Ben Matthews describes a typical day as a freelance digital PR and director at volunteer-run comms agency Bright One

My working day

7.00am: Up and out to the gym. Healthy body, healthy mind, etc (and have all the excess from the Christmas party season to work off).

8.00am: Back from the gym and after a shower put the kettle on for the first of many cups of coffee for the day. Check the day’s news using some of my favourite iPhone apps: Newsblur, Smartr and Flipboard.

8.30am: Arrive at the office: my living room. Being a freelancer, the commute is a definite plus point!

8.35am: Try to be good and not open emails until I've done a few important tasks for today. Normally too tempted by the instant gratification of dealing with them though – a bad habit I'm trying to change. I'm taking the Revive Your Inbox course by Baydin, which has worked wonders so far in helping me manage emails, but still got a bit to go before I'm a productivity expert.

9.00am: Finish dealing with the majority of emails and start working through the to-do list, which starts with my freelance clients first before working through the charities that Bright One works with.

9.30am: Second coffee of the day.

10.30am: Third coffee of the day.

11.00am: A good morning of work preparing for some upcoming campaigns and reporting on coverage secured. A few reports to do next, which are good to show progress and keep up discipline when you're working at home on your own.

11.45am: Prepare for client call.

12.00pm: Client call.

12.45pm: Finish client call, send round actions to client, add actions to my to do list using the productivity app Wunderlist – a great app that is free across all devices and syncs with my iPhone and Mac, so I can add tasks on the run and they're ready and waiting for when I get back to my desk.

1.00pm: Check and deal with emails over lunch. We're organising an event in February called the PR Prom, where 500 top PRs will descend on Shoreditch Town Hall for an evening of entertainment, so I check in on ticket sales and liaise with the rest of the team on how organisation for the event is going. Send a reminder to a few friends to buy their tickets here.

3.00pm: I've just started lecturing at the London College of Communications, so review my slides for the next week. It's on Crisis Comms, so I do some background research for case studies, theories and any other useful content. Lots of great examples, but unfortunately lots of "how not to"s out there as well.

5.00pm: Finished with client work so check in on Bright One's clients, who are all very busy at the moment. We work with volunteers from the industry, so spend lots of time making sure they're happy with the work they're doing and answering any questions they have or support they need. We get lots of enquiries from new volunteers at the start of the year, which is fantastic but takes some organising. Luckily I've got a fantastic team around me who help everything run smoothly.

6.00pm: Finish the day by capturing any actions needed for tomorrow and responding to any last emails.

8.00pm: I've set a goal for 2012 to learn to code. I can do some basic HTML and CSS work, but want to build more advanced projects, so signed up to Codecademy and am learning Ruby on Rails. Find myself reviewing why my code isn't working rather than building the next Twitter ...

10.00pm: Last social media scan of the day, which consists of flicking through Facebook, Twitter and a few other sites to see what else is happening.