Recently, I was met with a partial working day without internet. As a business owner with many clients, being a web developer, and as a general internet user with a mild tendency to enjoy checking technology blogs, this scenario had potential to be a scary thing let alone quite inconvenient. However, productivity rose substantially as I discovered that I could complete a lot of my tasks and online activities offline, breaking the grand illusion that I needed an internet connection to work and be productive. Another added plus was that I was now distraction free.
A brief outline of how I worked without internet includes simply this: drafting emails in CODA (my coding text editor) saving each to be distributed at a later time, preparing quotes – which I found very therapeutic and self – motivating discovering that all the expertise needed was either in house or vested within – using books as information resources when necessary, and completing work using my local development environment rather than through an external web server and then committing the changes later on. Apart from that, I feel the time could be used wisely by strengthening client relationships through use of the telephone, or scheduling time with your business colleagues to work on floating demands or internal business processes. Perhaps work out a new process to follow as default for when the internet goes down for half the day.