Day in the life of: Adrienne Albert

5:45 a.m. I usually wake up when the sun comes up. I have large windows in my bedroom and there are shades, but I keep them up at night. That’s my alarm clock. Then I hop on the BlackBerry, but I’ll get a cappuccino first and climb back into bed.

8:15 a.m. I live on 73rd Street, and our office is at 59th Street [at 750 Lexington Avenue]. I usually take a taxi. It takes 10 minutes, unless the President is in town or it’s Christmas. But I try to walk home if I don’t have a lot to carry.

8:30 a.m. I love being here early in the morning, because it’s so quiet. One of the things that the electronic age has robbed us of is thinking time, because everybody expects an immediate answer. “I sent you that e-mail three minutes ago, and you haven’t responded yet!” Well, you know, I would like to think about it to make sure I’m giving you the right answer. These times of the day allow you a little more time to think.

9 a.m. My day is pretty heavily scheduled. Most mornings we have meetings. On Mondays at nine we have our “MMM,” or Monday Morning Meeting. We review each project to find out what kind of week it had, what kind of traffic it saw and what needs to happen next.

11 a.m. This week we met with Barnes, the international brokerage. Our job is to make our developers successful, so we figure out how they can sell more of our product. I wanted Barnes to be aware of the Jefferson, a new 83-unit condo on East 14th Street. A lot of my time is taken up by meetings with developers. We also work with the architect. You would be surprised how many cable connections are in the wrong place, and light switches and thermostats. It’s not like we’re control freaks — but we are! And I have a background as an architect [a master’s in architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology], so sometimes I can sketch what’s needed.

Noon I don’t really do lunch unless I have to take someone out, like this week with Allen Goldman [president of SJP Residential Properties]. He really understands good food, so we went to Bottega del Vino on 59th Street. I had gnocchi with a white sauce, and tap water. If I had a three-martini lunch, I couldn’t function in the afternoon.

1 p.m. This week we had an agents training session here for Palmer Square, a condo development in Princeton, N.J. We have architects meet with the agents; we have attorneys meet with them and go through the offering plans page by page. The agents need to know all the layouts. They also need to know the speed of the elevator, how long the waiting time is, so if they get an objection from a buyer about how they don’t want to be on the 30th floor because of the wait time, they can have an answer for that. The sessions last all afternoon, and even the agents that have been selling for 20 years have to do it, because you develop bad habits. But it’s tedious. They call it “boot camp.”

6 p.m. I leave around six. I’m trying to get into an exercise [regimen] — I found a trainer. It’s so boring, but I’m trying, though I hate standing on machines. A couple months ago I got this Nike FuelBand bracelet, which measures calories and steps taken. I find that I’m walking a lot more since I put this stupid thing on! When you make your goal, all these fireworks go off, and it makes me feel good. I’m a positive reinforcement kind of person. I used to ride horses in Central Park before they sold the stable. I play tennis in the summer on weekends on Fire Island, where I have a house. I’m not very good, but I have a lot of fun. Sometimes I play with my husband, Oskar Brecher [director of development for the Moinian Group]. But my son Matthew, who’s the IT person here in the office, he’s too good to play with us.

6:30 p.m. I go out to dinner with friends about four nights a week, and I walk if it’s nearby. I like a lot of restaurants: ABC Kitchen, BLT Steak, Vico Ristorante on Madison. I still have friends from 30 years ago. There’s something about an old friend that’s hard to reproduce in a new friend. Like Jeffrey Brosk, [a friend] from M.I.T. He’s now a sculptor.

9:30 p.m. When I get home, I love putting on action movies. They take me away. Martial arts scenes, they’re like ballet. And Jackie Chan, oh my god, the stunts he does. And Bruce Willis — he does comedy, he does drama, he saves the world.

11 p.m. I watch the 11 o’clock news, and I try to stay awake for Leno’s monologue, but I’m asleep right after that.