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Normally, I wake up around 7 am every day. Usually, it's by my kitten in the household, as she is still learning to let me sleep through the night and to sleep until I want to wake up. Right now, she's basically asking me to pet her and play with her. She doesn't really care. She has to learn that, though.
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So, after I wake up, I usually lay in my bed and play on my phone. My cats would then come to me and start trying to cuddle with me and ask me to pet them. They're absolutely adorable, and I just love them both to death. At 7:30 am, this sound will attract my cats. I really love my auto feeder because I can schedule any time, any portion, and it really saves me the trouble from getting out of my bed to feed my cats. However, I do have a new kitten in the household, and I only have one pet feeder, so that's why I still have to get up and feed my kitten her kitten food. She will try to steal food from her sister, but since her sister is one year old, so it becomes difficult for her to get the nutrients that she needs if she only eats adult food, which is why I have to get up early and feed her because she's still a kitten. So, really, I have to start teaching her this is eating time. What I do is I just grab a cable and place it between my fingers to attract her to tell her, "Now it's time to eat." Then she will come and try to eat some food off of her plate, but I guess not today. While my cats eat their food and are distracted, I will go to the bathroom and start my morning routine and brush my teeth. Evelyn is an indoor cat, but she likes to go outside to the yard. I and I will let her go out and just roam around in the fenced backyard. I'm not really too worried because I've taught her not to run away. Evelyn really enjoys the outside. While she's doing that, I will start feeding my cat grass right by the window. It's a very pleasant morning for me. I get to really just take things slow since I work from home remotely. Evelyn really loves the outside, which is why I have to be the one to go out and fetch her. Normally, I go out and grab her and then just place her on the floor. Then she would know that outside time is over for now, and I need to get ready for my day.
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Wednesday is trash day in my neighborhood, so I really have to take care of everything garbage-wise early in the morning because the truck comes around 12 pm. I'll be in meetings with clients, and that's why I have to take care of everything in the morning.
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And at 8:20, after I've taken care of most things around the household, I would start checking my emails for anything that came from the clients overnight or anything that happened early in the morning. And this is also when I check the data processing for the financial data that we process for our clients and make sure they run successfully. If not, it might be a difficult conversation to have with the client during client meetings today. So, personally, I believe that if you're joining a startup, you have to understand two things: one, why does your company exist, and two, what problems is your product, is your company solving? And for us, we exist because digital companies, they spend a lot of time interacting with PayPal and Stripe and Recurly, those payment solutions. And every day, they incur hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of transactions. How can they really gather those data, process those data, and then recognize revenue? Currently, they either have to build everything in-house or just try to use Excel to handle from the reports that they gather, but you really make a lot of mistakes that way. And that's what we do best, and that's why we exist. If there isn't anything urgent from the client or everything's going smoothly, then I would spend my morning checking the stock market. If everything looks good from that end, then I'll spend a few minutes playing a Spike Rush in Valorant so I can feel relaxed and ready for the workday. At around 9:00 a.m., I will start focusing on my work because most of the co-workers are based out of San Francisco and California area in general, so they work Pacific Time, while I'm based out of Austin. So, in the morning, it's really good time for some deep work sessions. The thing at a startup is that you're not really doing just the thing that you're hired to do. For example, I actually interviewed for the Product Manager position but got hired as the Solutions Architect. But right now, I'm doing Project Management work because the needs of the business shift constantly, and sometimes you just really have to be flexible and handle different job responsibilities, which for my personality, I absolutely enjoy because I get to practice different skill sets and grow in different areas. Right now, my primary responsibilities are to follow up on client calls, make sure I jot down all the action items so my lead Solutions Architect can perform the configurations they need. At the same time, to send a to-do list for my clients, things like they have to send the right data, they have to send the data that we need in the format that we need, so I can keep them accountable and keep the project on time. It sounds easy on paper, but since our startup is growing quickly and we're taking on a lot of clients, it just became really difficult to really follow up on every single client for every single meeting. So, the SAs, the Solutions Architects, they don't really have the time or the energy to handle so many clients at the same time, and also deal with the Project Management type of work. That's why we wanted to have a dedicated Project Manager on the implementation team so we can keep everything on track. Recently, I transitioned back to Product Manager, focusing on improving our implementation platform for the Solutions Architects so we can speed up our implementation process and deliver our product to our clients quicker. If you're curious on what it's like working as a Product Manager, feel free to follow the channel. I will be putting out a new video describing my day-to-day as a Product Manager at a startup.
