HISMD: Ecommerce Director
WFH. Partner (WFH + travels a lot). 2 kids - 10yo & 7yo. Midwest. Mid-30s.
Each Thursday, the “How I Structure My Day” series features women from different industries, with and without kids, with and without partners, with family living with/near them and not, wfh to 1+ hour commutes, etc. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I do!
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The Snapshot
Profession: Ecommerce Director
WFH
Partner: Yes (WFH + travels a lot)
Children: Yes – 2 kids (10yo & 7yo)
Midwest
Mid-30s
Typical Morning:
When my husband is home, he gets up with the kids by 6:30, gets breakfast going, and helps them pick out clothes. I typically get out of bed around 6:45, and the very first thing I do is pour myself a coffee. I've been adding creatine to my coffee for the past several months, and I find it really helps my muscle recovery from exercise, and has made a massive difference in my ability to tolerate the occasional 6 hour night of sleep.
Once I've got my coffee I pack snacks, make sure the kids' backpacks are ready, and help with general encouragement and prodding. Depending on whether they're ready early enough for the bus or we decide to drive them, my husband is out the door with them between 7:05 and 7:30. When my husband travels, I do the morning routine myself, and am more likely to drive the kids to school.
Once the kids are out the door, I try to get the dishwasher unloaded and breakfast cleaned up, and then I work out. I use the Peloton platform and do 20-30 minutes of strength and/or cycling most mornings.
Then I take a shower and get ready for the day.
Depending on a variety of factors (if I drove the kids to school, if I had to wash my hair, how "ready" I decided to get that day) my morning routine takes 45-90 minutes, but I'd say I'm usually at my desk by 9:30.
Morning "Make Life Easier" Hacks
Around the time the kids should be getting dressed, Siri tells us the current and high temperatures. When it's time to start getting shoes on for the bus, Siri reminds the kids to take care of medicine and deodorant, then put their shoes on.
My kids eat school lunch, which definitely makes mornings easier. This summer, we'll need to pack lunch most days, which I'm not looking forward to. I plan to have that be a skill they learn and take on.
Transition Into Work Mode
I'm not great about this, and I love putzing around in the mornings. However, I usually try to have a clear workspace, and I make sure I can sit down without needing to get up for a little while. So I'll make sure I have chapstick, a fresh cup of coffee, a full glass of water, and I'm dressed warmly enough.
I'm a member of a couple different Slack groups that offer informal virtual co-working, so I try to join or start a session by 9:30 to get my work day going.
What My Work Day Looks Like
My company has a very asynchronous culture, and we default to well-organized Slack communication rather than meetings. Some days I have no meetings, and a heavy meeting day for me is 3 hours of meetings. More than half of my meetings are with vendor partners where I'm the client, so I have a lot of latitude to shift or cancel meetings as needed.
Our entire company is less than 50 people, with well-defined responsibilities and little overlap. Most of my work is very self-driven, with input from my manager, so I have both the freedom and the challenge of organizing how I get work done. I have bi-weekly prioritization meetings with my manager, and although we don't go through the status of each project on those calls, I write it all out and then use that as my "to-do" list for the two-week cycle. As smaller things come up in Slack, I flag them as "For Later" until I do them.
On any given day, I'm moving between merchandising and content strategy, content creation, user experience improvements, and back-end admin work. I love being at a smaller company where I have broad responsibilities across my domain, and my focus is constantly changing which keeps me engaged.
Lunch/Snacks
I like to make myself real, balanced meals, and found that when I ate both breakfast and lunch, I was taking up more time than I wanted to, having to clean up twice, and not hungry at dinner time. So I've started eating an earlyish lunch around 11 and just combining those two meals. Having a light meeting schedule and a desk that's steps from the kitchen makes it easy to grab a snack whenever I need to.
Breaks
I'll put "lunch" on my calendar if I have lunch plans or a mid-day appointment, but I don't schedule in breaks since my work schedule is so flexible.
Leaving Work
This varies depending on whether or not my husband is home. The kids need to be picked up at 4:30 so if I'm doing pickup, I typically work right until I need to leave at 4:20. If we don't have evening sports I might sit down and work for another 30-60 minutes when we get home before starting dinner. If my husband picks them up, I'll work until 4:45 or 5, unless we need to eat earlier. It's rare for me to work a full 8 hours at my desk, but because my work requires a lot of strategic and creative thinking, with little busy work, I feel great if I put in 6-7 hours of really focused work a day.
Transition Out of Work Mode
At the end of the day, I try to have a sense of what I'm going to work on the next day. That might look like making myself a quick to-do list, or scheduling myself a 1-2 hour block for the next day. As long as I don't feel like I have open loops without a way to remember them (i.e. marking a Slack message unread), I'm usually able to transition out of work pretty easily. It helps that we don't have a culture of working in the evening or at least expecting responses in the evening.
After Work/Evening Hours
This varies night to night. My younger son is on the swim team that runs through the fall and winter, with 3-4 practices a week. My older son has basketball 1 night a week in the winter, and baseball 3 nights a week in the spring and summer. On nights the kids have sports, we eat pretty early, go to their practice/game, then just chill as a family when we get home.
I also play volleyball a couple nights a week. My husband is really supportive of this and does the bulk of the childcare when he's not traveling (I do more housekeeping and mental load, and this is definitely a shift from years of much more frequent travel).
