We spend too much time at work, and it shouldn‘t be controversial to say that. The average employed American between the ages of 24 and 54 spends more hours a day working than on any other activity. And why? For the privileged, our time and labor will, at the very least, be compensated with a wage on which we can afford to live. For even fewer among us, it will also offer intangingible meaningful rewards: a sense of purpose, an opportunity for creative expression, lifelong friendship, whatever.
But what actually goes into a job? Below, nine people working in fields ranging from professional childcare to full-time academia explain how they spend their workdays.
Bread baker
Jerry Price, 30
Portland, OR
What is your to-do list on an average workday?
I’m in charge of making and baking four types of dough and bread in the morning and trying to get those out in a timely manner. The sourdoughs are the first thing that come out of the oven, around 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. And then we go on to the baguettes and French bread and ciabatta.
The sourdough gets made the day before by somebody else because it has to sit in the retarder and ferment and build flavor overnight. When I first get to work, I make the French bread in the bowl, I make the dough, and then I pull out the sourdough from the night before to see where it’s at. Maybe it needs to sit on the floor for 15 to 20 minutes because you gotta kind of let it wake up a little bit.
About the time I get done baking the sourdough is when the baguette dough is ready to go and be shaped into baguettes. I would say on a busy day we do close to 200 to 300. And then on a slower day we probably do about 160, 180. It’s usually just two [of us working]. On heavier days — like Mother’s Day or Thanksgiving, mostly holidays — we have three people knocking out the baguettes.
What are your typical hours?
If I’m working the first shift, it’s usually from midnight to about 9 a.m. And then if I’m working the afternoon shift, our shift starts at 8 a.m. and we can get done with the dough around 3 p.m.; then we usually end up spending an hour cleaning, so we get done around 4 p.m. I’m definitely not the boss so I don’t get to set the schedule. But I working four ten-hour shifts now, so I get three days off.
What do you spend most of your workday doing?
Putting a lot of dough in the oven and then pulling it out. Baking is a lot of hurrying up and doing a lot of stuff in a few short moments and then just waiting for the bread or the dough to do its thing. So a lot of it is waiting, but it’s all time management. We can kind of fill in certain other tasks; like, there’s cleaning or we weigh out stuff for the other doughs that are gonna be made. I hate being behind as a baker so as much thinking ahead as I can do is what I try and do.
What do you find to be the hardest part of your job?
In my earlier days it was the hours. Now, it’s really hard to say. I really do generally love my job. I’ve been a bread baker now for six years. I would say… dealing with burnt product. A lot of work goes into this simple loaf of bread, a lot of time and energy goes into it. In the midst of all this multitasking, sometimes stuff gets left in the oven. You don’t set a timer. And so just when you finally see this burnt product come out of the oven, it’s just kind of a crushing blow. So that’s what eats away at me a lot. Because it’s such a simple thing to do to take it out of the oven, right? And yet here I am just failing miserably at it.
A lot of my job is repetitive motions, so I get weird aches and pains in my wrists and my back from rolling out 300 baguettes. That’s the negative side of it, but really the job isn't hard. There’s a reason why it’s been around for thousands of years.
“Watching the panic of families wanting the best care for their loved one have to weigh [insurance decisions] in an emergency is something I can never get used to.” — Nia Navarro, registered nurse
Lawyer
Christine Doelling, 30
New York City, NY
What is your to-do list on an average workday?
I always start my day by answering emails and recording my time entries for the day before. From there my day varies. I normally have big and small legal research questions looming. I often do trademark searches, which involves sifting through about 300 brand names or logos and writing risk assessment letters that will be sent to my clients. Often I’m drafting response letters to cease and desist demands or calling clients to get background facts on specific issues. When I’m working on a litigation, I often have tons of documents to read through and summarize or organize depending on the need.
What are your typical hours?
When I’m slammed I work from about 10 a.m. to 2 a.m., but if things are slow it’s more like 9:30 a.m. to 6:30pm.
What do you spend most of your workday doing?
Currently I’m doing a ton of legal research and litigation strategy, but if I’m doing trademark work, for example, I spend much more time writing letters, doing online research about competitor product offerings or drafting licensing agreements.
What do you find to be hardest part of your job?
Most of it is challenging, but I love learning about the technical sides of my practice. What I find hard is managing different expectations and personality types. There is a constant feeling that you are being evaluated, and everyone wants something slightly different. Clients, partners, senior associates — they all come with different preferences and personality quirks. But I think getting good at reading people quickly and learning how to adjust my performance to meet different needs at a rapid-fire pace will make me a better attorney, and probably human, in the long run.
