So what do you do when you encounter these interruptions? While you can’t control the weather, there are still ways to prevent it from affecting your work too much.

Before you proceed executing the following tips, remember that your primary concern should be your safety. If your home is secure against flooding and strong winds, then that’s the only time you should be thinking about continuing your work.

With that said, here are some things you should consider if you want to keep working through power outages:

The first thing you should consider is to increase your laptop and mobile phone’s battery capacity. You can do this by having an extra battery and keeping it charged, or by upgrading to a larger capacity battery. You can also get an external battery for your laptop, which can give you more hours of usage. You should also practice power-saving habits when you’re using batteries. TheAppleBlog compiled some power-saving tips in a previous post. Keep these in mind when you’re running your laptop on batteries only so that you can use it for as long as possible.

If you can, invest in a reliable uninterruptible power supply (UPS), especially when you’re using a desktop computer. It’ll give you the opportunity to turn off your equipment properly or wrap up your tasks. Remember to have your modem and Wi-Fi router plugged in too, so that you don’t lose your internet connection in case you’re working on something online.

When a storm seems like it’s calming down and the weather predictions are optimistic, you can give yourself the option to work in a nearby location that still has electricity. Many establishments such as coffee shops, malls, and restaurants have generators that provide electricity when the rest of the city is off the grid. Some of them will even have Wi-Fi access too. Just make sure that they are “laptop friendly,” and that you are polite to the staff.

It’s also important to have a backup internet connection. Apart from my DSL connection, I also have a 3G USB modem that I use during trips and emergencies. When my DSL connection is down, I can still have internet access.

When your high-tech tools are powerless, it’s also a good opportunity to revisit the power of good ol’ pen and paper. Apart from storing critical contact information in your phone and laptop, you should also have it in an address book. Finish as much work as you can with pen and paper, whether it’s drawing mockups of a design or writing your latest blog post. In case your hardware becomes completely unusable, you can turn to these options to communicate with clients and stay productive.

Also, when you get the chance, let everyone know you’re safe — especially if the storm is bad enough that it’s covered by international news. When Typhoon Ketsana hit us last year, the city I lived in was mostly under water. My foreign friends, colleagues, and clients saw this on the news and sent me messages about how worried they were about me. My mistake was that I should have sent word earlier, saving them from worry since I live in one of the few elevated areas of the city.

Though I live in an area that’s susceptible to typhoons, the regular theft of phone and electric cables, and a variety of other service interruptions, this doesn’t mean that I can’t be a successful web worker. It just means that I need to have a solid contingency plan so that clients can still receive consistent work from me.

Do you live in an area that experiences regular internet and power outages? How do you cope as a web worker?

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Now, I’m not famous, so I doubt that any news about me would cause a spike in Internet traffic, or get me invited to appear on “The Colbert Report.” But recent events made me realize that I still needed to have a plan in place to be able to respond to news (both real and false) posted online about me. Here’s what I came up with.

• Be prepared to respond instantly. The speed with which people heard about Jackson’s death was amazing. A friend of mine who happens to be a radio announcer smugly announced on his Facebook status that he was able to broadcast the news before CNN did. So if someone posts information about you, even (or especially!) if it’s not correct, there’s no time to waste. You must comment immediately, even if it’s a bare-bones “that’s wrong, more later.”
• Make sure that someone else has access to your accounts in case you aren’t available to post.
• Remember that the social networks are connected. If someone is talking about you on Twitter, the same comments are probably being made on Facebook, and other places as well. Check, and be ready to respond accordingly.
• Use Twitter and social network updates as backups to your usual means of communication. Recently, a much-hyped new web site found that it couldn’t cope with the traffic, so it put up a “down for maintenance” notice, complete with a “meanwhile, follow us on Twitter” recommendation. It was able to post updates on Twitter when its own site was overstretched.
• Don’t rely on just one site, or just one medium, to get the word out. My customers know that they can get the latest info on my web site, a backup web site on a leased server in another state, on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and by pre-recorded phone message. I’m also experimenting with sites like Get Satisfaction and Yelp as backup information sources.

I hope that I never have to implement my emergency plans. But it’s a comfort to know that I’ll be ready if someone posts a “did you hear the news…?” message about me or my business.

How have you prepared to respond to news and rumors about you?

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What would you do if your web connection went down right now? You might have a fairly reliable web connection, but faults and maintenance inevitably leave each of us without web access some of the time. If you rely on the web to work, it’s important to have a contingency plan in place.

Being a “webless web worker” is a challenge I deal with often, because I use a wireless Internet connection that routes through a series of repeater stations dotted along the six miles between my house and the service provider’s base station. In the last year, we’ve had a number of service failures, including the weather knocking towers out for days, as well as the usual minor technical faults. There are also times, particularly when it’s windy, when our connection can crawl.

As a consequence, I’ve developed a few fallbacks for the occasions when I lose my vital connection to the web:

Use portable devices. Of course, a web-enabled cellphone or BlackBerry is great for keeping up with news, blogs and email. But it can be a life-saver when you suddenly lose your Internet connection — you can use it to send that critical email or even write a blog post. Having said that, I wouldn’t want to spend days completing online research or writing book chapters using my phone.

Have backup references handy. It’s all too easy to substitute physical references like books and CD-ROMs for their less bulky, at-your-fingertips online counterparts. That’s fine — until there’s no web. I always keep foundation references on my desk and a library of additional, particularly relevant or important information handy.

Know your local web hotspots. The coffee shops, bars and libraries around here are fairly free and easy with their Wi-Fi, so one option for me is to focus on the work I can get done offline and then go out for a coffee to access the web. It’s restrictive, and it takes a bit of preparation, but it’s better than nothing.

Phone a friend. I have friends who live nearby who have invited me to use their wired web connections if I need to. This can be a reassuring option if you have to rely on flaky wireless Internet like I do.

These are all only temporary solutions, though. If our repeater station’s been damaged by high wind and will take days to repair, I just have to face up to the physical commute to the office.

So, what would you do if your internet connection went down right now?

Image by sxc.hu user Rybson

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