DNAphil

So you have spent months tweaking your GTD system, getting it set up just the way you want it. Then one day, you wake up to find out your system has been: lost, hacked, crashed, stolen… Now what?

When Disaster Strikes

No one wants to think about disasters, more or less prep for them, until their first system crash. If your GTD system collapses, how will you survive the crash, and how will you get your system up and running again? If you rely heavily on your system, then its collapse is going to have severe implications on your ability to be productive and effective at work and at home. The faster you can get your system back up and running, the quicker you can return to full productivity.

Disaster Planning

The first thing you are going to have to do, is to have a plan for the loss of your system. It does not matter if you use a Hipster PDA, notebook, smart phone, or a web site, something can happen to any of them. By having a plan for what you will do next, it will allow you to do damage control and maintain some level of productivity under these disaster conditions. The first part of your plan is to understand what could happen to your system and how great the loss would be. If you have a Hipster PDA, your system can be physically lost or stolen. If you use Remember The Milk, then you may lose your internet connection, the site may go down, or your account could be hacked. Once you understand what could happen to your system, then you know the extent of the damage to your system. Now it is time to figure out how you will deal with that loss.

Knowing what is at stake, you can start to think of ways to get on your feet after the loss. The first thing you need to do is to decide on an interim platform to use as you get your system back up and running. The simplest ways is to go back to paper lists. Get some legal pads and a some pens, and you can rebuild your system. You can also get more sophisticated and use alternative web applications, stand alone applications, etc. No matter what you decide to use, you should know how you are going to access our new system in the case of disaster.

After you have your platform chosen, you will need to determine how much of the lost information you can recover. The more tasks you can recover in the early moments of your disaster, the faster you can get your interim system running, and the less of a loss of productivity you will experience. In trying to reassemble your tasks try the following steps:

• Brainstorm right away– As soon as you realize your system has crashed, get a piece of paper and write down everything you remember from you To Do list. The sooner you do this, the more things you are likely to remember. While in traditional GTD philosophy you should not trust your mental RAM, there is some reliable amount of information in there, that you can copy down. It likely won’t be the full list of items, but your highest priority ones will likely be in your forethoughts.

• Try to Recover Your Inputs– If the majority of the things on your To Do list come in via email, then your email trash bin and/or folders may contain copies of recent requests that you can pull together to fill your interim system. If you use a notebook to initially capture your tasks, and then transfer them to your lists, you can go through your notebook and find recent tasks.

• Ask your Boss and Co-workers– The people you work with regularly will also know some of the things they have asked you to work on recently. You may be reluctant to ask them because you do not want to seem vulnerable or unreliable, so use your best judgment about who you ask.

• Ask your Significant Other– Your “SO” is bound to know a number of things that he/she has asked you to do. Ask him/her what he/she is waiting for you to do and add these to your list as well. Unlike some of your co-workers, your “SO” should be much more sympathetic in helping you during this disaster. *grin*

Now take all the tasks from your list and transfer them to your interim system. This system will keep you up and running, but it is an interim system, so you will still have to start to rebuild your permanent system. Depending on the complexity of your permanent system, this may take hours to a week to restore. During that time your interim system should to keep you afloat. As your permanent system comes back to life, you can wean yourself off your interim system, and eventually shut it down.
Backup Your System

Obviously the best way to avoid a disaster is to have a backup of your system. With a reliable backup, if your system ever crashes, you can restore your system using the backup and get back to work with a minimal loss of productivity. Your backup system will need to have a few traits:

• Simple To Use– If your backup system is cumbersome or time consuming, you will never keep it up, and your backups will go stale and lose their effectiveness.

• Easy To Recover– Your backup system must create backups that are easy to recover in case of disaster. If the backups are hard to recover, you will lose valuable time in getting them restored.

• As Automated As Possible– As much as possible, your backup systems should run without your direct intervention. This will not always be possible, but if your backup system relies on you to start it up, every day, then there are going to be times when you forget or are unable to run your system. Then gaps will form in your backups which could compromise your backups.

• Reliable– This goes without saying, but I will say it anyway, your backup system must run well, and it must create backups that are actually useful, otherwise you are wasting your time, and you really won’t have any protection.

Depending on the components of your system, there are different ways to back them up. Some of the general categories include:

• Optical Backups– If your system is paper based, then photocopying or scanning may be the only backup for you. This kind of backup is time consuming, but it leaves you with an exact copy of your system, and will allow you to get back up and running quickly. If you are a paper based system, also consider using digital photography, to take pictures of your pages. It’s much faster than scanning, and digital photos are reasonable in size, and easy to manipulate.

• Software Backups– If your system has a computer component, then you can investigate software backup solutions. Computer file-based systems can use traditional backup software and version control software like CVS or Subversion. Wikis (local and remote) often have backup capabilities, for dumping the database or pages out to a backup file that can be backed up with traditional backup software. Some sites like Remember the Milk, use Google Gears, which creates a local copy of your system that can be accessed when you do not have an internet connection. If you use a web service that does not offer a backup solution, you can use something like the Linux wget command to create a local copy of the page on your home machine, and then back up the copies. You will have to do your homework to find the right solution for your system, but it is worth the time.

With a good backup system in place, you can relax, knowing that your system is protected in case of a disaster, and with a disaster plan, if the day ever comes when your system fails, you will know exactly what you need to in order to get up and running again and continue to be productive.

Share some of your GTD system crashes, or your disaster and/or backup plans.