Posted by rebecca

1. Friday: Inadvertently took a two hour lunch break. The Friday before all of the deadlines were due Rand Matt Jeff Jane and I went to lunch together. Unbeknownst to us we picked the one restaurant in the University District whose policy is to starve their patrons to near death before bringing them food. A 45-minute break turned into two agonizing hours of us whining that the service was taking for-freaking-ever. When we finally got our grub we sucked down the food and raced back to the office grumbling about how we had wasted precious time waiting for sandwiches and fries.
2. Monday: Scheduled a day off. When I requested to take Monday off I was obviously unaware that the Multiple Project Deadlines siege would fall on the week where I'd only be working four days. Being the nicest guy in the world Rand urged me to take the day off anyway despite the fact that we had a lot to do that week and certainly could have used the (wo)man power. Having adopted the "I'll figure out how I'll cram a bunch of work into four days when I'm at work tomorrow" mentality I watched Cinema Paradiso at home and also got "accidentally" poked in the eye by my boyfriend. It certainly was a productive day off.
3. Tuesday: Had my replacement laptop arrive at work. SEOmoz bought me a laptop but when it arrived it was making a lovely "ch-ch-ch-ch-ch" noise (not unlike a tiny sprinkler system). I ordered a replacement laptop which arrived on my day off. What started out as a quick "Boot up the system to make sure it works fine" turned into "Oh crap why doesn't this new laptop have a built-in wireless card?" I ended up wasting a good part of my day on the phone with Dell who insisted that there was a wireless card in the laptop. After handing the phone off to Matt he convinced the guy otherwise and then proceeded to waste about half his day talking to Dell support and taking the card from the defective laptop and putting into my new one. While I now had a functioning laptop I also lost another day of productivity.
   
4. Wednesday: Had an eye doctor's appointment. My appointment was at 8:00 at the medical center about a block from our office so I figured I wouldn't miss any work. Well I didn't miss any work but I did spend the whole day squinting at the computer monitor with pupils the size of gobstoppers. Needless to say I wasn't operating at 100% that day.

1. We really need a project manager. Rand had mentioned hiring one soon in his recap of Andy Beal's visit to SEOmoz and after last week's shenanigans we really see the value in hiring someone to keep track of all our client's deadlines. The problem this time around was that we over-extended one of our client's contracts by a month which resulted in their deadlines coinciding with another client's. If we had someone managing our schedules we'd be more aware of situations like that and would be able to react accordingly.
2. Speed doesn't make up for quality. I'm not saying that I compromised the quality of my work in order to meet deadlines but I was certainly aware of that downside when struggling to get all of my work done. We strive to provide our clients with the highest quality work we can give and I don't want to be put in a situation in the future where I have to turn in low-quality work in order to meet deadlines.
   
3. Work can't be monopolized. Rand's teaching me how to do everything he does because the company can't rely solely on him to do all of the consulting reports and negotiation with clients. I didn't completely rely on him to get everything done but I also know that if I were as savvy as he is I wouldn't have had to send mostly finished work over to him so he could put the finishing touches on it.
   

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