For several days last week, I was without internet connectivity in my apartment. Given that I work from home and almost all of my work either involves online teleconferences or working with documents stored and accessed via cloud servers, this was not ideal. I had the benefit of being able to use my mobile data via a wireless hotspot so I was not bereft of the internet, but I was data-limited and my connection speed was reduced. This forced me to take Zoom calls on my phone while simultaneously looking at documents on my computer, a practice that I find annoying and so resented doing myself even if I had the camera stationary in order to minimize the potential distraction.

On Thursday with my internet still out, we extended what is usually a half day of being in-person working together into a full day as I drove to Durham as if I had a normal working commute. I don’t miss that part of the day, even if the absence of a commute means I listen to fewer podcasts now than I have during certain periods. My productivity was also less than it would have been on a more typical Thursday morning, but there were some broader strategic discussions that compensated for this slight delay in production work.

By the end of Friday afternoon, I had a new modem in place. It had also been a roller coaster of a day, starting off with a business pitch that went very well and ending by offering the opportunity to absorb some lessons on how to better manage particular situations (and angry counterparties). It was a good evening for a group dinner and some decompression. It was also nice to have a period of forced no-television for a few evenings, even if this meant I had to delay watching the gold medal match of mixed doubles curling at the Winter Olympics, something I finally did early Saturday morning when I couldn’t go back to sleep. Mind you, I returned to watching videos sooner than I would have liked. Maybe that is suggestive of something I can experiment with removing in order to create more time and mental space for other things.