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Task-Driven Preparedness Planning, by J.M.

At it’s core, preparedness is a planning activity – we think about what bad things can or may happen and take steps to help ensure our survival if one or more of those events does occur. But what is it that drives that planning? Many of us tend to take a list-driven approach – we identify the types of resources we think we’ll need to survive such as food, water, medical supplies, plans, skills, etc., evaluate relevant factors such as our location, weather, family and finances, then make or find lists of what we think we’ll need to increase our chances of surviving. These resources typically fall into one of several categories:

Based on these categories, here are some examples of how preparedness planning is frequently done for most event types:

These are just some basic examples of what many people tend to consider when doing preparedness planning, and all of these are perfectly valid ways to help you prepare. However, based on my experience over the years of trying out many new activities I’ve found that a simple linear checklist approach tends to fall short when reality hits you over the head. Take hunting for example – I wanted to get into deer hunting about 15 years ago, so I went out and found a ‘hunting checklist’ on a well-respected hunting web site, then purchased or acquired everything I thought I’d need based on that list (e.g. a hunting rifle, some ammo, appropriate hunting clothes, game processing gear, license, etc.). I also watched a few videos online, read a few books, spent some time at the range with my new rifle and talked to some locals about the best hunting spots.

After a few weeks I got together with a friend and we went on our first hunt, and needless to say it was a disaster. The gear was heavy, it took a lot longer to get to the spot we were looking for, it was cold and raining, there were tons of other hunters out, etc., and even if we managed to bag a deer I’m not sure we would have been very successful at processing it and hauling it back out. I’ve learned a lot since that first trip, but many of the problems could have been mitigated if I’d understood that deer hunting is a series of tasks and activities with a lot of variables and unique requirements and planned for those appropriately.

For the sample scenario in this discussion, I’m going to assume that a major disaster has occurred, public services such as water, sewer, electricity, law enforcement, etc. aren’t available, and you’re forced to adopt a completely self-sustaining lifestyle for an extended period (more than 1 year) to ensure your and your family’s survival.

For my example, I’m also assuming you’re living in a house, cabin or some other structure and not engaging in a nomadic lifestyle. The same task-driven planning process will work for pretty much any type of scenario, but I chose to focus on ones that are most relevant for me.

Tasks

Identifying what tasks are going to be relevant or necessary in a post-disaster environment and determining the requirements for successfully accomplishing them can be a critical first step for any preparedness planning. Simple things such as your morning routine may require a wide range of preparations you may not have considered in order to accomplish this successfully. There may also be conditions or dependencies such as seasons, security state, etc. that necessitate modifying your approach to a task. It’s impossible to identify and plan for every possible task and every possible unique combination of activity, condition, or dependency, but by considering the most common and likely ones you’ll gain valuable insight into how well prepared you actually are. Note that if you currently live a completely off-grid self-sustaining lifestyle you’ve probably already learned most of the hard lessons necessary to effectively support your day-to-day tasks and activities.

Tasks can be described at different levels of detail – everything from ‘I’m going to survive’ to ‘I’m going to move some firewood indoors’. In many instances it helps to break a broader task down into a group of more specific tasks or activities – this is referred to as decomposition. Once you’ve done that it becomes simpler to identify what resources are relevant and required to accomplish the activities that make up the task. Let’s start with a simple task – getting up in the morning and getting ready for the day. We can decompose this task into several smaller tasks and activities:

Now let’s take a look at some things you need to consider for each of these. To begin with, where are you sleeping?

A post-disaster world isn’t the kind of place where sleeping late every day lends itself to survival – you’re going to have tons of tasks to do like farming, hunting, repairs, security, cutting firewood, etc., so you’ll need to wake up early every day to get everything done. If you’re the kind of person that naturally wakes up early every day this part shouldn’t be an issue. However, if you’re like a lot of folks you’ll probably sleep late in the morning unless you have some assistance, like an alarm clock.

You’ll most likely find that you’re going to need to get up really early on most days in order to get everything done that needs to be done, so it may be dark when you get up, depending on the time of year.

Once you’re up and about you should probably get dressed.

After you’re dressed, most people will need to perform some bodily functions.

If you’re currently on a septic system, you should be able to continue using that but you’ll need some way to get water into the toilet tank to flush it.

