When people hear I work for Zune, the question I get most often is, "What's it like there?"

So here's a little diary of a real day. Like Jack Bauer of 24 fame, I'm telling my story in real-time...minus the boring parts, like when I go to the restroom. Here goes. This is Friday, February 13.

4:20 a.m.: Wake up, get coffee, head out to the gym near Microsoft. Smile at all the Zunes I see there.

7:00 a.m.: Leave gym with second cup of coffee in hand. Head to work. Find some good beats - today it's trance from Tyler Michaud and Matthew Cerf - and check my Zune inbox. Respond to a few inbox messages and forums private messages. It's totally silent here, except for my music. I love the two hours I have in the morning to focus and work before most people get in around 9.

7:30 a.m.: My inbox doesn't have any unread mail...but it's got 49 items in it. I like to keep my inbox below 20 items, all actionable. This calls for a little cleanup.

8:00 a.m.: Right now, we're coming to the end of a coding milestone - the majority of the code for this milestone is written, and we're focusing on finding and fixing bugs. I'm the release manager for my team, so I lead a group of folks who triage potential issues and make decisions about whether we'll do something about them - investigate, fix, or push into our next milestone.  Overnight, I got a few emails about issues, so I look in our issue tracking tool and prepare a list of items my team will want to discuss today.

8:30 a.m.: Time to check out the forums I watch - primarily the Community Assistance: Social forum. I answer as many posts as I can in this area, but almost more importantly, I keep a running tally of reported issues - I group them by issue topic, and I keep track of how many people report each issue, whether it's a known bug (meaning, we can reproduce it here), a user bug (meaning, we're still trying to get enough information to see what the user is seeing), a "how-to" question, or a feature request. I also log the links to the posts so I can write a report later and share this information team-wide. I also track who is answering posts - users, MVPs, or Microsoft employees.

9:20 a.m.: At Zune, we work on multiple milestones at once. I'm planning some feature work for our next milestone, so I look at some iterations from design and send my feedback. I'm supposed to have my functional specification - the document that says how everything is supposed to work - complete today...and it's going to be a stretch.

10 a.m.: My weekly one-on-one meeting with my manager. This one is easy - everything is going well, and I have reasonable answers to his questions.

10:45 a.m.: Randomization begins. Two people stop by my desk to discuss different issues in some new code; as we're trying to lock down and stabilize for the milestone, I need to evaluate the issues and help my team come to a decision on each. And my husband is instant-messaging me, commenting on the music I'm playing (it shows up in my Messenger as my status). At the same time, I'm trying to write a mail that will go team-wide and let them know where we are in the planning for our next milestone and what documentation, costing, and prototyping work is due today and in the next few weeks.

11 a.m.: Zune central shiproom. This is a meeting of all teams - device, software, services and others - to come together and talk about project-wide issues. Today I only have good news to report about the progress my team is making on the current and next milestones.

12 p.m.: Lunch time in the cafeteria. I eat with my co-workers; we complain about the horrible food and talk about what shows we're seeing this weekend (me: Christopher Lawrence).

12:45 p.m.: Quick hallway conversation with a developer and tester about site performance turns into a task for me to write up our site performance goals and to set up a meeting to talk about where we should focus some attention.

1:30 p.m.: Still working on that mail that will explain to the team expectations for the next few weeks.

2:04 p.m.: Finished mail and sent it; late for a meeting to discuss one of my features for the next release.

3:00 p.m.: Had too much coffee! Very jumpy! and 36 new emails since I left my desk an hour ago. Quick cleanup of emails and a quick check at the issue database to see if anything new has come in and needs triage.

3:45 p.m.: Updating the backlog (the list of work items and features we want to do) with a few new items some of the other program managers have suggested. I also sent a meeting request to the leads and program managers for a week from now to go through everything and decide what exactly we're going to do in our next milestone.

4:00 p.m.: Random tasks; answering questions, looking at issues in our database, having people stop by and ask me questions. The later it gets in the day, the harder it is to get focused work done!

5:00 p.m.: My husband comes by to pick me up. It's Friday night, we have a babysitter, it's time to party! Yay!