In the month of October, I focused a large portion of my extracurricular work time on training new Automatticians and Happiness Engineer trials. We covered tools, tickets, tone – and in every session, a trainee taught me something new.
This is a reason I love to teach. The joy of a student’s discovery is always contagious, and that delights me, but I also love teaching because I learn. Trainees’ questions show me gaps in my approach, our tools, our assumptions, my own knowledge; their strategies show me new thought processes and workflows; their knowledge enlightens me in areas I previously lacked insight.
The student becomes the teacher.
For the month of November I am super excited about another opportunity for this exchange of knowledge: starting Monday November 3, I will be providing support for the Blogging 101: Zero to Hero course. I am giddy for the opportunity. New and experienced bloggers are going to bring a freshness and impart unique perspectives to each other and to those of us helping out. I can’t wait to see how everyone approaches the daily assignments, and I’m eager to help bloggers navigate their WordPress.com dashboards, find themes, fidget with widgets, and press that beautiful blue Publish button.
I’ve been through almost all of the Blogging U courses, and even after several years of blogging, I learned new tricks from the assignments and the community. Now, as a former student, I will (sort of) be a teacher. That’s kind of awesome.
Whether you are new to blogging or are a seasoned pro, these courses are approachable, fun, flexible, and free – did I mention they are free? I encourage you to take advantage of them if you have any interest in blogging, writing, or photography. And if you do decide to sign up, I’ll be there, ready to support you, and ready to learn from you.
Do you want to be a blogging superhero? Register here for Blogging 101 or the brand new Photography 101. Courses begin November 3, 2014.
I always think of spring as being the beautiful season, with its bright pink flowers, its new green leaves, and the reawakening to life after the cold hardness of winter. But the deep tones of fall – the mustards, the rubies – remind me that there is as exquisite a beauty in going to sleep as there is in waking up.
This photograph was taken on a rainy October day in our townhouse parking lot. The mundane scene was beautiful to me, and this photo is my entry to the Daily Post’s Dreamy photo challenge.
Several friends have asked, “How’s your writing going?” now that I’ve got a full-time job. While I haven’t been writing as much for my blogs as I was when I was a stay-at-home-mom, I am excited that my job as a Happiness Engineer involves writing All. Day. Long.
Even more thrilling, especially for a writer working on craft, the types of writing I do throughout the day are varied and hone different types of skills: bug reports and internal blog posts require technical writing; support documents require the ability to translate technical information into understandable language; support replies and chat messages call for skill with tone, specificity, and brevity. Most fun is that the internal messaging we do through Slack allows me to write like I talk – it’s the place to write easily and with humor, especially in our water cooler channels where we goof off and post lots of GIFs.
This week I and many Automatticians have been writing about our workdays, and today I want to approach from a writing angle, with word count estimates pulled from my Wednesday workday.
For a little background, I am a Happiness Engineer on the Store team, and my days consist mainly of providing live chat support to Business and Enterprise users. What this means is that I am always working to improve the WordPress.com experience by troubleshooting issues live with users, by submitting bug reports, updating documents, testing, and by being in constant internal communication with teammates. While on live chat, we collaborate in real-time on Slack. We troubleshoot together so we can give the best possible solution to the user on the line.
What this means is that we all read and write. A lot. And quickly. So I thought it would be interesting to look at my day in terms of communication inputs and outputs. The graph above shows an estimated word count output for Wednesday, October 8, not including this blog post, which I count as personal word count (Slack and O2s/P2s are our internal communication tools):
Support Chat messages: 250+ (2500+ words in 14 chats)
Internal Slack messages: 240+ (2400+ words)
Support tickets answered: 12 (1600+ words)
O2 comments: 7 (189 words)
O2 posts: 1 (82 words)
Trac tickets: 1 (65 words)
Support docs updated: 1 (14 words)
Words spoken aloud: 1
emails: 0
TOTAL: 6769+ words
**Number of times I laughed out loud: 14
By the time I manually added up estimated my word output, I did not have it in me to go back and calculate the word count for all the O2 posts, O2 comments, Slack back scrolls, live chat messages, and tickets I read today, so I’ll break it down by unit instead of word count:
Communication input and output for Oct 8, 2014
I found it funny that I only spoke one word aloud during my work day. The one word I spoke was “Bye!” as we all signed off of our team video hangout.
