A few weeks ago, I decided to keep track of how I spent my time during a product launch day at work. I thought it would be an interesting exercise and might yield some valuable insights to what things required my attention that day.
With the different responsibilities that a community manager has, and the different priorities that we sometimes need to juggle, this isn't indicative of what a day might look like for all community managers, but did help me realize how much of my day was just spent responding to messages, answering questions, and interacting with our community across various channels. It's not always a difficult task to do, but on launch days when there is a lot of activity, it can be very time-consuming and took a lot of energy to keep up with.
For reference, this was March 12th, the day we launched the Daggerheart NEXUS character tools alongside Critical Role's playtest of the game.
9AM: Start morning routine (breakfast, coffee, take the dog out, etc.)
10AM: Double check Socials/Discord/Forums/Support desk before the launch
10:15AM: Pre-launch rollout (I did a quick double check that everything was working correctly and looked good)
11:AM: Announcements go-live
11:05AM: Post-launch team call to monitor for any performance issues and debrief
11:30AM: Monitoring Socials/Discord/Forums/Support desk
1:30PM: Took a break for lunch
2:30PM: Prep for Discord Office Hours
3PM: Discord Office Hours
3:45PM: Schedule social posts for the afternoon/evening
4PM: Ticketed a handful of bug reports
4:15PM: Monitoring Socials/Discord/Forums/Support desk
5PM: Prep for evening stream
5:30PM: Extended break for dinner
7:30PM: Stream pre-show
8PM: Produce Stream
10PM: Post-show wrap-up
10:30PM: Turn off my PC for the night
Let me know if you found this type of post interesting! It's not something I normally do, but the practice was eye-opening to me about the amount of time that I just spent interacting with people online. If you tried to do this at your job, do you think you would find you spent more time on specific tasks that you didn't expect?