I don't set my alarm clock anymore. As a rule, I see little reason to greet each morning with a shrill "beep-beep-beep" aside from the occasional, unavoidable early meeting or call. Even so, I average less than six hours of sleep a night during the week, and I do keep some odd hours. Such is life at a venture-backed company, especially when it happens to be the fastest growing private software company in the U.S. over the past five years.

edocs, which provides customer self-service and e-billing software, owes much of its success to its many intelligent and hardworking employees. Some have likened the past several years to a very long sprint. A few of my friends have even compared my hours to those of investment bankers. But the key difference is the degree of latitude and flexibility that edocs provides. I have some 40-hour weeks and some 90-hour weeks. Sometimes I work from home, sometimes from the office. If I need to run an errand, I go ahead and do it.

I'm certain that the flexibility of when, where, and how I work is what fuels my incentive to keep doing it. The downside to this is that work life and personal life often blend together.

TYPICAL DAY:
7:00 a.m. -- At this hour, there's very little brain activity. Acknowledging that I'm an evening person, I'm content to simply scan the new e-mails from colleagues that have arrived throughout the night. Thankfully, there isn't a fire burning out of control, so I close the lid of my laptop.

7:15 a.m. -- I crawl back into bed and sleep for the next hour and a half.

8:45 a.m. -- The sun finally breaks through the window, and I'm permanently awake for the day. After a quick glance at my cell phone to make sure that nobody called overnight, I jump into the shower and get ready to head into the office.

9:45 a.m. -- I hop into my car, get onto the Mass Pike, and accelerate to just under 80 miles per hour. To make even better use of time, I pick up my phone and dial into an internal edocs "account review" -- a weekly forum in which a strategic account manager (SAM) does a pulse check on a key customer. On this morning's call, I discover that this U.S. wireless-service provider now has almost 50% of all its customers using the edocs part of their Web site each month. I tuck away that tidbit in my head since it'll be a handy sound bite on sales calls.

10:15 a.m. -- The call wraps up as I walk into our office in Natick, Mass., and I'm happy to finally remove the hands-free earpiece. I get to my desk and drop my laptop into the docking station. Reaching into my bag, I pull out the untouched papers that I took home the previous night.

10:30 a.m. -- I undock my laptop and walk over to a meeting where Rob Orgel, our head of business development, has scheduled a call to evaluate a partnership opportunity. Partway through the potential partner's pitch, I get distracted by more incoming e-mails. Once derailed, my mind then becomes preoccupied with the Webcast that I need to deliver to a potential customer later in the afternoon. I then get busy polishing off some last-minute content.

11:30 a.m. -- I walk briskly back to my desk, purposely keeping my pace slower than a jog (I recently discovered that I have a reputation of running in the office). Rounding the corner, I bump into Katy Wyatt, our engineering program manager, and she pulls me into her office. We brainstorm on a list of items to share at tomorrow's weekly cross-functional meeting, a gathering that includes a representative from product management, project management, engineering, quality assurance, documentation, professional services, training, and technical support.

11:45 a.m. -- My desk phone is ringing, but I'm tempted to ignore it. When I notice that the number on the display is from London, I pick it up, since I'm helping one of our European pre-sales engineers prepare for a critical in-person meeting for next week.

11:57 a.m. -- Things calm down for a moment, and I take a quick inventory of my to-do list for today (things I've committed to) as well as my initiative list (things I want to do for the long-term). Most of the morning has passed, but that's O.K., since I spot a pocket of open time later in the afternoon.

12:15 p.m. -- I pop my head over the wall and see that David Reichert, another product manager, is back at his desk. Today looks like a hectic day for him, but I force him to take a break anyway. On some days, we have to take lunch at our desks, but today we take a breather and also grab our manager Bill Zujewski to sit down for lunch. Walking through the parking lot, I glance down at my BlackBerry -- a terrible habit, but then again, there's a reason they call these things "CrackBerries."

1:00 p.m. -- We start the product marketing meeting a few minutes late. The key topic is deciding the marketing mix for the integrated campaign we're launching for banking prospects. I always look forward to this bi-weekly meeting, since I've been able to learn a lot from Bill and his past experience as head of product marketing at BroadVision. At the tail-end of our meeting, the four product managers stick around with Bill to dive deeper into some product topics.

2:00 p.m. -- Noticing that my calendar is momentarily clear, I sit down to revise some sales training materials as well as jot down a few thoughts on how to quantify the opportunity around a potential new product extension.

3:15 p.m. -- A 15-minute meeting reminder pops up, so I shift gears and review the set of slides for the Webcast I need to deliver. I also go over some notes on the prospect that I just received.

3:30 p.m. -- I hit the speed-dial for the conference number and click on the URL to start the Webcast. Although product management typically gets pulled into sales support during later stages of the sales cycle, I'm pulled into this call since the potential customer has raised some very specific questions about how credit-card processing works. The call runs a little over its one-hour scheduled time, but it's worth it since we'll likely make it to the next round of their evaluation.

5:00 p.m. -- I jump back onto the new business plan template and financial model I've been working on to size potential markets and measure results.

5:30 p.m. -- A pop-up reminder appears on my screen for an earnings call from a public competitor, but I'm on a roll with the business plan template and skip the call.

7:00 p.m. -- Activity in the office subsides, and I start to crack open a product return-on-investment project, a side project I've been working on to quantify the results of our product investments to better optimize edocs' product portfolio. However, I realize that there are still a bunch of little items on today's to-do list.

8:00 p.m. -- I pack up, grabbing my laptop and a few papers. I hop into the car and head toward home, gym, dinner, etc.

11:00 p.m. -- I'm back on the sofa, half-watching a little Seinfeld in the background, but also working. This is the only chance I'll have to map out that revised competitive landscape that I've wanted to finish.

12:30 a.m. -- I pour through the e-mails that I didn't get a chance to respond to during the day. Starting with the high priority items, I try to tackle the ones where I'm in danger of becoming a bottleneck. For the next hour or two, I answer sales questions, review presentations, provide subject-matter expertise, comment on an analyst report, etc. As I quietly type away on my laptop keyboard in bed, I'm astonished that other colleagues are responding to my e-mails in real time. Then again, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only night owl.

2:30 a.m. -- Wrapping up my final editorial comments on a Request for Proposal, I fire back the five-megabyte file to the European team just before they start their day. It has been a long day for me, and I glance at the clock -- it reads 2:32 a.m. I resist the urge to reach over and set the alarm, since I know the sun will wake me up again tomorrow. I just hope that it's not cloudy.

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