Like many of you in North America, we've been experiencing some pretty frightening weather over the last couple of weeks. No flooding or real permanent damage here in Toronto, but there has been enough green skies, sideways rain, power outages, and wind to tear up a few plants and to send me emotionally back to my elementary school days of tornado drills and missing buildings.
Today I was on the phone with Andrea from DAMA Minnesota when the skies turned dark and the rain started pouring down. I told her that I may lose the call because our power seems to go out at the drop of a...raindrop. Then the noise started. It got louder...then LOUDER. At first I thought it was small branches hitting my office windows, but when I looked out, I could see snow. No, wait, that's not snow, that's hail. Then the big ones started coming down, bouncing up about a metre in the air, then finally coming to a stop.
Having grown up in the US Midwest, I take these sorts of weather patterns seriously. So I rushed Andrea off the phone and found a safer place in the house to wait it out. I thought for sure that the skylights were going to break and that some of our larger windows would be the next to go.
But about 5 minutes later, it was blue skies again.
However, my brain went into a sort of "gotta gets some work done before the power goes out" mode. I finished writing three sections of a report that should have been done last week. I polished off a big chunk of my to-do list. I booked a couple of months of travel arrangements. I think instead of my usual "what can I do to procrastinate these unbearable to-dos", my brain had shifted into survival mode ... or at least some type of panic mode.
Maybe there's some sort of productivity tool here: switching from glued-to-the-computer boredom to life threatening (or at least fear of life threatening) mode can be a new form of Getting Things Done.