Meeting days: Dominated by a weekly or bimonthly project meeting, for example, for every two hours of meeting time, allow one hour for preparation. More if you’re going to give a quick presentation on something. You’ll very certainly need to send out several preliminary emails to ensure that people are prepared and not wasting time. Any unusual supporting documentation will need to be prepared. Top management’s high-stakes reporting sessions are among the highlights of exceptional meeting days (or pitch days for startups). An hour or two of follow-up work is normally included in every fruitful meeting day: summarising conclusions, processing follow-up actions, and so on.
Big-picture thinking: These are the days that make everything worthwhile. You take a stack of blank paper to your favorite coffee shop. The low-level news and project work has been developing a higher-level scenario awareness in your thoughts for the last few weeks or months that something isn’t quite right at the 50,000-foot level. You’re going to coax it out of her. It usually takes 4 to 8 hours. “What should our China strategy be?” “Do we need to care about mobile?” “Is our team balanced, or do we need to reconsider resources?” are some of the questions you might be considering.
Vision Board Meetings: These aren’t the days of big-picture thinking. These are the days of product visioning. This is a wireframe day in software when you sketch up a fully thought-through feature idea. You are not examining an abstract problem, as you were in the days of big-picture thinking. You’re giving folks a very tangible (though fictitious) vision to react to. Because you’re also the UX designer in a small team, this may be considered an early-stage design. This is more of a “concept exploration” design in larger teams, which fleshes out all the consequences of a major portion of the project/product roadmap.
Geeky Meetings: If you work in product or project management, there’s a good chance you have some technical talents that you enjoy using. So, if you get an opportunity to indulge, this are another type of pleasurable day. It could be anything as simple as establishing a market demand model in Excel. Alternatively, sitting down to crunch numbers from a trove of accumulated analytics data. Alternatively, you may use a specialist tool to conduct what-if planning scenarios
People Days: Days dominated by decisions on hiring and staffing (as a leader or as a participant), interviewing, and so on. Other people’s days are spent dealing with motivation concerns, sensitive 1:1 interactions with disgruntled employees or bosses, and so on. These are some of the most crucial, high-leverage days of the year. If you get these days right, the rest of the year will be a breeze. If you get things incorrect, you’re in for a world of hurt. Some PMs adore this work, while others despise it.
Customer Days: Days spent visiting, emailing, or otherwise interacting with potential or present customers, where you may be pitching and persuading, troubleshooting and providing customer assistance, or surveying and questioning them.