a day in the life

I’m Joe, a director at dandolo. I arrived here in Melbourne planning an eighteen month stint before heading home to my native New Zealand. It’s been about eight years now. I’m still here and not going anywhere. 

Here’s an example of a typical Wednesday for me. 

5:50am 

Not my preferred time to wake, but my kids are early risers. They’re one and five. I spend the next couple of hours hanging with them. There’s books, drawing and lego. 

8:15am 

Out the door and headed to the office. Two days a week I work from home so I can do drop offs and pickups at daycare and school. But other days I take the train into work and use a rare quiet moment to read or listen to news. 

9:30am 

First meeting of the day. I catch up with Stacey, who is at home, and Bo who is in the office. They’re the core team for two major early childhood reform projects and we catch up quickly a couple of times a week so they can fill me in and I can help talk through any tricky issues they might be working on. 

9:53am 

I duck out of our meeting when I see a long time client’s number pop up on my phone. They’re in a bit of a pickle and want to know if we can help out with some very quick analysis. I promise we can, but that I’ll need to figure out who is free and what kind of timeframe might be reasonable. I’ll email them back later in the day. 

10:00am 

Ghosting with Lambrini and Birdie. Ghosting is our term for working through what we want to say in a report. We often do that by drawing the slides we’re planning to make up on the whiteboard, a bit like a cartoon script. And then filling in the ‘lede’ for each. That’s the single sentence running across the top that conveys the ‘so what’ of what’s on the page. A busy reader should be able to just read the ledes and get the main points of the report all the same. It’s a fun and collaborative process as we talk through different possible structures and narratives. 

10:04am 

I’m relieved to see the coffee orders channel light up on Teams because Nadya and JP are offering to do a run. I’m finally in the habit of washing my keep cup in advance so I flick of my order mid-ghosting. 

11:30am 

There’s a request for proposal from a large government organisation. We’re not sure whether it’s one we should go for. Rachel and I usually make these decisions but we’ve pulled in Tom because he’s got some subject matter expertise. We talk through whether we want to do the job, whether we’ve got the capability to do it, whether we think we’d have a good shot at winning and whether we’d have enough capacity to do the work. Rach is a big fan of Formula 1 so I humour her by quipping that I don’t think we’d be in pole position in the race for the job. In the end, we decide this isn’t one for us. Our approach is to bid for few, but do a great job of every proposal, so it’s not uncommon for us to pass. 

11:45am 

We’re presenting an interim report to clients at midday. It’s an evaluation of a medical research institute that Lambrini is leading. We checkin on the key messages we want to get across and anything we think the client might be surprised by or sensitive about. Lambrini will lead the presentation but I’ll be there in support. As independent evaluators it’s important we speak the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable. But in this case we don’t think our findings will be especially confronting. The presentation goes off without a hitch. Our client is going well. Though they haven’t cured cancer. Yet. 

12:30pm 

I’m eating a hastily procured sandwich while I catch up with our EA, Indi. She’s got a list of questions for me about some double bookings in my diary, and reminds me about an email to a client I need to return. I’m very lucky to have her support, and her reminders. I fire off that email as soon as we’re done talking. 

1:00pm 

I’m leading a training session this afternoon. It’s one we run regularly when we’ve got a critical mass of new staff. It’s about conceptual frameworks – what they are, how we use them, and some classic ones we tend to use at dandolo. It’s interactive with lots of exercises and people generally make an effort to do training in person, so there’s a bit of extra buzz in the office. 

3:00pm  

Sat at a desk by myself for the first time today with a few things on my to do list. There’s a couple of draft reports waiting for my feedback, and a handful of emails to respond to. I see some media about an initiative we helped a client get off the ground so I send them a note of congratulations. I’m pretty proud too, to be honest. 

3:23pm 

Lauren stops by to talk through an evaluation framework she’s working on for a new project. It’s looking good but there are some tricky questions I’m glad we have the chance to work through together. After we chat I tell her I don’t need to see it again and she should get it out the door to the client today. 

I’m also happy to be interrupted by JP and Birdie doing the Heardle. If the music is from the 90s, I back myself to get it. That’s also true if it’s more recent albums from the Wiggles or Teeny Tiny Stevies. Anything in between and I’m out of luck. 

4:00pm 

My diary is free and I’m done getting back to clients so I wander around the office to see if anyone needs any help. Helena has produced an especially pretty slide which I spy over her shoulder and ask her to talk it through. That leads to an impromptu lesson in what a market failure is and why it’s relevant to our work. I pull in Aideen and Rachel too because neither of them have a background in economics. 

4:40pm 

I’m headed out the door to get home in time to help with dinner and bedtime for the kids. It’s macaroni cheese for dinner and, I confess, I enjoy it just as much as they do. 

7:50pm 

The kids are asleep. I jump back online to review a couple of things that the team has been working on. There’s a first draft of a proposal that I work through carefully, adding ideas about how we can improve the methodology and some past projects to draw on as examples of our credentials. And there’s a summary of a big chunk of fieldwork. It’s important for me to breathe this in so tomorrow we can talk about how what we’ve learned from the field will influence our findings. 

We’re also in the middle of a recruitment process at the moment. We work with a recruiter, Sam, who triages the initial applications we get and passes the ones on to me she thinks are worth considering closely. Each of the three she’s sent through this week have very different backgrounds, but they’re all interesting propositions for us. Sam’ll schedule interviews with each and I’m looking forward to meeting them. 

8:30pm 

I’m done with both work and parenting for the day so it’s time to relax. Tomorrow I’m doing drop offs so my wife will take the early shift and, thankfully, I’ll get up at a more normal, grown up time.