I have lost my share of time over the years on projects, start-ups ….. the world of work and felt some sort of retribution when I discovered (See below) a sample daily schedule of a Googler. Life as a Google executive seems more like a classic modern day tale of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

Sample Schedule as seen on BusinessWeek:

Marissa Mayer VP, Search Products & User Experience Google

8:00 a.m. Wake-up, get ready for work

9:00 a.m. Arrive at work, take conference call about a new technology

10:00 a.m. Meeting with Udi Manber, VP of engineering to discuss search, engineering staffing, etc.

10:30 a.m. Meet with Associate Product Managers to brief and prepare for upcoming international business trip

12:00 noon Product review with Larry and Sergey; review product direction and strategy and potential future collaborations

1:00 p.m. UI (User Interface) review to review/approve user interface designs/changes for multiple products

3:00 p.m. Meet with a new member of my team to welcome him and discuss career goals/trajectory

3:30 p.m. Meeting with Google Video product manager

4:00 p.m. Google Product Strategy meeting with Eric, Larry, Sergey, and other executives to go over weekly site traffic and a few special topics

5:00 p.m. Executive strategy meeting on Google China

6:00 p.m. Office Hours

8:30 p.m. Catch up on the day’s e-mail

11:15 p.m. Visit to the Google Gym to run

12:00 p.m. Go home

12:30 a.m. Watch TV, do e-mail

3:00 a.m. Go to bed

Lives to work or works to live. Looking at the “sample daily schedule” of Marissa Mayer – Google’s Talent Scout,  in the world of work-life madness, my click? “I’m feeling lucky”

The concept of time flexibility where “Time replaces money as the new currency” and “Work becomes living”. A recent comment from a question I put to business thinkers: I’m minded of the Master, Peter Drucker in an interview from 1993 (he always seemed to have a fairly good grip on how the world would be 20 years hence), who said, basically, companies are increasingly temporary (in form if not name) and people now need to arrange their careers around their core values and not the firm.

Do you know of other companies offering such career ”trajectories”?

I looked up trajectory on Wiki as it is a pretty trendy word in reference to “career development”. I wondered if there was a new buzzword in HR on the scene that had slipped my attention: A trajectory is the path a moving object follows through space. “The object” might be a projectile or a satellite, for example. It thus includes the meaning of orbit – the path of a planet, an asteroid or a comet as it travels around a central mass. A trajectory can be described mathematically either by the geometry of the path, or as the position of the object over time.