After the kids go to bed I try to get the house tidied up, especially the kitchen. I like to watch basketball when my team is on, and I read in bed for 20 minutes or so before I go to sleep.
Dinner Time/Meal Tips
I really like to cook, and when the kids were younger and less busy, I cooked a real dinner 4-5 nights a week. Now we have a handful of go-tos for nights when we don't have a lot of time (sometimes we eat as early as 4:40) like snack dinners, pre-made meals from Costco, sheet pan dinners that I'll prep ahead of time, and lots of concession stand hot dogs in the summer! We also eat dinner at our church on Wednesdays, which is great because it's a meal I don't have to plan or cook, and it gives us some pre-planned social time.
I make a dinner plan (and think about what I'll eat for lunch) every weekend, then go grocery shopping. I hate having to run out for groceries mid-week, but luckily my husband is great about picking things up that we've run out of or that they didn't have when I went shopping.
Evening Non-Negotiables
The dishwasher has to be run, and ideally the counters and kitchen table are cleared off and wiped down.
I also can't go to bed without washing my face and doing my skincare—I'm trying to be better about doing this earlier in the evening, because sometimes the inertia of getting up to do it keeps me up later than I want to be.
I charge my phone outside of the bedroom and I always read to fall asleep.
Afternoon/Evening “Make Life Smoother” Tips
Last summer I established bins in our laundry room for each kid's sports uniforms. We often have a mountain of laundry that needs to be folded, so it's really important that we're not looking for a baseball jersey, pants, and specific socks when we need to leave. We try to be diligent about getting uniforms right into their bin when they come out of the dryer, and if a jersey isn't going to be washed between games, it goes right back in the bin.
On sports nights, I'll usually start making dinner while my husband picks up the kids, so it's ready to eat as soon as they get home. If I'm solo, I pick them up a little early so we have enough time, or sometimes we'll hit a drive through. I think it would be so logical to just feed them a snack and eat dinner after sports, but we've always been an early-ish dinner family, so 4:45 dinner just makes more sense to me than 7:30.
Sharing the Load with a Partner
This is a constant struggle for us. I think we both feel like we're doing a lot and don't have enough time for housework specifically, so asking the other for more generally doesn't land well. When things get really out of control my husband is good at doing a massive tidy and I'm better at actually cleaning. I handle almost all of our meal-planning and cooking, and he does more of the childcare and kid sports management. I do most of the appointment scheduling, school communication, and prescription refills, and he handles sports signups, permission slips, etc.
As his work has become more meeting-heavy (and we have so many synced sports calendars), he's more comfortable with a digital calendar and now accepts my invites and sends me invites for the things he schedules. He recently asked me if I could add my volleyball schedule to my google calendar and invite him for visibility, which felt like a major breakthrough!
Things You Do For Fun/You During the Week
Volleyball is my main thing right now! I also enjoy going out to dinner with friends, however now that I'm playing so much volleyball, I get my social time from that as well as the kids' sports. My best friend and I independently signed our kids up for the same swim team this year, and it's been sooo nice to see her 1-2 days a week without having to plan!
Exercise/Body Movement
This is very important to me. I work out at home 3-5 mornings a week, and I play volleyball on average two nights a week.
Outsourcing
Nothing outside of childcare.
We had bi-weekly cleaners for a year or two. When my husband's role shifted to being home more, he told me he could take on cleaning and we canceled the cleaners, but that hasn't exactly panned out. We do our best, and we don't host a lot, so cleaning is just not something we want to spend money on.
I do think I'll push to have somebody mow our lawn this summer. It's a big source of stress for my husband to find the time to do it, and it's such a great job for teens!
Our kids go to after-school care for two hours Monday-Thursday. We're fortunate to have grandparents close by so it's usually easy to find a sitter when we need one (mostly for my volleyball when my husband is traveling), and they're now old enough that it's easy to pay a middle- or high-school neighbor to babysit when needed.
Anything Else the Sharer Wants to Share
While we're in a busy season of life, it's very manageable with the kids’ ages, us both working from home, and my husband traveling less. Up until they started school, it was a totally different story. My husband traveled almost every week, and I worked full time in an office pre-Covid. The ONLY thing that kept things afloat back then is the fact that we had au pairs! This is my number one piece of advice for households with two working parents, especially if you have to go to an office. Like any childcare arrangement, it's not perfect, but I would recommend it 100x over!
That’s a wrap for this one!
Thank you so much to this woman for generously sharing. These publish every Thursday!
A reminder of the ground rules to ensure women continue wanting to share about their days and feel safe doing so.
Encouraging comments always welcome!
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I’m Kelly Nolan, an attorney-turned-time management strategist and mom of two. After experiencing overwhelm as a young patent litigator in Boston, I figured out a time management system to help me show up in the ways that I wanted to at work and at home – without requiring my brain to somehow magically remember it all. I now teach other professional working women how to manage their personal, family, and career roles with less stress and more calm clarity using realistic time management strategies.
My system, the Bright Method, has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, and my work has been published in Forbes, Fast Company, Business Insider, and more. Learn more on my website, come learn bite-sized strategies with me on Instagram, or jump into my free 3-day program.
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