Speedskater
Sugar Todd, 26
Salt Lake City, UT
What is your to-do list on an average workday?
A typical day for me would be to wake up maybe 7 a.m. and then drive to the Utah Olympic Oval, our training facility. We’ll have a morning practice, about 45 minutes warming up off-ice. And then we’ll have an hour-and-a-half to two-hour practice on ice. It might be really hard intervals, it might be extensive endurance laps, it might be sprints-specific.
After that we’ll cool down and get some treatments from our team trainer. I, for example, have knee issues and back issues. So if either of those are bothering me, go see him and get it iced or massaged or worked on. By then it’s usually lunch time. And then maybe I’ll take a nap in our locker room for a half-hour or so. And then just kill some time until our afternoon workout starts, which will start maybe around 2 or 3 p.m. depending on how late the morning went. In the afternoon we might have weights, so we’ll be in the weight room for maybe two hours. And then cool down from that, drive home, have dinner, just relax, and go to bed.
What are your typical hours?
Maybe 8 a.m. until I usually leave the Oval maybe like 4:30 p.m. or 5.pm.
What would you say you spend most of your workday doing?
I guess working out. Whether it’s actually being on ice or being on a bike or being in the weight room or being in the pool, most of my day is spent working out in some capacity.
What do you find to be the hardest part of your job?
Probably being resilient. I’m playing the long game here, you know? I work out for four years in the hopes that I have a really good race on one day at the Olympics. So staying motivated day in and day out, and remembering that I'm working towards this really big goal that’s pretty far down the road and just being able to wake up every morning with a positive attitude.
“One of the boys has also been digging into his diaper lately and gets poop everywhere.” — Karin Argueta, private nanny
Registered nurse
Nia Navarro, 30
Abu Dhabi, UAE
What is your to-do list on an average workday?
Working in an emergency department, it’s hard to predict what kind of day it will be and what to expect at any moment. The nurses see patients first to assess whether their symptoms are emergent versus urgent versus you’ve been googling too much and need some reassurance. We do this by checking vital signs, listening to breath sounds, and asking detective-like questions to anticipate the direction of care and to get things started for the doctors. And by collecting blood work or urine samples, starting an IV, getting an ECG, ordering X-rays, checking visual acuity or preparing for a procedure. This list, of course, can change significantly based on the patient.
What are your typical hours?
We work shift work: 12 hour days, nights, and mid shifts. The mid shifts cover the peak hours with the most patient traffic.
What do you spend most of your workday doing?
The best part of my day is getting to see a perspective of people that most people would never experience, learning their stories and sharing moments where people are most vulnerable. Generally people come in through those doors in high anxiety situations. Once we’ve stabilized them, we get to educate both families and patients. Making sure they understand all the jargon, finding resources for their safety or shelter, and preventing further illness or injury, whether that's through medication administration, hospital admission or lifestyle change or support.
What do you find to be hardest part of your job?
The business and commodification of health care is for sure the hardest part. I come from a Canadian universal system, so moving to a private US-run institution in the Middle East has been a weird transition. The differences of demographics of patients attempting to receive care and realizing their insurance isn’t covered... That and watching the panic of families wanting the best care for their loved one have to weigh that decision in an emergency is something I can never get used to.
Private nanny
Karin Argueta, 26
Alexandria, VA
What is your to-do list on an average workday?
I nanny three boys during the week: the two baby boys are 1 and the oldest boy is 5. We have a bit of a routine but our days never are really planned. Mornings include playing together, snack and bottle, and getting the boys ready for a nap. When playing, I like activities that help with both motor and cognitive skills. Sometimes it can get hard to focus on those things because babies are obviously unpredictable! There are constant accidents, spills, poops, all that good stuff. I've been thrown up on quite a few times, so I always keep extra clothes in the car, just in case. After naptime, I get their lunches ready and we go for a walk before picking up the older boy from school. Some days he has after school activities, like piano, so we walk over to his class. After we get back home in the afternoon, I help the oldest boy with his homework, and the babies usually play, have another snack, and maybe nap again.
What are your typical hours?
8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. is my regular day. Usually it’s 45 hours a week for my full-time nanny job. And then some side babysitting throughout the week with other families, an additional 10 to 15 hours.
What do you spend most of your workday doing?
My day is spent making sure the boys get what they need. Feedings, diaper changes, play time, getting outdoors. I try to work on language development since they are just learning how to make certain sounds and understand some basic sign language. When they nap, I get a little bit of a break and usually I'm just as worn out as them, so I end up taking a cat nap. I love being able to go out when we want and spend time in the park or just going on walks. I tried working in an office once and it just wasn't for me. I love children and I love having spontaneous days, so I feel like my career choice is perfect for me.
