AnywhereMan

…And now the entire city of Grand Rapids is without power.

Really, a substation or something like that caught on fire. Luckily it happened today and not last week when I had lots of deadlines. There are still plenty of important tasks that I was hoping to accomplish today but a few hours of delay shouldn’t make too much of a difference.

So far the outage has lasted about two hours and I’ve already learned a few things in that time:

• Having a MacBook Pro is nice. Actually, having my main computer be a notebook is in itself nice. When the power went out, all the desktops at the Chamber of Commerce office (that CommonSpace is connected to) went instantly black. Which means if you hadn’t saved what you were working on, too bad. On top of that, the 5 or so hours of life I can squeeze out of this thing mean I can at least get some things done. This blog post is one of those things.
• Having a mobile hotspot on my phone is nice. When the power went out, I was able to flip the hotspot on and send any important emails before going offline for a while. Normally I can work all day using the hotspot feature, but that’s with the phone plugged in. I don’t get much time running it on the battery alone.
• Many necessary tasks can be accomplished without internet access. So far I’ve cleaned up my MacBook’s desktop which was overflowing with files. I didn’t need web access to send half of them to the trash bin and the rest to organized folders. I’ve been needing to clean that up for weeks.
• I need to force “disruptions” like this into my schedule. Sometimes I think having a wide-open schedule for development time can be too open. I possibly neglect some of the offline activities that should have higher priority. It also give me a chance to spend time with my wife and kids in the prime-time of the day.

Isn’t it amazing what you can learn in two hours without power?

I used yesterday, July 5th, as a chance to make some serious progress on the new version of my Lift Development website. I built the original about 3 years ago and my business has evolved quite a bit since then. I’m also moving forward with some new branding so everything (business cards, apps, website) needs to be updated to reflect this change.

Using everyone else’s day off gave me an excuse to devote the day to my own project. Whether it’s a holiday or a weekend, sometimes that’s the only way my in-house projects make any progress. However, if I would simply commit an hour here and there to my stuff…as in actually make time on my schedule…I wouldn’t need to cut into time that might otherwise be used for relaxation and recreation.

My point is this: Treat yourself like a client as much as you can.

Set deadlines and goals for your own stuff. It’s important! In the case of my website, it’s one of the first points of contact I have with a potential client. Therefore, it’s as essential as anything else that I do. I need to treat it as a high-priority task.

What are you working on in-house that may need to get bumped up the priority list a bit? Can you devote a few hours a week to it? Make an effort to schedule it: write it down and add it to your calendar.