For home-based professionals who work online or use the internet to submit their work to clients, a reliable internet connection is an essential piece of business equipment. However, internet connections can and do fail to work properly from time to time. Sometimes, there is nothing that you can do to get through an internet outage except for finding things that you can do offline until connectivity is restored. Even though it may be a bit upsetting at first to have to set the work that you had planned on doing aside because you cannot get online, the very act of committing yourself to finding tasks that you can do offline is essential to your productivity.
When the internet is down, it can be very tempting to throw up your hands and declare that you cannot get anything done. You may want to walk away from your desk or work area and abandon your “work day” or scheduled working hours, thinking that you can reschedule those tasks that you should be doing now to another time. Instead of declaring your work day a loss, I would challenge you to brainstorm a list of things that you can do without the internet and then do those things. It may be that I am a little possessive of my working hours because those working hours are very limited and to pass up any of them would drastically affect my ability to get my work done, or it may simply be that I am stubborn and do not like to allow one thing like an internet connection to determine whether my day is a success or a failure.
What are these things that can be done without the internet? It depends upon what you do for work. If you are a blogger, you may sometimes use the internet to research ideas and get information for your posts. If the internet is down, you may have to dig a little deeper and come up with something that you can write from information that you have contained in your head and your heart. In fact, some of my favorite blog posts are written straight from the heart with no research involved. Write those posts and post them online once connectivity has been restored. Regardless of your profession, there are probably some emails you could draft so that you can simply send them off once the internet is back on. There may be phone calls to make, or perhaps there are some business-related errands that you have been putting off. You get the idea. A lapse in internet connectivity can have much less of an impact on you and your home-based business if you do what you can to get things done offline.
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