved waking up but once I'm awake I like the quietness of having some time to myself. Usually I start with grabbing my iPad and browsing my favourite internet sites -- blogs I like to read, checking e-mail, Instagram, and TimeHop, and, during baseball season, I spend some time on the MLB app.

6:10am -- I usually try to start working by 6am but I was a little late this day. I made coffee and did a bit of laundry. This is the normal start to my day. I pick my mug for the day based on how I'm feeling -- Do I wish I was traveling? Do I wish I could just stay home and read all day? Am I thinking about a particular person? How long until baseball starts again? These are all the various factors in picking out my mug for the day. Ha!
6:30am - 7:30am -- I worked for an hour. I only take a break to get more to drink or to hug the kids "Good morning."
7:30am - 8:40am -- This day I spent this time folding laundry, helping the kids get ready for school, getting dressed, and I did some house tidying. I work at my manager's house on Mondays and Tuesdays so by Wednesday mornings there is just stuff that needs to get done which I've put off for those two days.
8:40am - 9:30am -- I walked the kids to school and did one work errand. This year is different because I don't have to wait at the school until the kids enter the building (like you have to in Kindergarten). Some days the kids are walking to school on their own but it varies.

And I love walking on the trails in our city. This one goes from our house and gets me to uptown -- where the bank, the library, and our local grocery store are. I LOVE this trail.
9:30am - 11:00am -- When I got home I took some time to menu plan, did a bit more laundry, and went grocery shopping. Before I went grocery shopping I had a banana muffin for breakfast. I am really not a breakfast person. At all.

One thing I love about working part-time is that I can do some of these errands during the day which allows us to do fun family things in the evening. That was my main motivation for doing groceries at this time.
 
My new menu planning pad isn't specifically for menu planning but it was the closest I could find. And no, I can't menu plan on an app.

Time to put groceries away

11:00am - 1:15pm -- I made myself some more coffee-hot chocolate, ate a bowl of cherry yogurt, and sat down to work for a few hours.

I am the administrative assistant (including bookkeeping) for a small organization which does conflict resolution, leadership coaching, and change management, among other things. I work about fifteen to twenty hours a week. On days when I wish I could just sit around and read a book all day, I motivate myself to work by remembering that the extra income allows me to buy flowers or for us to do some extra traveling. Those are usually good motivators :)

This day I was drinking out of my Salty Dog Cafe mug and remembering our Southern Road Trip in 2015 when I got to meet some blogging friends! You can read about that trip here.
1:15pm - 1:45pm -- I had a rare outside work meeting this day so I ate some lunch and read for a bit. And drank lemonade out of my Disney cup, just like on our cruise! I had a cheese sandwich.
1:45pm - 2:30 -- Thankfully, I could walk to my meeting and it ended quicker than I thought it might.

2:30pm -- I got home from the meeting and did some random stuff  -- tidied the house a bit more, responded to a few work e-mails, read a little bit, and figured out the Scripture litany for Sunday. Rachel is reading Scripture for the first time so we'll see how that goes...
3:00pm -- I pick up the kids every day after school. And yes, I was on the trail again!
3:30pm -- Both the kids got invited for last minute after school play dates, so I threw supper together (Sam had grated the cheese that morning and Rachel had broken the pasta up the night before), ate a snack and read a book.
4:30pm -- Sam got  home. We shared a mango for snack, he showed me the song he learned on his new recorder, and I killed some time. I was tired by this point.
5:00pm -- Rachel was home and I supervised her dish doing. Look at all the clean dishes Dave and I didn't have to do - Yay!
5:30pm -- We ate supper (pasta bake -- recipe found here) and after supper, Dave showered Rachel. Sam is at the stage of life where he wants to be ridiculous in pictures. It isn't at all annoying :(
6:15pm -- Instead of having to do groceries, we all got into pajamas and watched The Princess and The Frog and ate snacks from our Disney Cruise Fish Extender gifts. And drank lemonade in our Disney cups. This movie is a new one for us and we LOVE it.
8:30pm -- We are trying a new bedtime routine with Rachel to encourage her to go to sleep on her own, and so Dave put Rachel to bed this night. Sam reads himself to sleep (or until we tell him to stop), so I just got to crawl into bed with my books. I was almost done all of these and finished two of them before falling asleep around 10:30.
And that was the end of my day. That tends to be a pretty typical work from home day for me. I love recording days in my life and how they have changed since the kids were little. It will be fun to see what a day in my life looks like in five years, if I'm still blogging then. After all, if you go here you can read what a day in my life was like just over five years ago. A lot has changed since then :)

2 comments:

  1. Love day-in-the-life posts! A few thoughts: 1) I too cannot menu plan on an app. Everything in my life is in my phone except menu planning. It’s the last remaining thing I do with paper and pen. 2) I want your job. When I do go back to work (when kids are in school), I would like to work 15-20 hours a week. I feel like that’s hard to come by around here, but maybe just because I haven’t figured out where to look. 3) we’ve never seen The Princess and the Frog either but I’ve always been intrigued. I just requested the dvd from the library.

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  2. Sounds like a fantastic day! I'm impressed!

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