What do you find to be hardest part of your job?
The hardest part right now is trying to let the boys run around and play, while avoiding them getting hurt. My biggest fear is having one of the boys get hurt badly, especially now that they're mobile and into climbing everything. They learn through play and exploring, though, so it's not like I can keep them in a giant bubble. One of the boys has also been digging into his diaper lately and gets poop everywhere when I put him down for nap, so that's been crazy to clean up.
I have had instances where the parents and I just don't click, but thankfully this hasn't happened in a while. I have been working with children since I was 18 and have had plenty of great families, but in the past I have had parents be cold or disregard me. You want to feel appreciated, valued, and acknowledged because you are in their homes nurturing, caring for, and ultimately educating their children every day.
I also hate putting the families I work for in inconvenient situations. It's a lot of pressure when I'm sick or want to travel, because taking off from work directly affects them and their schedules. I often feel guilty taking days off and am horrible at taking time to go to the doctor for check-ups or appointments, because I use my time off for vacation instead.
“Most of my job takes place in my head. To call this labor makes it sound grander than it is.” — Deborah Baker, non-fiction writer
Designer
Anthony Bryant, 31
Portland, OR
What is your to-do list on an average workday?
As a senior concept designer at Nike, I'm creating art direction for video and photo shoots, then art directing on set for those shoots. Building presentations that the art direction feeds into, creating consumer insights, collaborating with product designers to build seasonal product stories (very corporate). Google searching for inspiration, researching interesting places, things, people, events to get a sense of what's happening in the world. And a lot of unnecessary emails.
What are your typical hours?
My daily hours are 9 a.m. until around 6 p.m. Pretty standard 9-5 stuff.
What do you spend most of your workday doing?
I spend most of my day coming up with creative and sometimes not so creative ways to convey an idea or ‘concept.’ Most of the time that means sitting in meetings discussing ideas with my team and then building presentations with all the material. Also: subduing my cynicism long enough to appear productive.
What do you find to be the hardest part of your job?
Working in a corporate environment means a lot of personalities involved in projects, which slows down creative momentum, which I feel is difficult and unnatural. So basically people.
PhD student
Marcel Rosa-Salas, 26
Brooklyn, NY
What is your to-do list on an average workday?
I start my workday by checking my Google alerts, which are based on key words related to my research. (I study marketers.) It's a quick way for me to see if there is any trending news on the topics I'm interested in. I also get email blasts from different industry trade publications that I check out in the morning. I create a rotating series of task lists based on long- and short-term goals, such as course readings, papers and exams for the short term, as well as articles I want to try to publish and conferences I want to present at for the long term.
What are your typical hours?
It's great to not have to go into an office everyday. Grad school isn't your typical 9-5 so I've had to learn how to create my own hours but also leave time for myself to just do nothing. I find the best ideas come when one is just a little bit bored, so stepping away, relaxing and doing something else is also important to me. I usually try to be up by at least 8:30 a.m. so that I can start working by 9 a.m. I’m definitely not a night owl when it comes to doing work. My brain turns off by 9 p.m. That's when I watch all my TV shows!
What do you spend most of your workday doing?
During the school year spend most of my day reading and writing. I do most of my course reading on the train. I say that the MTA is actually my office; I get a lot of work done in transit. Courses that are seminars are typically two to three hours each. When I'm not in courses or doing course assignments I'm on the library catalogue figuring out all the books and articles related to my research that I haven't read yet. Soon I will be “in the field” for my dissertation research, which for anthropologists means that you are no longer in the classroom but are immersed in your research location fulltime.
What do you find to be hardest part of your job?
One challenging aspect of being in the academia industry is its economics. A great deal of my time is spent pitching the value of my research to foundations. Also, the academia job market is frighteningly precarious. As an academic, at least once you get your PhD, you are kind of like a traveling salesperson, going from job to job until you find yourself a tenure track job-for-life situation.
Getting a PhD comes with the expectation that you will create new, important knowledge and that you are an expert on something. The pressure to feel as if you know everything there is to know about a particular topic is daunting. Our knowledge will always be partial; objectivity and total knowledge are myths. And I personally have other interests and passions outside of my research that I want to leave time and brain space for exploring. As a woman of color in a field such as anthropology where someone who looks like me has historically been treated as a research specimen, I am especially attuned to the politics of being considered an expert, and have to be especially aware of how my expertise will be perceived and judged because of my identity.
