I enjoyed reading Shawn Blanc’s interview with Daniel Jalkut. I had the pleasure of working personally with Daniel when he acquired MarsEdit from us, and got to know him a little bit through that process (although never met in person).

One question that caught my eye – Shawn asked him what an average day looks like, and this was Daniel’s response:

That said, I’m still pretty disorganized in this regard, so in all honesty, a typical day for me is to wake up and immediately start working. The hours then surrender to tackling bug fixes, implementing features, responding to customer support inquiries, and trying to squeeze in some socializing via chat and Twitter.

Left to my own devices I will work all day and into the night, so I’ve developed some tricks to get myself away from the computer. Forcing myself to take a shower, make lunch, go to the gym, etc., are good ways of punctuating the work with other activities. This is something I hope to write more about in my blog, because as I said, it fascinates me.

It’s funny to read this…when NewsGator was just me, and I was still running it all in my house, this was exactly my situation. I found I had to have a “routine” – I would shower in the morning by 11am at the latest, and I would nearly always go have lunch with friends (or at very least get out of the house and eat). Otherwise, I would find myself getting hungry about 3pm, have a quick snack, and the next thing I would know it would be midnight and I’d be hungry again, wondering where the day went.

And there’s an advantage to all those lunches – many of the folks I ate with gave me some free consulting over burritos, and now work at NewsGator. :-)