What Do You Do All Day?

It's a fair question. I did a post like this more than a year ago, and I think it is instructive. A lot of people wonder what exactly it is that you can do all day when you're just sitting in your house pecking away at the computer. Are you really working?

Yes.

8:00 - Fire up the computer and check email.
8:15 - There's an item in the all-campus email update that is relevant to Advancement, so I post it to the intranet; because it includes a nice photo, I spend a little bit of time figuring out how to make it look good because I've never included a photo in an announcement on my intranet before.
8:30 - It turns out that Advancement doesn't want to emphasize the event I just posted to the intranet, so I kill the announcement I just made.
8:50 - I post another announcement from my in box -- this is definitely a keeper.
8:55 - I need more coffee.
9:00 - Work on the intranet for a while -- I'm changing a bunch of settings on all the folders we have in there, and so I need to just go through each folder and do the same set of changes. Dull, but I'm glad I'm here by myself so I can concentrate and do each one the same way.
9:30 - Working on a quick guide on how to manage documents in the intranet, now that I've changed everyone's document library to accommodate how I think their documents should work.
10:45 - On to another intranet issue. I'm on fire!
11:00 - Interruption -- a colleague is having an issue with one of my products and emails me a bunch of queries. I respond to her questions and send her some documentation that may help.
11:07 - Back to the intranet.
12:00 - Lunch - I go and lie down for a little bit, because by Friday I'm pretty beat. Somehow the being at work at 6:00 my time is cumulatively tiring. Alas.
1:00 - Weekly meeting with my manager. We use Skype to do a videoconference, and go through the stuff I'm working on. Fire up an ad-hoc GoToMeeting session for a little tour of some stuff.
2:00 - Process email that came in while I was in the meeting. Answer a couple of questions.
2:15 - Back to the intranet -- it is really my day to work on this thing.
3:00 - Phone meeting on an event site that we're plotting. Internal client doesn't have time to really think in detail about it for a couple of weeks, but at least the ball is rolling. SkypeOut to several people works great!
3:15 - IM with the other webguy who was in the phone meeting to digest what we heard.
3:20 - Seriously, I need to adjust the size of the middle pane in my intranet. Please please please Sharepoint, could you make this easy? No? Fine, be that way.
3:38 - Okay, my Sharepoint book has no insight that I can discern from its index, so I'm now Googling to see how to adjust those columns' sizes. Sigh.
4:30 - I give up on my zone adjustment, and start emailing a few people who I'm giving access to their document libraries.
5:10 - Done. I'm actually just kind of giving up for the day because I can't make any more progress on adjusting my columns, and I'm kind of fried on everything else. Time to go to the gym.

And that's what I did all day. I was remarkably focused on the intranet today, with brief email based diversions into other areas. It's a real luxury to be able to focus and work steadily on something like that because it's hard to make sure that all 23 pages or document libraries or what have you all have the same dumb formatting changes applied in the same way.

See? I don't "work at home", I work at home.