Your Business… Offline

Ask any entrepreneur, or teenager, to go 48 hours without using the internet and you might get a lot of blank stares. It’s akin to asking some people to give up coffee, texting or television. Sure it could be done, but why would you want to? Here’s a few things my 36 hour no-internet experience has taught me & how your business can survive an outage:

1. If everything is online then you’re at a disadvantage

When working out this issue with my service provider, they asked for a recent copy of my bill to verify amount paid, my customer number and my rates. Uh… sure. Those bills are all online. Some are downloaded for tax purposes but then archived in my Dropbox account. When everything for your business exists only online you may find yourself cutoff and needing information. One solution is to use online services to store copies, not the only copy of data. Keep careful track of your passwords too, if they can only be stored and accessed on one computer and that is the machine that’s unavailable, you might find yourself locked out.

2. Know what requires internet access 

Despite being unable to pop over to Google at any moment, it was easy for me to work without the internet. Proposals, blog content, video editing… none of these tasks required me to be online. It was an interesting exercise, in fact, and I kept an on-going list of what I needed to do when I got back online (at the local Starbucks incidentally).

Most of the items on my list were final steps. I could research, draft, finalize and save the proposals going out and even write the email. Then when I got online, the only thing I had to do was press send. Most of the time we’re “online” and connected while doing tasks that don’t require that access.

Consider if you had a 4 hour flight with no access to wifi. How much offline work could you get done in that time? Try turning off your internet access for a few hours on your next work day and find out.

3. Without access, distractions online are minimal 

Do you ever come across a problem you don’t know the answer to just yet and find yourself navigating to Facebook? Or Reddit? Or the online forum or news site of your choice?

I believe it’s because we like to have easy distractions that keep us from facing some of the harder decisions we have to make. While it can provide a nice break for our minds to think about the problem it’s also incredibly inefficient. I would find myself opening a web browser only to find the “not connected to the internet” page still coming up. Then I’d reach for my phone, asking why no one had texted in the last 6 minutes.

When your internet is down, the distractions might be gone but reaching for them doesn’t stop. If you don’t believe me, declare this Friday to be “no internet day” and count how many times you reach for those distractions. While you and I may never be able to eliminate them, it can be managed.

4. Have backup systems offline and a team in place 

The only reason the front end of my week was as productive as it could be was that we have a wonderful team working at She’s Got Systems. It’s very rare that all of us will lose internet access at the same time so knowing that they were working on regular marketing tasks, client services, managing support and launch tasks made it so much easier to relax. And, when needed I was able to access my calendar, email and websites through my iPhone to keep in touch.

Action Step: You may never think that an internet outage is in your future. However, being prepared for one is just smart business. Fake yourself out by disconnecting a few hours this week or an entire day and find out if your business can truly survive. By the way, if your business starts to fall apart after a few hours offline, that also means you can’t take time off and that is bad news!