When Everyone Takes a Snow Day
Even though it didn’t affect places like Atlanta, DC or New York it was pretty hard to avoid noticing that a lot of the country got slammed with a big snow storm this week. Even the Chicago School District decided that it was best for everyone to stay home for a while. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but there seem to be more posts than normal this week about the benefits of not being at work or shutting out other inputs to get Work done.
Seeing that it’s been over 10 years since Chicago cancelled school reminded me of the first time that I stayed home just so I could work. It was one of those assignments that you actually start hearing about from upper classmen your first week of high school. Even then, there was nothing like a full pot of coffee and jazz before 9:00 to get things going. I noticed the same things this week.
Yesterday the Firm closed for the first time in a long long time. Everyone holed up, pulled out their lists and plowed through them. I received maybe one phone call of major substance and no more than a few emails. Not only that, those emails didn’t come until the end of the day. The timing and substance of the emails that we exchanged after about 4:30 in the afternoon tells me that people avoided bugging others for most of the day and instead took time to get some depth out of their work for the day. I know I did.
I remained snowed in today, but with the office officially open it was somewhat back to business as usual. Tomorrow everyone will be back and I’m sure the volume of interruptions will be back to normal levels. In the meantime, I think there will be lots of people who look back (in the short term at least) on the blizzard not because of the volume of snow, but how incredibly nice it was just to get some things done for once.