Week 743

I think I’m starting to get the hang of this Weeknotes thing. So far, my system has been to keep notes throughout the week in a text file on my desktop, then refer back to them and other sources–like my Google calendar and email–on Monday to reconstruct the highlights of the previous week and match them up with my reflections. It’s interesting how little I actually need to remember on my own (but that’s another blog post). In fact, maybe next week I’ll try to write this up without any notes or help at all. In the meantime, this was…

First thing on Monday, Mark and I had a call with an agency partner of ours to discuss a potential project for a wellness non-profit. Right after that, we got on the phone with Eric to have our weekly check in and talked about all things Newfangled–finances, pipeline, projects, people. Eric and his wife are going to be in town over the next two weeks house-hunting, so our next meeting will be in person over lunch! Later that day, I spent some time over coffee at Jessee’s with Dave to chat about development stuff, working on our Culture of QA, and some current projects.

Tuesday began with a continuation of last week’s meeting with Mark, Mike and Nolan to talk a bit more about nurturing that QA culture I’ve been talking about. We’ve gotten some great input from everyone at Newfangled, and I’m confident that we’re heading in the right direction. Mid-morning, Mike took SteriPEN.com, a project that Steve, Jillian, George and Justin have been working on for the past few months, live! Right after, the team walked next door to Townsend Bertram & Company, an outdoor equipment shop, to show off some SteriPEN products. Right before lunch, our letter carrier arrived (one of my favorite times of the day) and delivered a book sent to me by my new friend, Emmet Connoly. I met Emmet after reading and commenting on a post he’d written about creating a quick-and-simple printed collection of web articles. I was immediately inspired by the idea and created a few of my own, including one called A Year of Ideas. Emmet got excited about the last one, and so we decided to do a book swap. I sent him a copy of A Year of Ideas and he agreed to send me a copy of his latest collection called Stacks. It looks great! Last night I read the first couple of articles, one of which is an interview with Dave Eggers which I found inspiring and entertaining.

On Wednesday morning, Mark and I met with a local entrepreneur to talk about an application he’s building to help companies plan their social media strategy. It looks pretty interesting–we’ll see how it takes shape. Later that day, Katie, Brian, Dave and I did a final review of the prototype for the new site we’re building for Imprivata.com. Katie and Brian have done a great job on the prototype. I even got a sneak peek at Justin’s designs, which look great, too!

Thursday mornings always include a brief review of our sales prospects with Mark and Dan. Mark has been having some interesting conversations with many different companies, so we’ve got a robust pipeline at the moment. After that, I had a meeting scheduled with Jason and Sarah (which I convinced them to have over coffee at Jessee’s) to help them plan their client strategy meetings. I wonder if Jessee’s realizes how much of our work gets done in their shop? We’ve even run into BlogAds folks there many times, too. In the afternoon, we had our usual client services meeting, and then I sat down with the engineering guys to plan out our mobile site offering. Finally, I published a blog post on mapping your professional network, which was an extension of some ideas we discussed at the client services meeting.

We ended a very busy and intense week by having breakfast together on Friday morning at Elmo’s, a diner right around the corner. We had a great time together and definitely kept the staff there busy bringing us all kinds of good stuff–omelets, pancakes, pecan waffles, homefries, biscuits, and coffee. When we got back to the office, it was back to business: Bettina, Dave, Nolan and I took a close look at our production schedule to make sure we could fit in the extra internal work we want to do on building a mobile version of our site within the next month. The rest of the day was similar–lots of coordinating–including some additional engineering planning and an internal review of another prototype in process. We finished out the day with a few of us (Katie, Steve, Sarah, George, Nolan, and I) heading next door to Southern Rail for end-of-the-week drinks…and left almost four hours later after a nice time talking and laughing together!