Two Weeks in San Fransisco Alone, A Day in my Life

Two weeks ago I moved from comfort to San Fransisco. I moved away from my home-cooked meals and free rent. I moved to expensive meals and…

Two Weeks in San Fransisco Alone, A Day in my LifeTwo weeks ago I moved from comfort to San Fransisco. I moved away from my home-cooked meals and free rent. I moved to expensive meals and…


Two weeks ago I moved from comfort to San Fransisco. I moved away from my home-cooked meals and free rent. I moved to expensive meals and expensive rent. One week ago I published my thoughts on what it’s like to make this radical change in my life and what my goals were laid out.

One Week in San Fransisco: What it’s Like

Initial Thoughts 

It feels like just yesterday that I said goodbye to my family and moved to San Fransisco for the…medium.com

In part of my “pursuit to happiness” something that I like to do is look at what I do, ask why I do it, then iterate and constantly improve my answers. It makes for great self-conversation. “crazy kid”. In reality, though, it makes me incredibly self-aware. It helps me to find out what I like to do and how to allocate my time throughout the day. I have a hypothesis that most people never find out what they love to do, thus you hear complaints about work life balances and struggle. Don’t let that happen to you, because I sure as hell won’t let it happen to me.

So I think it would be beneficial (at least for me, right) to go over a couple of days this week and figure out what I did and why I did it. I take notes everyday on what I do so this should not be hard…

Let’s go with a random day…Wednesday. Hump-Day. Some people hate Wednesdays. Here’s how it went.

this is based off of the journal I keep on evernote. I have written in it every single day for the past 170 days or so and i highly recommend it.

5:43 am me: “tired af” , “I feel really behind.”

What a start to my day. I guess I was feeling kind of lost.

5:43 to 7:00 am: I try to get a boat load done during this time.

  • I published a bunch of words. Call it a blog post — it looks like this:

You Got Your Internship, Now What
It does not stop after signingmedium.com

7:30 to 8:40 am:

After getting off the bus, I walk about 10/15 minutes in downtown SF. I pass the Yelp Building, Linkedin, Optimizely, and make it to where the office I work at is (on 2nd and bryant). From there I go up to the 5th floor terrace and find a place to sit (I am always the only one up there). I find this to be a great place to think and write. And so I like to use the next part of my day before work up there writing a blog post or whatever else I have to do.

Now another thing I use this time for is meeting / talking to other people. I love meeting in the morning at a coffee shop or something and I do it during this time.

Please let me know if you ever want to chat! It is one of my favorite ways to learn.

8:40 am to 6:15 pm:

I am at my internship working hard! Adding value or whatever you want to call it. Lots of fun stuff. Oh and I eat, that is important.

6:15 to 8:00 pm:

During this time one of two things generally happens…I’ll go through both.

The first option is that I meet someone for dinner or just to chat. Again another great time to meet people! I have met with 3 people during this time this week and learned a ton. Remember, formerly strangers, now people I love to talk to!

The second option is I use this time to go to the gym. I set a goal for myself to go to the gym 4x a week and I did that this week! Only the start. But I know how important it is to be healthy.

8:30 pm — :

I use the remaining part of my night to take the bus back home, eat dinner, and do some other work for loose ends that I have. Still ironing out this book-end.


So, after all that analysis, what are some conclusions I have about my day.

Well, there are two that jump out at me:

The first thing I think most people are thinking…is that every single day? Don’t you get bored? Too much routine?

My answer is no I don’t get bored and yes that is too much routine. I need to add some variability to my life. Though I try to do that by talking to unique and different people everyday, I also need to expose myself to different environments on a day to day basis. And lately I have been taking the same path to work and home but I need to switch it up. Noted.

The second thing that you may be thinking … is wow kind of a lot of stuff. My answer to that is that I think of things in their smallest possible form. I think you can get anything done if you break it into really small pieces. So in my morning to-do list I break it into as many pieces as possible so I can do as many as I can. A piece may be sharing something on twitter. But as long as it’s a piece I can check it off.

I like to start my day with a power hour of sorts. To me that is winning the day. I get so much done to start that everything else are sprinkles on the cake 🙂

Another thing — I have a lot of urgency.

Of course, reach out if you have any questions. Thanks so much for reading!

twitter — @jrdngonen

Tagged in Productivity, Tech, Life, The Mission

By jordangonen on June 25, 2016.

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Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.