Take Time To Reset.

BE.lief.

Take Time to Reset.

Note: Some brands — Pandora and JBL are listed here. I wish they would pay me to write about them, but they don’t. But if they did….well, my home audio experience would be even better ;)

As soon as Grote Automotive started advertising on Pandora, I immediately updated to the commercial-free version and moved to a paid subscription. The flow of my music and the strong-in-your face local used car salesman commercial did not belong in the same space. In addition, the premium Pandora, I was also thinking about upgrading our speaker at home, so within the same few weeks, a new JBL Bluetooth speaker made its way into our house.

One of the first things I do when I get home is to connect the speaker to my phone, open pandora, and start music in the house that plays until we head to bed. I can’t put my finger on when it started, but I noticed that my phone would discharge the battery in about 20 minutes when playing Pandora through the JBL speaker. With the update to the pandora subscription and the new speaker I didn’t know why or which upgrade caused the issue.

After several times of my phone draining; going to a blank screen and the music stopping, I added the routine of plugging in my phone as I started the music. This issue is defiantly a 1st world problem, but it was a pain and inconvenience. All of a sudden I was tethered to keep my phone plugged in for the music to keep playing.

I searched online to see what was going on and saw that maybe the JBL speaker was more powerful than my previous speaker and might be pulling energy from the phone. But that didn’t make sense to me. Another post said something about the premium version of Pandora pulling more power. It was mostly message boards filled with people and their opinions and offered no actionable go-forward plan.

It’s just a minor thing; I valued the music more than what the inconvenience cause me, so I just continued on the path, until last week, Pandora kept freezing up on me. I would go to search for a song, and the app would freeze. My phone was acting up with some calls recently too, and my first thought was, “Oh crap, now I have to buy a new phone.”

Before acting too fast down that path, I was going to try a few other things; the first of which was removing the Pandora app from my phone, turning off the device and then re-installing. This was my ctrl-alt-delete plan. I thought I had automatic updates on my phone, but when it was reinstalled, a whole new user interface appeared for Pandora, and it worked fine. Not only it didn’t freeze anymore, but it also had no negative effect on my battery.

All this time, maybe it was just a small glitch in my Pandora app. It took less than 5 minutes, and my problem was fixed. Now I could take my phone outside and on walks — no more tethered cord.

I might have been running an old version of the app, that had not updated, and it was draining my battery. A small thing just needed reset; it wasn’t the speaker’s fault, or my phone, it was a simple reset of an app.

A simple reset, change the whole path forward. What if I wouldn’t have reset the app? I would have still been tied to the charger, or maybe I would have bought a new phone or speaker thinking it was the fault of those devices.

I also wonder how many times I have been too quick to act on something, ran to ‘fix’ the problem — making it a bigger deal than it needed to be; when all I needed was a reset.

That reset can come in many forms, in other parts of our life. For me it’s a run through the woods, a weekend alone when Lexy takes the boys to her parents, waking up early to read and pray, or taking a few days off work for a trip with the family. It’s been on these resets, I realize we need to buy a new piece of equipment, that we don’t want to work with a specific General Contractor anymore or see an opportunity in someone’s development.

In the go-go-go it’s hard to think about anything other than what’s in front of me, and like when I was plugging in my phone each night, it was a pain, but I just got used to it — yet it kept me from the freedom of a non-tethered cell phone.time

We all need resets in our life. Time away from work, our kids, or maybe even our spouse. (Yes. It’s ok to have alone time from your kids and spouse).

Better perspectives can come when we take the time away from the hard-charging, go-getting, and have time to reset. We do this in our company by taking most weekends off, having a generous time-off request process, and building systems and people to allow each person to ‘actually be off work’ when they take off. Most of our industry is working every weekend, holiday shut-downs and are available 24/7 to their clients. We think we serve the best with guidelines for our work. When we protect and take care of our team, we are best suited to deliver the best to the clients. We value resets.