Keeping Your Focus to Meet Deadlines
Do you ever feel like the world is conspiring against you while you are
working your proverbial arse off? Well, let me tell you, the world does
work against you sometimes. During the final month of helping to
complete my company's website, I encountered more distractions
competing for my time and attention than I ever have in my life. After
a while, I began to think that perhaps I wasn't meant to complete the
site. Still, when I set a deadline, I do everything in my power to make
sure that I meet it.
It all started seven months ago when my lead web developer became deathly ill. Normally a picture of good communication, I hadn't heard from him in a week. Concerned, I called and emailed, but there was no response. I decided to wait a week to see if perhaps he had a family emergency or something. Two weeks later, there was still no word. With forty percent of the site completed, it was not an easy thing to just hand the development off to another developer. I knew we would have to start over if I went with someone else, and I have a rather extreme amount of loyalty to long-term contractors who do great work.
Finally, after three weeks, I heard back from my developer. He had been completely bedridden for three weeks, and he was still there. He said there was no way for him to continue on the project because he was unable to do anything but eat and sleep. This was the first time he had been able to talk on the phone.
In those three weeks, our office became extremely busy with client work, and our website had to be content with a temporary page for the time being while client projects took priority.
Our traffic flow allowed me to restart our website four months later. My lead developer was still sick, so I had to start nearly from scratch. I teamed with a new developer half way across the country. I set a new site launch deadline for Monday, August 29th.
About five weeks before the deadline, as I walked past our building, I noticed yellow jackets crossing my path at an alarming rate. They seemed completely uninterested in me. As I watched their travel path, I saw them going in and out of a hole in the side of our building. I called our handyman, and he came out with a yellow jacket trap, placing it near the hole. He said that he has seen these traps become completely packed with yellow jackets in just a few days, and he frequently has to empty them to make room for more willing victims.
Not one yellow jacket entered the trap in two weeks. In that same period, I saw their numbers double. I couldn't walk past that part of the building without twenty or thirty yellow jackets crossing my path. Our handyman sprayed some sort of poison death spray into the hole, and the bees came dropping out in heaps. Every time a bee entered the hole, it dropped out dead seconds later.
The yellow jacket problem solved, I happily went back to work with three weeks remaining until our deadline. Then they came into the building. To this day, I do not know how they got in, but yellow jackets were streaming into our office at an alarming rate, scaring the staff out of their wits. I had to close the office for the day and call an exterminator.
With dead yellow jackets lying all over the office and that problem finally solved, I got back to work on the site.
Three days later, I discovered that a rat had somehow gotten into our basement. Worse, it had found a box of our client's caffeinated chocolates, and it apparently enjoyed them quite a lot. These were not just any chocolates. Each one has caffeine content equivalent to two cups of strong coffee. For an average sized human, one chocolate provides a substantial energy boost. For an average sized rat, who knows what they do? All I know is that I saw this rat scale a wall faster than I could ever have imagined possible. It put Spiderman® to shame, shooting up the wall, across the rafters and back down the wall within about one to two seconds. Scared the heck out of me.
I set a trap, but the rat simply sprung the trap without getting caught, then ate the food. Four days after that, our kitchen flooded when a drain stopped up. I called a saint of a plumber who was able to fix the problem in about two minutes, and he didn't charge for the call. Next day, the rat had managed to infiltrate a drain pipe, and I found rat droppings in our kitchen. The rat had not managed to get into the open house, but was underneath the dishwasher. The drain pipe, meanwhile, had flooded a corner of the basement, and there were rat droppings all over the place in the water. There were also two more caffeinated chocolate wrappers. My taxes for the last five years were in boxes that were covered in rat droppings. Apparently, rats do not like taxes either.
I set three more traps, and I strategically placed rat poison along the rat's travel path. The rat tripped another trap without getting caught, ate the food, then it managed to get more droppings from under the dishwasher into our kitchen. I think the rat was sticking it's tongue out at me from behind the dishwasher.
While I was doing battle with the rat, I found that many of our portfolio files from up to ten years ago were no longer compatible with current software, so I had to rebuild between seventy and one hundred design files for our website. This added several days to the development time.
Next, I got a gnarly spider bite on my leg that made it difficult to sit properly. In three days, I found four scary looking spiders with thick, bike racer sized legs in our office. Then a hard drive crashed, and my main computer, the one with the site development tools, failed to start up. I lost an entire day of production time while fixing the computer.
All of these factors beyond my control caused a one week delay to the site launch. It was frustrating to say the least, but it could have been worse. Between client work and completing our own website, I found myself working 20 hour days for three weeks straight near the end of the project. This was when the valuable lesson of keeping my focus to reach a goal came in particularly handy. Without that ability, our website could have been in a state of perpetual development for years. Having the ability to maintain focus and keep your chin up is a great skill to possess when it seems like the world is conspiring against you.
When you have so many bizarre, even unbelievable, distractions occurring right before your eyes, you start to look for a sign, any sign, that things are turning around. This morning as I approached my computer, I saw what looked like a dead scarab beetle lying on it's back beside my keyboard. In ancient Egypt, the scarab beetle was a sign of rebirth after death. This one being dead, it seemed like yet another a bad sign.
I turned on the computer, and I began to work. Suddenly, I noticed the beetle's legs were moving. I placed a piece of paper lightly over it, allowing it to grip something. I took the beetle outside, and placed it in the soil. Perhaps this was a sign that things would turn around.
Four days later, our website launched to positive comments all around. I was filled with a sense of calm and peace at last.
Then the rat broke into the office.