Once that’s done you should probably wash up and brush your teeth. Hygiene is critical to preventing the spread of disease and keeping your body healthy.

Once you’re awake, clean and refreshed, you’ll most likely want to eat breakfast.

And after you’ve eaten you’ll need to clean up the kitchen and dishes:

Mapping it Out

In order to better understand each task and its associated preparedness factors, I like to create a table like the one shown below. Note that I actually do these for all of my tasks in a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet, which allows me to create a separate worksheet for each task, link dependencies to other worksheets, link to worksheets containing my inventories, etc.

Activity Notes Material Environ. Social Know. Skills Plans Time Depend.
Sleeping Bedrooms 3 season, LR in winter Cots for winter, bedding for cots, normal beds/bedding NA NA NA NA Winter sleeping arrangements 8 Hours

Plan: Enviro.

Task: Washing bedding

Plan: Security

Waking Up Watch alarm Casio solar watch NA NA NA NA NA NA Activity: Daily planning
Moving around Flashlight Flashlight, batteries NA NA NA NA NA NA Plan: Power
Getting dressed Lay out clothes in winter Clothing, Seasonal NA NA NA NA NA 5 Min. Task: Washing
Body functions Toilet/septic system Non-potable water, TP, bidets, drying cloths Water source, privacy NA NA Using Bidet NA 10 Min. Plan: Water
Task: Washing clothes/towels
Brush teeth Stocked toothbrushes & tooth powder, baking soda Toothbrushes, tooth powder, potable water Water source NA NA NA NA 5 Min. Plan: Water
Wash Stocked powdered soap Soap, water, towels Water source, privacy NA NA NA NA 5 Min. Plan: Water
Task: Washing clothes/towels
Breakfast Cook on woodstove in winter, small wood grill otherwise Food, potable water, utensils, pots/pans, grill, flatware, napkins, Tang, Coffee Water source NA NA Fire Kindling

Woodstove Cooking

NA 30 Min. Plan: Water

Plan: Food

Clean up Wash dishes Powdered dish soap, dish towels, water Water source NA NA NA NA 10 Min. Plan: Cleaning
Plan: Water

Table 1: Morning Routine Tasks & Activities

The first row in this example is sleeping – I plan on using our normal bedrooms when the temperature permits and move everyone into the living room with the wood-burning stove during the cold season. For Material we’re going to need our normal beds and bedding for warmer weather and smaller folding cots to fit into the living room in the winter. Nothing special for Environmental, Social, Knowledge or Skills is needed, but I want to create a plan for laying out the living room for winter sleeping. I’d like everyone to get 8 hours of sleep (Time), and there are several other tasks and plans that can have an impact on our sleeping plans (Dependencies):

I’m not going to discuss every row in the table, but hopefully it’ll give you a starting point for how to go about planning for all of the various tasks and activities that you may need to accomplish in a grid-down scenario. These plans can also be extremely useful even for short-term disasters – for example, if we lose power for several days during a major blizzard we’ll be able to use the results of this planning to get by, and return to ‘normal’ once the power is restored.

Plans for Every Occasion

So far I’ve focused on a single task (morning routine), but I tend to take planning to a higher level and created a series of plans that cover a wide range of functions, with each plan covering multiple tasks and activities. Here’s a partial list of my current preparedness plans and some of the tasks they cover:

Each task-based plan is in a separate LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet, with separate worksheets for each task. I created a standard naming convention for things that appear in the Materials, Knowledge, Skills, etc. columns so I can easily extract those columns into consolidated lists and compare them to what I actually have or know in order to identify gaps in my preps. I print and regularly update hard-copy versions of all of the plans, and I’ve spent time reviewing them with my family and trusted friends to ensure everyone knows where they are and how to use them.

Reality Check

Focusing on tasks instead of just ‘stuff’ for your preparations is a great way to help identify things you may not have thought of as part of your preparedness planning. However, it’s critical to understand they are just plans and reality may have other ideas, so you need to be flexible enough to respond to changing conditions. I’ve invested a lot of time and effort in my planning and it’s helped me identify a lot of things that I hadn’t considered, and as a result, I like to think I’m a lot more prepared than I would be without the planning. But in a nod to Richard Bach’s Messiah’s Handbook, on the front cover of each of my plan notebooks is the phrase ‘Everything in this book may be wrong’.