What Do You Do Every Day Anyway?

I recently gave my team a challenge to develop 'elevator pitches'--short, 45 second introductions of themselves and our company. I suggested 3 scenarios where having something prepared that rolls naturally and easily off the tongue would come in handy:

1. At a conference of peers, and you get the inevitable questions-- "what do you do?" and "who do you work for?"
2. In either a business or social situation where you meet someone who might be a potential client and you want to introduce yourself in a personal yet professional way.
3. When your non-tech family and friends ask you "what exactly do you do for a living?"

As community managers, that third scenario is often the most difficult to describe, because there really isn't an off-line job that mirrors what a CM does.

Well, I'd like to give a shameless plug to @rhappe of The Community Roundtable who has written what I consider to be the best description of the many functions of a Community Manager.

She's done a brilliant job describing the role and I'm not going to recap her work here--I highly recommend you click on the link and check it out. I don't really have anything to add to her concise description.

Now, I still have to figure out how to put her wonderful CM description into 45 seconds or less so my Dad can understand what I do for a living, but that's another matter.

Rachel poses an interesting question on the topic--how do you prioritize your time as a CM? With so many different aspects to the job, how do you go about managing your day?

And that's what I'm curious to know too. I'm probably not very good at time management, because I find myself working on a Sunday afternoon, trying to catch up to work that I didn't get to during the week. I can get so wrapped up in doing daily maintenance tasks for my clients that I don't always get to the bigger, long term initiatives that will ultimately benefit both the client and my company more.

So here is my question for you, dear readers: How much of your day is taken up with 'mundane' tasks, and how do you carve time out for the bigger projects? I can find myself so occupied with responding to daily emails, looking at metrics and reports, surfing through clients communities etc, that I don't feel like I actually got anything done.

Do you have a system? How do you spend your day?