Nobody ever made a documentary about this job.
Not because it is not interesting — but because from the
outside, it looks like a man sitting at a desk, staring at a computer,
occasionally standing up to check on a printer. Which is technically accurate.
But like most things that look simple from the outside, the details are where
the actual story lives.
Hi! I'm Mavs. This is my day. A real simple one. Not the highlight reel — the
full version, from 6AM to 11PM, in Surigao City, Philippines, in 2026.
6:00 AM — Boot Sequence
The alarm goes off and the first decision of the day is
already made before I am fully awake: get up now or negotiate five more
minutes.
I get up. But before anything else — before the tea, before
the phone, before I think about what needs to be done today — I take a moment
to just be still.
I thank God for the sleep. For waking up. For one more day
to be a blessing to somebody.
Then I pray. One Our Father. One Hail Mary. The Glory Be.
The Angelus. The Divine Mercy prayer. And finally the Novena to God's Love —
the Abundance Prayer I learned from the Feast Community of Bo Sanchez. Then I read the Gospel for the day.
It is not a long ritual. It does not need to be. But it sets
something in the right direction before the world starts making noise. The day
feels different when you begin it with gratitude instead of urgency. I cannot
fully explain that. I just know it is true from doing it consistently.
Then — pansit-pansitan tea and the sikwate!😄
First thing: pansit-pansitan tea.
I harvest a small handful of fresh stems and leaves from the
backyard — the little heart-shaped succulent weed that most people ignore but
our family has been drinking as tea for years. Boil it briefly, let it cool
slightly, drink it while the morning is still quiet. I
wrote a full post about what this plant actually does — the short version
is: it supports kidney health, reduces inflammation, and costs absolutely
nothing because it grows in the corner of our yard without being asked to.
The day begins with free medicine from a weed. That is a
very Filipino way to start.
6:30 AM — Breakfast
The sikwate is the non-negotiable. My mom makes homemade
tablea from scratch — dried cacao beans from our backyard tree, roasted, ground
by hand, molded with her puto cheese molder using her batirol and bornejo. That
whole process has its own post because it deserves one. What I can tell you
from daily experience is that hot sikwate in the morning is not just breakfast
— it is a mood stabilizer. The theobromine in pure cacao promotes calm
alertness without the cortisol spike of coffee. I have never had coffee in my
morning routine. I have never needed to.
Before leaving: USANA PolyC. Vitamin C supplement. One
of the additions I made to my daily routine earlier this year after
reviewing my health numbers. Small capsule. Big difference in how the immune
system handles daily stress.
Glasses on. The progressive lenses I finally got in February
after months of squinting at screens and calling it "tired eyes."
₱10,000 well spent. The world is sharper now than it has been in years.
7:40 AM — The Tricycle to the Office
No personal vehicle. No car. Just the classic Surigao City
tricycle — the three-wheeled Filipino institution that has transported
government workers, market vendors, students, and everyone else through these
streets since before I started this job in 2017.
The ride is short. The traffic is already awake.
I arrive at the office, and before going inside — two
minutes of sunlight.
Not because I read a wellness tip about morning sunlight
exposure and decided to implement it. Just because it feels right. Two minutes
standing outside before the fluorescent lights and screen glow take over for
the next eight hours. The body gets a quick reminder that the sun exists. Then
we go in.
8:00 AM — System Online
Power button on the desktop computer. The familiar startup
sound. Emails first — because whatever arrived while I was sleeping needs to be
acknowledged before I can focus on anything else.
Then: Photoshop. Canva. The two tools that define
most of my creative output for the day.
My official title is OTOP Technical Staff at DTI Surigao del
Norte. What that means in practice is that I help micro, small, and medium
enterprises — MSMEs — get their products shelf-ready. Packaging design. Product
labels. FDA-required information properly formatted. Brand identity for
businesses that have a great product and need it to look like one.
I do this for free. It is part of the DTI's MSME assistance
program and it is one of the most genuinely satisfying parts of this job.
The morning queue might look like this:
A label for Crunchy Dried Squid — original flavor and
hot and spicy variants. The kind of snack that you cannot stop eating once you
start, and that every Surigaonon knows by heart. Getting the packaging right
for this means finding the balance between appetizing and honest — the squid
has to look good but not fake, and the heat level of the spicy variant needs to
register immediately on the label without being a warning sign.
Or Peanut Butter and peanut products — and here I
have to pause for a moment because one of my peanut product clients turned out
to be an internal medicine doctor from the government hospital. The same
hospital where I had my blood chemistry done. She came in for a label
consultation. I pulled out my March 2026 lab results on instinct and said: "Doc,
please don't charge me." She read my cholesterol numbers, got
appropriately serious, and gave me a free consultation right there in the
middle of a label design meeting. That story has its own
post. The sweetened peanut (candied peanut) is excellent, by the way. I am
slightly biased. 😄
Or Garlic Chili Oil, Coconut Vinegar, Shrimp Paste, Pork
Tocino, Embutido, Papaya Pickles, Banana Chips, Cassava Chips — the full range of what Surigao
del Norte's MSMEs produce, one product at a time, one label at a time.
Each of these is a real Filipino family's livelihood. Some
are cooperatives of farmers. Some are a single entrepreneur working from a home
kitchen. Some are a doctor with a side business in peanut products who happens
to also read cholesterol panels between consultations.
My job is to make each product look like it belongs on a shelf — because it does.
