Emergencies abound. But, they don't always mean you have to lose personal productivity. With some contingency productivity planning, you can stay productive even when things break, when technology fails us, and when people snap!

Also, this was recorded a while back and since then, we're glad to note that Francis has since upgraded successfully and happily to Windows 10. 🤓

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In this Cast | Contingency Productivity Planning

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Show Notes

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Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF)

048 Creating a Backup Storage System – ProductivityCast

Francis Wade had Ray Sidney-Smith on his podcast to discuss backup systems:

Ep 60 Creating a Storage Decision Tool w/Ray Sidney-Smith p1Ep 61 Creating a Storage Decision Tool p2 w/Ray Sidney-SmithEp 62 Creating a Storage Decision Tool p3 w/Ray Sidney-SmithTry the Storage Decision Tool here

Raw Text Transcript | Contingency Productivity Planning

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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:20 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:22I'm Francis Wade.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:24and Welcome, gentlemen, welcome to our listeners. Welcome to you all listening. And what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about backup plans, that is contingency planning for greater productivity. We all come into contact with situations where stuff just goes south. And we need to be able to be prepared. We need to be flexible and adaptive. We need to be dynamic in the circumstances to be able to recover from those situations. And so today we're going to talk about three umbrella areas. Pretty much when things break when technology goes wrong. And of course, when people say The app. And so those will be what we talked about today in terms of what happens when those three areas of our worlds melt down. And we have to still be productive, we still have to get things done even when the problems arise. So let's start off with the notion of when things break, and ugly. So do you want to start us off with a personal example

Augusto Pinaud 1:27to kind of start with a personal example as he wake up this morning, grab his glasses out of his nightstand and end up with half of the glasses on the hand, the legs, one of the legs is broke. So traveling this week and I have all these PC things and it throws your morning off when you now need to add something that you know is time consuming. It's not as simple as say, Okay, well I need to replace it is I need to go stop on a particular place that only open on a certain time so it throw a big wrench on your planning. And like that many of the things many of these on expected failures and some of them you can plan the contingency I mean I went open the drawer on my nightstand and pull an old set of glasses and I have glasses otherwise I will not be able to see anything okay but but he's still a problem that now needs to be turned into a project that we need to look for next actions and everything else. So what do you do well, those things come in you're already complicated life

Francis Wade 2:29number conscious of this. The whole business of having backups because when I I, a migrated to Jamaica from living in the US, it was it was like moving from the land of reliable everything to the land of To a land of random, random everything random everything else. It was it was a culture shock to go from being able to live a very ordered, reliable, trusted, in some ways boring life in which everything was extremely predictable. And things were easy as a result, to move to a country where, where every day is a breakdown of some new concoction that you sort of have to navigate. And it was it was it was very difficult at first it's still it's still extremely challenging because he when the when the things that you can rely on, develop and become new and all of a sudden intrude into your world, it's it still takes the same level of ingenuity and effort. Like for example, just in the last year or so by cell phone services basically stopped working. Part of it is that I live up in the hills but something has changed in the networks here in Jamaica, the two major cell phone providers and the service that they provide has deteriorated to the point where Half of the time, it's impossible to have a phone call. And I've basically stopped receiving phone calls because people call me and all they get is voicemail. So I've had to adjust and readjust and use FaceTime and hat and Google Hangouts and, and telegram and Skype and WhatsApp is of no help. Unfortunately, it's very popular. But it's so popular that the word is that the telephone companies are throttling it, because they're losing too much revenue. But the other ones all work somewhat. So this is required. And this is just in the last year. It's just an example of what the kind of thing that when there's no copy of the source code create one,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:45you bring up a great point, which is that when when things break, like your cellular network, telephone network generally, then you need to make sure that you're aware of some some pieces of the puzzle. One is that it can break almost everything in your world can break I have a microphone that I'm speaking into right now and we'll get to technology stuff soon. But you know the the microphone arm could break. It's there's springs and joints and I'm use it every day. And it could just break. And what happens in those cases where there is a breakage and you need to now recover from that and still move on. Now my contingency plan is understanding what the scenario is. Right? So what are the various ways in which things could break and knowing what are the ways in which the contingency plan kicks into place? Right? So there's a scenario there's a cyber attack you you then think of Okay, what are the scenarios within which there could be a probability of some impact on your ability to continue to have continuity in this case for me, I always think of business continuity, but you were talking about your productivity system. So your productivity continuity then becomes a What's the probability of an impact? And those are the things that we pay attention to. So what could break in your world? And what would trigger you to know that there is a break. And so, for example, if your car's engine light comes on, that's a trigger, because it's at least warning you. And you then have the opportunity to do that. If you are writing with your pen, and all of a sudden the pen starts to and it's your only pen, you know, you have on an off site meeting, and it starts to you know, give not have enough ink in it, right? You know, you're like, Wait a second, why is this not? The why isn't the ink not flowing properly? That's a warning, that's a trigger. And then you have to figure out how you respond to the whole scenario. And so in the pen example, I always carry extra pens. I actually carry way too many pens on me at all times. And this is actually two problems and one, the first problem is that my pen could run out of ink I traditionally write with fountain pens, and I just like having a nice, you know, everyday nothing fancy fountain pen, but I tend to feel like it slows me down enough to think more thoughtfully about what I'm writing, especially when I'm taking notes by hand on like physical agendas that might be given to me at meetings. The other is I've been forced to use the the the friction pens that go with the the everlast, the rocket book everlast notebooks that I use for capturing my own internal notes when I'm meeting one to one with clients. And so that notebook uses the the gel ink pen that comes with the friction, you know, inside the friction pen. And so I have those two so I already carry two pens for when I'm capable of writing on my own or when I'm taking specific notes, but I want to use some automation through everlast notebook and Evernote and any other automation that's going to then get triggered beyond that. Automatically sending it to to whomever I need to. Well, the problem is that I frequently go to meetings and other people don't have pen and paper. And so I actually carry extra pen and paper for those people. Because frequently, I'm delegating or making recommendations of projects and actions to those people. And I want to make sure that they capture them. Because I can't depend upon others to have great productivity systems. And that by itself is a contingency plan. My contingency plan is that no matter what other tools people have, or don't have, or systems they have or don't have,