Powerless

Yesterday, our Moxxy office in Salinas, CA lost power for three hours, and it couldn’t have been more perfect.

While being effectively shut down for so long could have been stressful and caused a late night of work if we’d had tight deadlines to meet; serendipitously, we had a little wiggle room in our schedules, so we decided to make the most of our analog afternoon.

We keep a list of lower-priority projects to work on when the team has down time, and several cleaning and organizing projects on that list had been passed over numerous times in favor of devoting effort to others, like writing SOPs and working on Moxxy’s own marketing.

But yesterday, when the entire staff had stepped away from our powerless computers, we collectively tackled those overlooked office organization and cleanup projects—and completed them in record time!

Not only was it an afternoon of teamwork, it was a fun and productive team-building moment. We tossed old paperwork, moved furniture, reorganized supplies, cleaned dusty surfaces, and created new systems to stay better organized.

Not only did we all walk away after a few hours with dirty hands and satisfied smiles, the experience also reminded me of the value of blocking out time to collectively focus.

Our team occasionally “tries” to block out time to tackle internal projects, but that often results in client projects taking precedence and the internal projects get pushed off.

Yesterday was a powerful reminder (pun intended) that a very short period of collectively focused effort has great value and is worth scheduling—and not pushing off—for “higher priority” tasks.