I clicked the button and my screen went blank. For half a second, I stared straight ahead, thinking what the hell had just happened. I couldn’t believe it. I was helping my client with an issue and had offered to prepare a presentation and a few talking points for her for upcoming Town Hall meeting. I had been working on the presentation for most of the morning. It was really starting to come together.
And, in one quick move I deleted the whole presentation. I was leveraging some content from previous work that I had done, but I hadn’t officially saved anything yet. I couldn’t believe my stupidity. Back in the day, in the days of word processing systems, you used to lose things all the time. Now with the growth of technology and the cloud, it takes a lot to lose something.
You generally can always find what you were working on before it disappeared. Generally.
I let out a scream. I wanted to cry and kick my heals, but I knew I was at fault. I hadn’t saved the document. To top it off, I needed to leave soon for an appointment. (For the tech enthusiasts out there, I think there’s still ways to recall an unsaved document, but my search came up empty and I needed to move on.)
Get back on the saddle
We write a lot on The Heart of the Matter on the creative experience and especially about resilience and problem solving. We all run into moments in life where we need to retreat into ourselves and come up with a plan to overcome whatever challenge we’re facing. Everything in my body told me to get up and just call it a day, but despite the late hour, I still wanted to send my boss something before the end of the day.
I let myself mope for another minute and then I stopped and literally told myself to put on my big boy pants. I was simply going to need to recreate the work I had done, this time instead of taking three hours, I would have 45 minutes.
Get your big boy pants on Brian and get it done!
When the copy writes itself
I opened up a new presentation, I saved it right away and started cranking it out. The content came back to me faster than I thought it would. I felt like I was back in the news room and the word processor went down and I had to recreate my front page story from memory all before deadline. I remembered the feeling of bile in the back of my throat and the burst of energy. It all came back to me in a rush.
I continued on with my presentation, one slide after another. I needed to be creative on demand, but fortunately I had a good base and just needed to remember the work that I had already completed up to that point.
Move, move, move
Oh, I met my deadline and I’ll even admit that it was fun to go back in time for a few minutes, but I never want to return. For now on, I’m saving, saving, saving. No messing around with the cloud. I liked playing magician for a few short minutes and making my presentation reappear, with the slight of my hands, but I’ll be leaving the magic to the real magicians for now on.
Abracadabra!
I’m not sure where my presentation disappeared, but I wonder if it disappeared to the same spot as this handkerchief (see below.) In any event, my client loved my work. That was nice too.
How have you had to be resilient in your creative life? How did you keep yourself from losing focus?
. . . .
Did my presentation go here?
. . . .
Please join in on the discussion. In addition, please visit my personal blog at www.writingfromtheheartwithbrian.com to read my companion piece. You can follow me on Instagram at @writingfromtheheartwithbrian.
All the best, Brian.
Images by Pexels.
The Heart of the Matter 
I imagine you have some company, Brian. I encountered the same challenge in writing psychological reports once or twice. After the burst of frustration I bounced back and rewrote the report in question. Live and learn, as you have suggested. Glad it all worked out for you.
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Psych reports. Oh, that had to be horrible. And you’re right, it really is a burst of frustration. It takes perseverance and a little bit of good humor to pick things up and start again. I’m always glad when it’s over. It’s easier to talk about in the past tense.
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Losing focus is a daily dilemma…and woweee…. your tale of disappearing presentations made me scream along with you. We are so reliant on things working as we expect them to, I often forget that I need to be my own ‘fail safe’ by saving, saving, saving. Cheers to Brian the Conqueror! 🥰
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I love how you phrased that: “reliant on things working as we expect them to.” That describes me to a T. Ugh, I’m crazy when things don’t work the way they should. Ha, ha. I wrote this week about my need to be punctual. When I hit traffic or I’m running late, it causes my reliance gauge to go off the charts. Ha, ha.
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Me, too — me, too! 🤪
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That certainly had to be an “Oh, no!” moment. Sometimes when doing the redo, it’s a better refined version of the initial document, presentation, etc. Thank you for the prompt to save our work, Brian. 🙂
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That’s an interesting question Nancy about it being a more refined version. I think I might have missed some things, but what I liked about the new version was that it was tighter, had less fluff, and seemed to flow better. I’m glad it worked out that way, but wasn’t so happy how I got there. Ha, ha. 🙂
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I know exactly how you felt! My MacBook Air started randomly deleting files a couple years ago. I lost my NaNoWriMo project, a fiction manuscript of 50,000 words. I lost a lot of other stuff, but that’s the one file that hurt! I thought icloud automatically back things up! I was on the phone with Apple for a week. They tried everything they could to find my files, and accessed my laptop remotely. They weren’t surprised about what happened to with the randomly deleting files. Obviously they knew it was an issue, but I never got an answer of what caused it. I tossed that laptop and got a new one. Now I back up onto thumb drives.
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We’ve talked about this in the past, that would be so frustrating EA! Oh my goodness. I lost one little document that was my own doing. You lost a manuscript. Ugh, so frustrating!
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It’s so frustrating and it was my fault, too. You’ve reminded me to back up my files today!
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I’ve had weird computer-y things happen like this. Hours lost, but then miraculously a better more focused version of whatever it was I was doing appears. Life can be like that, go figure.
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Go figure. I’m with you Ally. I just hate to go through that process. If there’s a good thing about it, I think it helps cut the fat and focus just on delivering. No worry about procrastination, just deliver, deliver. I’m always glad when I’m done!!!! Ha ha
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Oh, this just happened to me too. And I’m supposedly an expert in making sure people don’t lose things in the cloud. Ugh!
But I love the recap of your re-do. I think we go to another level when under that pressure – especially when you’d already done all the thinking. You’ve modeled a great story of resilience and coming back stronger. Love it!
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Oh I’m going to be calling you next time Wynne! I seem to lose stuff all the time, between my clients Teams, my company, and then my personal laptop! Geeesh! I need some resilience there. 🤣🤣🤣🤣😎
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Oh yes! The stakes weren’t quite as high as yours. But for about a decade I made and sold products at local holiday craft fairs in the fall, making soap during the window of time when my son was in school and my husband was at work. I’d crank out about 200 to 250 bars of homemade soap (as well as other products) to get ready for my first show, and when I was making one of the batches (of 20 bars), I’d been concentrating so much on the new colorant I was using, I forgot to add the scent. There was nothing I could do but rebatch it – wait for it to completely cool, grate the entire batch with a cheese grater, add a sprinkle of water, pop my soap-filled stockpot into a low oven until I could stir it, add the scent, and get it back into the log mold. Everything worked out, and I never forgot it again.
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Oh my goodness, that sounds like a lot of work. Ugh! But, I bet you didn’t forget it ever again. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
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The worst! Glad you got back in the saddle and made it even better. Giddyup!
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Thank goodness for the obsessive clicking on the Save button and for being able to save things on the cloud. I can’t imagine how stressful work life would be without these sanity saving tools.
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That first moment immediately after you realize what happened is the worst. If there is a person alive who’s never experienced this experience, they’re a rarity. I’ve done it more than once, which makes me beat myself up more.
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Oh it is a chilling feeling!!! 😎😎😊😎
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After having a dew of those moments – I’m now a big save, save, save again person!
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Yes, I try to do the same. I hate losing stuff. I’ve learned my lesson for another 10 years! 🤣🤣🤣
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That’s the biggest sinking feeling, isn’t it? Tara recently “lost” a Google doc she’d been working on since February. But the whole point of Google Docs is saving to the cloud for collaboration. It has to be there somewhere…
Good job on recreating the missing work in record time!
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