The morning is mostly heads-down work — searching for design
inspiration, experimenting with typography and color, consulting AI tools for
reference and feedback, refining until the initial concept starts to feel
right.
10:00 AM — First Break
Stand up. Fill the water tumbler. Walk briefly.
This is not optional. My Huawei smartwatch occasionally
reminds me if I have been sitting too long — the heart rate variability data
tells it something about my stress level that I am not always consciously aware
of. When it prompts me to breathe or move, I take it seriously now.
The 10AM break is short. Five to ten minutes. Water,
movement, a few seconds looking out the window or down the hallway at something
farther away than a monitor. The eyes need this — the 20-20-20 rule, more or
less: every 20 minutes of screen time, look at something 20 feet away for 20
seconds. I do not follow it religiously, but the principle is sound and the
breaks help.
Then back to the labels.
12:00 PM — Lunch
I pack my own lunch. Almost every day.
This is not me being particularly disciplined. It is a
combination of health logic and practical reality. Going out during peak summer
heat at 12 noon means walking into a 38-40°C heat index with no umbrella for a
carinderia meal that I could have just prepared at home. My packed lunch is
usually simpler — rice, vegetable, maybe some of the kamote my mom cooked into
the pot that morning, occasionally leftover fish.
After eating: a short walk. Iwrote about this routine at length — the walk is not just physical. It
resets something in the brain that 30 minutes of sitting and eating does not.
Even ten minutes around the building or down the street makes the afternoon
feel different.
If the schedule allows — and sometimes it does — a brief
nap. Not a full sleep. More like a system standby mode. Eyes closed, brain at
low power for fifteen minutes, then back online. It sounds indulgent. It is
actually performance optimization.
1:00 PM — Afternoon Loop
The afternoon is different from the morning in texture.
Morning is fresh — ideas flow more easily, the creative work
gets done. Afternoon is execution and communication. This is when I send
initial design outputs to clients and wait for feedback. This is when the
back-and-forth begins — adjustments to color, changes to text, requests to
"make it pop more" without specific guidance on what "more"
means. 😄
The waiting time between sending and receiving feedback is
when the IT support work fills in. Checking on printers that decided lunchtime
was a good moment to have an opinion. Troubleshooting slow computers. Helping
officemates with connectivity issues, document formatting, software questions.
The job description is technical staff — which means whatever technical thing
needs doing, I am the person it comes to.
Between tasks: water, stand up, look outside. The standing
habit is real and necessary. 8-hours in the chair I described in another
post — the one whose foam stopped being foam and started being a historical
artifact — means the body needs regular reminders that it has legs.
The afternoon light coming through the window is a kind of
calendar for me. When it starts to tilt a certain way, I know 5PM is
approaching.
5:00 PM — Shutdown and Walk Home
Computer off. Files saved. Pending tasks noted for tomorrow.
Then the walk.
Almost 2 kilometers, home. On foot, every working day. My
Huawei smartwatch tracks it — the heart rate curve, the step count, the
calories burned. But the data is almost beside the point. The walk is the
decompression ritual. The transition between the version of me that sits at a
desk designing labels and troubleshooting printers — and the version of me that
goes home to his wife and his mom and his evening routine.
The 2km takes about twenty-five minutes at a comfortable
pace. By the time I arrive home, whatever the day brought with it has been
partially processed. Not solved — but walked through, which is sometimes
enough.
Evening — Dinner, Cold Sikwate, and Drafting
Dinner at home. My mom's cooking, usually — kamote in the
rice, something from the backyard malunggay or whatever the market offered that
day. Simple. Real. The kind of food that keeps an 80-year-old woman in better
health than most people half her age.
Then — cold sikwate. The evening version. Same
homemade tablea, same batirol and bornejo process my mom has been doing her
entire life, but chilled. The day bookended by cacao — hot in the morning, cold
at night. It is not a strategy. It is just the rhythm of our house.
8PM, I say prayer, sometimes a Rosary.
By 9PM, if there is no specific urgent task from work, I am
at the laptop writing.
Blog posts. Drafts like this one. Research for the next
rewrite. Notes on ideas that came to me during the walk home that I do not want
to lose by morning. This
blog started in 2008 as an attempt to earn extra income. It is still that —
but it has also become something else. A record. A practice. A way of thinking
out loud that I have been doing long enough that it now feels like part of how
I process the day.
Lights out at 11PM.
The system rests. Tomorrow, same time.
Note: The views in this post are my own personal
experience as a Job Order employee at DTI Surigao del Norte. The MSME products
mentioned are real products of real small Filipino businesses I have had the
privilege of working with.
Okay, Last Thing — I Promise
People sometimes ask what it is like to work in government
as a Job Order employee.
The honest answer is: it is not glamorous. Job Order means
no permanent status, no tenure, no benefits package beyond the basic. The chair
at my desk is older than my career. The aircon is set to a compromise
temperature that satisfies nobody completely.
But I design labels for a fisherman's Bottled Bangus in Coin Oil in
Consolacion, Siragao and help it look professional enough to sell in a trade expo. I
help a farmer's wife put a proper product label on her garlic chili oil
so it can compete on a shelf. I watch small Filipino businesses get a little
more visible because of something I built in Photoshop on a Tuesday morning.
That is not nothing. In fact, on most days, that is quite a
lot.
I drink my pansit-pansitan tea and sikwate (hot chocolate) at 6AM. I walk home at 5PM. I
write at 9PM.
The system runs.
-Mavs
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