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?

Photo by stock.xchng user dimitri_c

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Brighthouse is the major cable and high-speed Internet provider for most of Central Florida. In the area where I live, they are actually the only high-speed provider. Web workers, of course, usually need the fastest and best quality connection we can get.

About a week before Christmas, I started noticing trouble connecting to several sites. I blamed the DNS errors on vacation traffic clogging the sites. But by Christmas Eve the issue had spread to almost all the sites I used, making my Internet connection virtually unusable. Extensive troubleshooting determined the problem was outside the house on the cable connection.

I decided to wait until after the holiday weekend to complain. But over the weekend I began seeing reports on Twitter from people I knew in the area experiencing the same problem. They did call — and the customer service people wouldn’t believe or admit that the company had a service problem.

Customer service reps told complaining customers that the problem was their personal router was broken. The offered solution was to plug directly into the cable modem to bypass the router. This was despite the fact that many of the callers were computer professionals who assured the reps that they had done extensive troubleshooting before calling to complain and they knew that the trouble was outside their homes (and some even knew roughly where it was through tracing packet loss). They got nowhere.

This situation highlighted something that can cause frustration for web workers. We are in the top echelon of computer users. We push things to their technical limits. We know ten times more than the typical user that the technical support script is written to help. We frequently know more than the “support” person on the other end of the phone. But convincing them of that can be difficult. How do we manage that?

In this case, the solution to being told there was no service problem was to prove that everyone had a problem. So the affected customers organized ourselves using social media. We started sharing info via Twitter so that we could tell customer service that it wasn’t just an isolated problem because we knew other of their customers that had the same problem. Using this information, some people were able to get customer service to acknowledge there might be an issue.

The biggest help, however, was when the media started reporting the problem. A local TV station and the Orlando Sentinel both picked up the story. Within only a couple hours, the problem that supposedly didn’t even exist was magically solved, after having dragged on for at least a week.

The lesson I came away with was that fighting as a group is more powerful than going it alone — and even better is having a reporter or two in that group.

After my Internet was back to normal, I realized that besides learning a valuable lesson about how to fight back as a consumer against a recalcitrant utility, the experience had also exposed a major flaw in my business emergency plan.

My “Internet outage” emergency plan has always called for going to family members’ homes, the library, Starbucks or McDonald’s to work. With Brighthouse being the only high-speed Internet provider in this area, all of those locations are likely customers of Brighthouse also and thus in a situation like this would have been as useless as my home service. I am going to have to do some research into alternative options in case of another emergency that renders the cable company’s service inoperable area-wide.

As a web worker, my Internet provider has me over a barrel. I am dependent on them and since they are effectively a monopoly, I have very little leverage with them. This weekend, I got a taste of how that can affect more than just my bill.

Does it worry you to be so dependent on your Internet provider?

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In the past 18 months, I’ve had to take time off of work for a variety of not-so-fun reasons. There’s been emergency trips to visit sick relatives, funeral travel, surgery for my mom, and surgery of my own. Plus, although we’ve been fortunate to not have serious disruptions from tropical weather here recently, that has happened before and will certainly happen again.

Here’s the lessons I’ve learned from those experiences about how being a web worker affects you during a personal crisis.

Good: Have Laptop, Will Travel

Being able to do your work via the web means you can probably pack it up and be productive (at least somewhat) while dealing with your crisis. If you have to travel, you don’t have to wrap everything up before you can run out the door. You can arrange for your time off after you’ve already left, or even get some work done anywhere that you need to be.

Many medical facilities even have Wi-Fi now for families to use while visiting with patients. Pulling out your laptop to do some work in these situations may sound more insensitive than it really is. Often patients feel they have to entertain people who are sitting with them. Working on a laptop can provide the perfect excuse to disengage yourself so the patient can rest or have some privacy, and it can alleviate a patient’s guilt over pulling you away from your usual routine if they see you are still being productive. If you are part of a group of visitors, excusing yourself to work elsewhere can be a good way to provide someone a private visit with the patient.

Good: Routine Is Therapeutic

A crisis by its very nature is stressful. Routine is comforting to most people. The familiar activity of being able to maintain at least some of your normal work routine via the web (even if it’s just checking and answering work email) can be a very helpful coping mechanism when something stressful is happening. The distraction of work can also be very helpful to some people by giving them something else besides their crisis situation to focus on for awhile.

Good: Reducing the Post-crisis Disaster

One of the reasons that I wrote that I don’t like to take vacations is that they are too much work to prepare for and catch up from. The same is true of a crisis break, but since it often isn’t planned, the work would all be done by playing catch-up. If you can do some of that work during the crisis itself, your post-crisis work stress will be reduced.

Bad: Working Under Stress

Remember that point about how a crisis is stressful? While a web worker may have the technical ability to work during a crisis, you need to be aware that your mental ability to do so may be compromised due to extreme stress. The quality of your work may not be up to your usual standards. You may make bad decisions that you later regret. You may say (or type) things that you normally wouldn’t because you are feeling emotional. Being aware of your limitations while working under stress is important. Postpone things that you aren’t sure you can handle correctly at that time until later.

One important limitation to consider: If the crisis is your own medical situation, and there are heavy medications involved, you may want to consider whether you should limit your phone and laptop use to playing Farmville. WWI (working while impaired) could cost you your reputation, a client, or your job if you aren’t careful.

Bad: Everyone Knows Your (Personal) Business

Even if you are working during it, a crisis will still mean some change in your capacity or schedule to do your work. This will need to be explained, especially to any associates and clients who are affected. In a traditional corporate environment, someone else would probably just step in for you, explain that you are on medical or family leave, and take care of business. But especially if you are freelancer, you will have to do the explaining yourself and probably to some people who feel they know you well enough to be concerned. Explanations will need to be somewhat specific (“My grandmother is very ill”) and as a result, everyone ends up knowing your personal business. This also makes it harder to use work as an escape from stress since well-meaning concerned co-workers may ask how you are coping.

Bad: Pressure to Limit Time Off

Web workers can feel pressure from both within and without to limit time off in a crisis situation. Freelancers feel financial pressure because they aren’t getting paid, and may be incurring unusual expenses as well. There’s also concern that clients may look elsewhere if put off too long. Outside pressure can come from clients who think that since you web work (and probably from home) that you can do more during a crisis than is really practical or wise. Juggling these needs can make it tempting to limit your time away. Make sure you take what you truly need.

The flexibility of web work can be wonderful in a crisis but it has pitfalls too. Being aware of them means being able to navigate your work through a personal crisis as smoothly as possible.

Has being a web worker helped you navigate a personal crisis?

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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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