Assumption: “If it snows or storms, I can work from home and telecommute.” Assumptions are not always correct. The major ice storms at the end of January and start of February 2011 prompted creating this plan for my husband and myself. (Or first backup plan was alternate transportation routes.)
Lessons learned day by day:
Day 1
When power goes out at the house, such as during the first day of the storm for about 6 hours, the only way you can work from home is by using precious generator fuel or laptop batteries. Due to my husband’s higher pay rate, he dialed in with the laptop computer while I managed the kids and lessons.
Lessons learned:
* if we want to be able to both telecommute, we either need to have two working laptops to connect with or be willing to give up generator fuel to use one desktop computer. Cost of fuel needs to balanced against the cost of extra lap top batteries and an additional laptop and the effort to keep their batteries charged.
Day 2
When the power goes out at your place of work, as happened on day 2 of the storm, you cannot remotely connect to the work site to telecommute. Husband’s backup plan was a stack of printed calculations to review and then manually type up comments and e-mail back. Time to type and e-mail is a fraction of the time spent reviewing paper. I worked on technical documents but could not submit them for review. My work was done in the hope of billable results (paid upon acceptance) later due to the customer’s site being down (whole site dead, data centers on backup power, no one had e-mail or network connections).
For another site, data that I worked on through the web site was lost when the site went down for a while during a rolling power outage. There went half an hour of work.
Potential backup laptop we have borrowed from a friend is virus infected. Running virus-scans found at least three infections. Fortunately, we double-checked everything before I touched it with consideration of actually working on it. (Imagine the perceived reputation of working remotely if all work sent in is infected!)
Lessons learned:
- Have a backup plan of means to generate billable time or payable work if everyone else’s network connections or computers are dead. The ability to do work from home is of limited value if you cannot send it for management review or customer acceptance. If their standard process is review through a tool like PleaseReview or Documentum, propose a backup plan of e-mailing documents so that days are not lost. If e-mail through work accounts are not available and e-mailing work files from personal e-mail accounts are not acceptable, have a backup location agreed upon in advance of where files can be securely uploaded and shared.
- Have backups of all customer billable files saved somewhere other than methods through which you submit them. Save early and save often. If their system goes down and all data is lost, your only hope of recouping that time is having a backup to resend them. Copy and paste results into web sites or attach these files to e-mails or upload to their web site. Avoid working only in their web site or forms; if your computer or theirs goes down, all the work is lost.
- Virus-scan everything thoroughly prior to use. Scan computers you receive at least three times to ensure that it is safe before using. Scan files you receive at least twice with two separate virus-scanners to prevent infection of your own machine.
Day 3
Husband has finished much of his take home work. I am looking for billable work through e-mail to customers. Crowd-sourcing web sites provide a fallback for burning some time and generating some (though less than usual) income.
My main customers’ systems are still shut down from massive electrical failure at site. This could create a problem because some of the work I do is customer surveys and satisfaction analysis. If I had had more information for software manual updates, there would have been more billable time for them even when working from home.
Secondary customer is up and running and accepting articles. I sent several articles written in the interim to a third customer.
Kids have finished all homework and are making progress through workbooks I had saved. This keeps them busy but not entirely occupied. Interruptions cost quality of work.
Lessons:
- Have more than one customer! The ability to be paid from more than one source meant that income flow wasn’t entirely constrained by one customer’s literally shut down.
- Where possible, have a backlog of tasks or projects for which you can be paid if working from home. Conversely, have tasks that are not time constrained. Having a paid task that must be done on a certain date is worthless if you cannot complete it on time.
- If you have children, then have a plan of how to keep them and you working at the same time. Then practice it on the weekends in imitation of how it may play out in real life. We’d practiced “power down weekends”, but that was closer to family camping inside the house. Mommy and Daddy trying to work on computers with them trying to do school work is a whole other scenario that needs to be practiced as well.
Day 4
Mailman makes it in and out. We’re well stocked, so getting to the store is a necessity. However, getting to the bank to deposit a check received in the mail is a major hassle. We found a solution: direct deposit through our credit union. Scan the check (our printer doubles as a scanner and fax machine), upload to web site, and deposit. Funds available next day for electronic funds transfer (EFT) bill paying.
I received other payments through PayPal and Amazon gift certificates. Paypal funds can be transferred to the bank account electronically. They could also be used for online purchases if we chose. Amazon gift certificates are great to order groceries or necessities from their web site; sort by items eligible for free super saver shipping and order sufficient volume to hit the $25-30 minimum for free shipping. The items arrive in a few days because the mail man still comes every day. And it is safer than trying to get to the store as well as convenient.
A few low priority documents and articles are submitted via the mail. A good supply of stamps and envelopes made this a practical backup plan when power is interrupted.
Lessons:
- Have alternate means of payment available. Be able to bypass the bank.
- Have ways to immediately convert these alternate payments into things you need and use.
- Plan your business like your life for emergency situations; don’t have to go anywhere to get it all done.
Day 5
Power interruptions are short 5-15 minutes during Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) planned rolling blackouts to save electricity. This is in some ways worse than power out for 2-5 hours because it is easy to resume work after power comes back on, only to lose it again shortly thereafter.
The Uninteruptible Power Supply (UPS [1]) is connected to wireless router and DSL router. We’re still connected to the internet while the UPS is running, and unlike a computer, routers don’t draw as much power. If that didn’t work, we could connect via the phone line.
Husband had to go into work to catch up on tasks that could not be handled remotely. Fortunately, he had safe routes in and out regardless of weather. Taking his laptop with wi-fi connection allowed him to work even while the train was delayed.
Lessons learned:
- Laptops have built in battery backups. If the power goes out while someone is working on a laptop plugged in, the battery backup kicks in. The ability to continue working and at least finish the work and notify everyone that you will be offline shortly minimizes the disruption.
- Have an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) connected to your desktop computers. This provides a short period to save work, preventing its loss. [JWR Adds: For the greatest practicality, a UPS should be too heavy to comfortably lift and carry more than a few yards. A heavy UPS means that that it has lots of batteries, which equates to a longer useful run time.]
- UPS connected to home routers keeps home network up and running even when the local wi-fi shuts down from local power outage. Consider adding a UPS to your router if it is heavily used or connecting it to your computer’s UPS.
- We retained our old modems in case faster network connections like wi-fi failed. Have a backup connection method.
Other observations:
- If you plan to telecommute, have multiple means to make connections with your customers. However, this must be balanced with data security and their corporate policies if any.
- Have these backup plans in place and agreed upon before they are needed. Trying to discuss these alternate data sharing methods on cell phones with limited batteries is not a good backup plan.
- As with any other power using appliance, have backup power sources that can fuel it.
- Have multiple methods to connect to the Internet.
- As demand on infrastructure goes up from a growing population but quality declines from lack of maintenance, expect interruptions of basic services like utilities. Then plan on how to function with both shut downs and interruptions.