Monday, April 11, 2011

Being productive when you have a power outage

Woke up this morning to find out that power is out in portions of my suburb. Bath water was cold, laptop battery can only last so much. And all I could think was "Thank God I don't have a major copy deadline!"' But I do have web site updates that have to be done daily, so the power outage still affected my productivity.

Here is how I worked around the power problem:

  • Attended a meeting - I already had a meeting scheduled with my accountant, so that's one solid task that made me feel productive.
  • Went to see client at office - one client had a query on Friday and we were going round in circles with our email correspondence. Power outage gave me excuse to go in and attend to the issue in person. Query is now resolved, and most importantly, client knows she is important enough for me to show up to spend 10 minutes with her to resolve query. Occured to me later that this was a good PR exercise:-)
  • Did some admin and filing - Good time to catch up with the never-ending paperwork, hey?
  • Drafted an article by hand - My writer friend Anita Khanna was saying the other day that writing by hand alllows the creative side of the brain to take over. And she's right - the words just kept coming.
  • Found alternative work space - spending the afternoon at a friend's house ( who also works from home) working in her dining room. That's where I'm updating this blog. Thank you, Gaynor!  

2 comments:

Judy Croome | @judy_croome said...

Every cloud has a silver lining - I used to get mad when the power cuts occured but now, like your productice morning proved!, I find that when the power's off, it actually gives me time to catch up on things I'd normally ignore because I was glued to the Internet! Even at night time I read by candle light, and get to read books that have just been piling up :)
Judy (South Africa)

Stephanie Faris said...

I get SO much work done when the power is out. But I can write longhand...in fact I really enjoy it more. It's just much slower than writing via keyboard!

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