Last week I had the week from hell. The IT company we’ve been using for the last four or five years was migrating our email to a cloud based exchange email to make life easier, better, and faster for our company. Well, IT had a total meltdown. Our email went down, they corrupted a lot of files, and we lost emails for about 120 accounts – no one in our company was getting emails. We couldn’t send and couldn’t receive. The IT company couldn’t give me answers, either. On Monday around noon they told me it would take a couple hours to fix, which became Monday night, then Tuesday morning. First thing Wednesday morning they told me it’s done – everything is corrupted. Not everything was lost, but they couldn’t get anything from Monday on.
My business relies on email appointments, talking with clients, and communicating with employees; so for two and a half days, I couldn’t do that. I wasn’t getting emails from customers which was costing us money, and I wasn’t able to communicate effectively with a lot of my team members.
We were eventually able to re-root emails and did a workaround in the meantime. We fired that IT company and hired a new one. I was sitting here the following Monday morning from my week from hell and we were still not up. We were using our workaround because thankfully we had a plan B.
I was so frustrated last week you wouldn’t believe it. But what I found is that I rely on email quite a bit and I’m sure lots of other people do as well. What I found was that my week unplugged really wasn’t that bad. I didn’t lose too much business out of it, the customers’ emails bounced back so most of them called, we were able to find a workaround, and what I realized was that email is a huge time suck. I spend up to four hours a day on email, but instead that week I got to visit all my stores, talk to my customers, and talk to my employees. So you may want to consider how email can be a time suck on you. My week unplugged, so to speak, wasn’t as bad, didn’t ruin my life, wasn’t as bad as I thought. You have to be careful with all these emails, texting, blogging, that you don’t forget about what’s important, which is your customers and employees and making sure that your organization is running properly from an operations standpoint.