You’ll probably notice something strange there on the email line as well: those 40+ emails I read were notifications of blogs I follow that are relevant to my work or to the company as a whole. We do not use email as a means of communication for the most part – we interact via Slack, where we text chat synchronously, and via blogs that are open to the entire company. Unlike email, which is closed and only available to the senders and recipients, all company communication is archived and available for anyone at Auttomattic to read and participate in. This makes Automattic an extraordinarily democratic, and empowering, work environment: every Automattician has access to everything. I think a lot of work environments would benefit from the open discussion that inline commenting on a blog facilitates when compared with the closed system of email.
So how’s my writing going? It’s going awesome. With all the practice I’m getting on the job, and as our family settles into a new routine to accommodate me working again, I’m slowly adding personal writing back into my life as well. In fact, this post bumps my total word count to 7000+ words for the day. Not bad for a writer who’s trying to make time to write.
In an effort to get to know each other’s work days better, and to share publicly what it is like to work for a distributed company where most of us work from home, some of us at Automattic will be publishing “A Day in the Life” posts on our personal blogs throughout this week. The posts will be tagged #a8cday if you’d like to follow along. And if you think a job like this sounds awesome, join us! We’re hiring.
I wasn’t sure if I’d be writing a whole series this week on my life as an Automattician, but today was so different from yesterday, I felt compelled. My Monday Day in the Life was very, well, Monday, with scheduling and time slots and laundry and my first attempt at training new hires.
And today? Today I’m listening to the rain and wind outside my “office”* window. I’m wearing slippers and a sweatshirt from our daughter’s swim team, and though it seems strange to say it when the only sounds I hear any day are the tapping of my fingers on my keyboard and the gentle chime notifying me when people are logging onto chat, today was much quieter than yesterday. Yesterday was action. Today was contemplation.
I started my day at 6:00 am, just as I’ve done for the past two years before I landed this job. I love the quiet of morning, and I used to get up at 6:00 am to write and drink my coffee before the household wakes up. After a long writing-related conversation with a coworker yesterday, I pulled out my pen and composition book while my coffee brewed this morning, and I wrote again for the first time in weeks.
After writing, I sat on the couch with my feet up on the coffee table and read some of Wendy’s fiction, along with the Day in the Life posts of other coworkers, while I relaxed into the day. Tuesdays are one of my early days – early to start and early to end – when my husband is on deck for lunchboxes and bus stop. On Tuesdays and Fridays I start work early so that I can finish up the day in time to squeeze in an afternoon walk or swim. Along with writing, exercise has lost its place in my new-life-with-a-full-time-job, and we are iterating on our family schedule to build it back in.
I moved down to my desk around 7:15 when the kids woke up, and I started working through some of my followups from yesterday – notifying a user about a bug that wasn’t actually a bug, notifying a user about a bug that was actually a bug, giving feedback to the training core team on how my training session went – and lots of reading on the internal P2s. When I transitioned to full time, the hiring squad set me up with a mentor, Caroline. I told her recently, “I’ve spent the past couple of days reading relevant P2 posts, there’s no ‘product’ at the end of that – no ticket or chat closed – so it feels like I’m slacking off, you know?”
She knew.
I am guilty of thinking I’m ‘not working’ when I’m reading P2s,” she said, “But that’s a huge part of our jobs! It’s all the talks and meetings we’d have if we were working in a traditional office. So it’s still important, and counts.
So today I thought, and I wrote, and I read, and I chatted. Live chat got a little crazy for a bit this morning when I was trying to help one user set up a complicated theme, help another user troubleshoot a domain issue, follow up on a ticket, answer a VIP plugin chat, and respond to a ping from a Happiness Engineer trial regarding plans and upgrades.
I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague. – from the Automattic creed.
Part of a Happiness Engineer’s job is to engineer happiness for everyone – users and coworkers alike – and while I put the ticket on hold and tackled other issues, HEs on the Store and VIP teams helped me with the domain and plugin issues while I helped with the theme and upgrade issues. It is chaos, but it’s a refined chaos that works, with everyone working together to help each other find not just solutions, but a rewarding, human experience.
