The other day, the internet was down in the entire city of Oconomowoc. There were insanely high winds that were apparently causing the issue.
At 7:45 it was fine, I was working, getting stuff done, prepping for my 8 a.m. meeting.
At 7:59, the internet stopped working.
And my cell phone service wasn't connecting either.
I tried to join my 8 a.m. meeting but they couldn't hear me. I couldn't even text anyone to tell them what was going on.
I missed a client meeting as well, and frantically tried to send messages that I prayed would go through so people wouldn't think I was flaking on them.
I drove into town, where at least I could get a stronger cell connection, and took a few calls from my car. With a pen and paper to take notes, and lots of apologies to my team for not being able to screenshare or do the things I normally needed to do on these calls.
It was both incredibly frustrating and eye-opening at the same time.
We are so reliant on technology now. Especially in my line of work where tech is what we do.
But that day when there was that widespread outage I realized something.
It's okay to go "old school" once in awhile.
To put pen to paper and let our brains settle a bit from the millions of messages that we receive and emails we open up every day.
It's okay to let ourselves slow down and breathe once in awhile. Take a rest, pause and reflect.
The outage also gave me time to sit back and think longer-term about some of my projects. To write down the ideas I have for where the project can go, capture all of the action items and do some planning.
That sort of work can be hard to make time for when we are fully connected and living in a world of constant disruption.
So all in all, that outage wasn't an entirely bad thing, even though it was pretty stressful the first hour or two of my day.
I'm mostly caught up now from the things I missed, and grateful for everything to be working again.
But I might just think about forcing an outage from time to time.
Just not on a workday 😉
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