The harsh reality of the economics of the academia industry, especially in the social sciences, is that often times social strife and the pain of marginalized people become ways for intellectuals to create careers for themselves. This might sound cynical — in many ways it is. The ethics of studying people's lives and hardships is fraught, to say the least. Activism might not be everyone’s goal, but it has been hard for me to witness for example, topics like European colonialism be innocuously discussed as if it were not an ongoing source of hardship and oppression for real people but a conceptual abstraction.
“As an academic, once you get your PhD, you are kind of like a traveling salesperson.” — Marcel Rosa-Salas, PhD student
Non-fiction writer
Deborah Baker, 58
Location varies
What is your to-do list on an average workday?
It depends on where I am in a particular project. At the outset of one, I’m researching in the library, calling up books or trying to track down where I might find letters, diaries, and photographs. Or I'm traveling to places to visit archives or settings or people who remember the people or events I’m writing about. Once I have a good idea of where the book is going, I write a proposal sketching out the general outline of the narrative and proceed from there. At the moment I'm revising a manuscript, trying to absorb feedback I’ve had from my editors and also from people whose opinion I respect. Days go by very quickly. To give myself a break from thinking about it, which starts as soon as I wake up, I will take on outside writing projects, like a book review or an essay.
What are your typical hours?
I get up at 6:15 a.m., swim at the Y if I'm in Brooklyn, or at the public pool if I'm in India. I'm generally at my desk by 8 a.m. and don't leave it again until about 6 p.m., except for a break for lunch or to reheat my coffee. Regular office hours.
What do you spend most of your workday doing?
These days it is fine tuning sentences or figuring out if I need to cut some details or re-arrange the order of sentences in which a paragraph unfolds. A month ago it was reframing entire chapters, moving stuff around, paying attention to the pace and asking myself whether, in this bit or that bit, I was expecting too much from the reader. Most of my job takes place in my head. To call this labor makes it sound grander than it is.
What do you find to be hardest part of your job?
I used to work in an office, commuting everyday, going to meetings, writing memos, having business lunches, making pitches. Though I liked being part of something bigger than myself, I found that hard. Because I feel very lucky to be doing this work, I’m reluctant to call anything about it hard, apart from the struggle to make money from my books. That's endless.
If I was pressed to answer I would say that the hardest part for me of being a writer is finding a subject that will sustain my interest for the three or so years it takes to get from initial idea to complete manuscript, but also one which I feel I can convince other people (editors, readers) to be as engaged with as I am.
Financial analyst
Kenneth Thompson, 26
New York City, NY
What is your to-do list on an average workday?
I work on a real estate finance team; we typically provide debt in the form of a mortgage loan or mezzanine loan to institutions that own or are acquiring commercial real estate. In terms of the types of deals we might look at that might be all sorts of different property types: office, retail, industrial, multi family, hotels, self storage, and in some cases some weirder commercial real estate.
I’d say in terms of to-do lists a lot of it is legal work that needs to get done. In addition to loan documents and other offering documents that might need to get furnished, we also have confidentiality agreements that need to get looked at. Working at a large bank unfortunately there is a lot of process. Other teams need certain information that adds different things to the process in terms of what I need to do to get a specific deal done.
What are your typical hours?
Typically I work from 9 a.m. to about 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. but that can vary pretty drastically. I’d say I spend a decent amount of time with clients, whether they have meetings on site or they may be in town and you go out for a drink or dinner, that’s very much a part of our job as well. Sometimes that 8,9,10 p.m. starts to look like midnight or 1 a.m. or 2 a.m.
What do you spend most of your workday doing?
In terms of my daily responsibilities, I’d say I focus my efforts on primarily on two things: responding to requests for loans. We will take a request, look at the property, look at the cash flow, the viability of that cash flow, look at the tenancy at a certain property, understand what's going on in the market where that property is located, and then ultimately think about what are some of the risks in the transaction and how we can structure for those risk through our loans. I spend half of my time working on these requests and ultimately sending out term sheets, maybe anywhere from 3 to 15 pages would be a formal response to a request.
The second part of what I spend my time doing is actually working on loans where we’ve gotten through the initial terms with the borrower, they like our terms, they agree to move forward with funding a loan. Every time you get a deal you have to understand its nuances, understand how it’s different. What I do appreciate is you really have to understand what the risks are and how the loan protects you from those risks. Telling that story is probably the most important part of what I’m asked to do on a daily basis.
What do you find to be hardest part of your job?
In terms of the hardest part of my job I think it’s the focusing on so many different things. Developing relationships at the same time as trying to do work is the hard part. I think the relationship part of it is really the key part because as you’re trying to focus on what do I spend my time on and how can I be most efficient, I think where you have strong relationships is often where you end up spending your time.