During lunch I lined up the resources I need to enroll in the company 401K plan, took care of a couple more followups, and then I set up a lunch date for Friday. I love the solitude of working from home, but there is a definite danger of becoming a hermit, so I scheduled time to get out into the world on Friday and have lunch with my husband. We’ll get food we can never convince the kids to eat, like Indian or Thai. Or maybe Mexican.
In the afternoon I fielded more live chats and updated the support document for the Stay theme. Several users in chat have had trouble setting up the Slider, so with some help from the Theme team I was able to get the instructions in a little bit better shape.
Since I started early today, I was able to wrap up my day just as my son was walking in the door from school. I considered staying online and working more, but I know I need to write and exercise to keep myself me. Posts from other Automatticians in this series have shown me it’s not only okay to sign off at the end of the day, or to take breaks for walks or to watch a baseball game in the middle of the day, but that it’s good to do that.
I did productive work today, but I also thought a lot and recharged. And thanks to that thinking and recharging, I know, as Hemingway always advised writers to know at the end of the day, where I will begin tomorrow.
*My office is a desk in our basement rec room.
In an effort to get to know each other’s work days better, and to share publicly what it is like to work for a distributed company where most of us work from home, some of us at Automattic will be publishing “A Day in the Life” posts on our personal blogs throughout this week. The posts will be tagged #a8cday if you’d like to follow along.
In an effort to get to know each other’s work days better, and to share publicly what it is like to work for a distributed company where most of us work from home, some of us at Automattic will be publishing “A Day in the Life” posts on our personal blogs throughout this week. The posts will be tagged #a8cday if you’d like to follow along.
As for me, here is what my Monday looked like:
6:00: Wake up. Make coffee. Empty dishwasher and pack lunchboxes.
6:30: Snuggle into a cushy chair in our living room with coffee and laptop. Finish up this morning’s Day in the Life: Intro post; log on to Slack and say goodmorafternight to coworkers in the US, UK, Malaysia, Indonesia; catch up on internal P2s (blogs).
7:00: Move downstairs to desk. Log on to live chat. Read through training guidelines and gather resources for 11AM training session. Check in with buddy on Theme team who is helping Happiness in her support rotation this week. Provide support in chat and tickets for:
10:45: Log off chat. Break for snack. Switch over laundry.
11:00: Train two incoming Happiness Engineer trials, along with a new Code Wrangler and a new Theme Wrangler who are starting their Automattic tenure, as all Automatticians do, with a three week Support rotation. Train in a channel in Slack using text chat.
12:30: Ten minute break from training. Drink a V8 and eat some almonds. Switch over more laundry.
12:40: Introduce trainees to how we work through tickets, where to find answers, where to ask for help, what kinds of tools we use. Hope I’m not overwhelming them!
2:10: Wrap up training, break for lunch. Guess what else? Yep. More laundry.
2:45: Log on to live chat. Talk writing with a teammate. Check in with Editorial about helping with Blogging U in November. Troubleshoot infinite scroll issue on test site. Help users:
set up slider on Stay theme; make a note that support doc needs to be updated
navigation bar on mobile site
custom menus
4:00: Log off of chat. Follow up with users on unresolved issues from morning chats. Finish up troubleshooting on test site and submit a bug report for infinite scroll issue.
4:45: Receive notification a bug reported of the weekend has been squashed. Receive feedback regarding infinite scroll issue. Make notes to follow up in the morning.
5:00: Write this post.
6:00: Convince the kids to fold all the laundry (by bribing them with extra screen time). Hang out with family and start thinking about making dinner. Mmmm, spaghetti…
For the month of November I am super excited about another opportunity for this exchange of knowledge: starting Monday November 3, I will be providing support for the Blogging 101: Zero to Hero course. I am giddy for the opportunity. New and experienced bloggers are going to bring a freshness and impart unique perspectives to each other and to those of us helping out. I can’t wait to see how everyone approaches the daily assignments, and I’m eager to help bloggers navigate their WordPress.com dashboards, find themes, fidget with widgets, and press that beautiful blue Publish button.
Butterfly Mind 