So, after I finish my deep work session in the morning, around 11:30 a.m., which is about 9:30 Pacific Time, we will attend our stand-up. This is where the engineers on the implementation team, and the Solutions Architect, and the Project Manager like me, and our CTO will get together and discuss our progress on our clients and if there are any blockers. We will raise it during this session so we can get them resolved. After stand-up, it's about 12 o'clock my time. So, this is around lunchtime for me because I make curry over the weekend. So now I'll be heating it up and just cooking some rice noodles so I can just get a quick bite before my client meeting in the afternoon. I know that I have back-to-back-to-back meetings in the afternoon, so I won't have time to really grab anything in between. So, it's nice to have an early lunch than to have nothing at all during those long sessions. After lunch, I would play a quick game of Valorant so I can be prepared for my afternoon. I usually eat lunch for about 20 minutes and play one round of Spike Rush, which takes about 10 minutes. So, from 12 to 12:30 is considered my personal time. However, I do sometimes do work lunches depending on how busy I am for that day. But for Wednesdays, usually it's just a lot of client meetings, so that means after lunch, I can relax a little bit and play a round of Valorant so I can get ready for my afternoon.
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Since it's right after lunch and it's considered afternoon, I like to chew a piece of caffeine gum so I can get some caffeine in my system quickly and stay alert and awake for my client meetings. And the gum I like to use is called Zynergy. I find them relatively effective, and maybe after chewing for 5 to 10 minutes, I will feel more awake so I can be more alert for whatever is coming up in the afternoon. Since it's client meetings, I also change into my polo shirt so I can be more presentable to the clients. But normally, I will have my camera off, so it doesn't really matter. But sometimes I will have to turn on my camera so I can greet them and ask them any questions and follow up with them about a particular task. So that's why I like to dress fancy. One really cool thing about working at a startup is that we try out awesome gadgets. And one of the things we do use is the virtual office called Gather. Gather.town is basically an office space where you can control your avatar and walk around the space, and it's really, really fun and very interesting. Good thing is that you can go to people and start talking to them like you're in basically real life, and then you can start video conferencing, and you can go into a room, and only the people in the room can talk to each other. All those great stuff. You can customize your character. My character wears a hat, just like I do. And you also have a pet in the office. Right now, it's dog only. I look forward to seeing cats in the office. And if you pet the dog, the dog will follow you around. Just absolutely adorable. So, since it's a virtual office, someone can just walk up to you and start talking with you, and that's what happened here. One of the new employees who joined the team after me was asking about a question on data completeness and data validation, and what are the actual procedures to confirm those. So, with my experience, I explained some things that she needed to ask the client and the way to ask them so we can make sure that we receive all the data and make sure all of the data they sent are exactly the way we receive them. So, I really enjoyed the culture we currently have at the startup. It's very collaborative, and everybody is helping each other out. There really isn't a lot of office politics yet because everybody's so busy with work and focusing on growing the company and developing the product and make sure that we hit our milestones and and hit our goals. It's very different from the consulting culture that I've been through, where you really had to think about your quote-unquote career moves when you joined the company, who, which MD, which to build relationship with so you can move up to become a senior consultant quicker, so you can get promoted to manager within five years, and four years, so you can start building your book of business and things like that, where everything is kind of like a like a race, and then you're trying to beat out your peer. While in this environment at my startup, everybody is focusing on growing the product and gaining new customers because that's that's really fun. It really is a lot of fun to try to build something with your own hands and with a group of people who believe in the vision and trust the mission of the company.
So, around 5:40, I will make a quick HEB run to grab my dinner. HEB is basically like Walmart or like Trader Joe's, but for Texas. I'm not sure if that makes sense. I go to HEB on Wednesdays because they have $7 sushi. $7 sushis are cheap, and they are plentiful, and I like to eat like dinner at least twice a week so I can feel more energetic about myself. And after a quick run to HEB, I will head back home and do a, you know, clean up for the day so I can be ready for tomorrow. So, during my dinner, I will start listening in on the recording of the client's meeting for the day and start compiling notes for what to send to the clients and to the Solutions Architect so we can prioritize that during our meeting tomorrow. And today, I'm working a little bit late because I needed to present something to the Head of Product to showcase what would be some of the use cases for a dashboard that we are going to build to monitor our implementation runs. As I mentioned earlier in the video, I transitioned back to Product Management recently, and this is one of the initiatives that I needed to focus on so I can provide value to my Solutions Architects. It's now 8 o'clock. I'm a little tired, so um, I will be probably done for the day, even though I still have some deliverables to deliver tomorrow. And I do hope that I get to finish it. Um, judging from my meetings for tomorrow, I might have a hard time, so I'm gonna have to start a little bit early for tomorrow. We'll have to see.
So, after I finish working, normally I would play a few games of Valorant, then spend some time working on my side hustle, which is the Shopify store, and then do a little bit of editing of my YouTube videos and my Instagram accounts so I can be ready for posting content on a regular basis. Then I will just sit on my bed and just watch TV for the rest of the night. Usually, that comes about around 10:30. Around 12:30, that's when I would just stop watching TV and playing on my phone, and it'll be ready for bed. Lights out, and just say goodnight to everyone.
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