High Tech Breakdown
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Bastion Brief! I hope everyone has crushed their goals for the week and can enjoy some deserved rest this weekend. In this week’s edition, let’s chat about advanced technology tools breaking down and keeping a system to stay productive.
Right now, I am writing to you from a humble word processor in offline mode and will upload the newsletter when possible. The internet connection and cellular data has been knocked out by a construction crew in my region. When using technology, it is almost guaranteed that availability will be threatened, and mistakes will be made. Our intricate systems are created with the flaws in human behavior baked right in. Accidents that break our high tech tools happen every day. It could be construction that digs into your fiber internet line, or a squirrel gone rogue focused on chewing through important wires (I’m not joking, visit this site to see the animals that have caused outages in the past).
In any case, we have to struggle with the reality that our high tech systems are not built on the best information highways. Your favorite delivery service may work great in a populated city where tons of users help support a big investment into infrastructure. These services quickly breakdown when expanded into rural environments in the United States. Cellular data connection is required and there is not blanket coverage for all areas.
We have amazing information systems where you can order your food, make a payment, and have it at your door in record timing without even talking to another human. At the same time, we have delivery drivers struggling to find your address without cellular data, or unable to complete your order from their side off the application. While we are advancing toward great capability, we are still hamstrung by old infrastructure limping to the finish line.
In a similar recent event, the pandemic pushed a sizable portion of education systems to online teaching. Even in populated areas this was a challenge as it had not been attempted at such a large scale before. What about areas that did not have the infrastructure ready for use? In reality, those students suffered as their education could not continue at the same pace as before. There have been great initiatives since then to bring high speed connections to rural areas to help with the lack of capability.
While the delicate systems we use every day may seem complicated and advanced, the internet is mostly still supported by massive wires. At least here in the United States, we will see high tech breakdown until we can design better systems for delivering the services we love.
Here are my tips for staying productive when advanced technology does break:
Create an offline workflow: Reserve some long term projects for an offline workflow that you can accomplish when you are on the go or if an outage happens. Staying productive when technology fails is a powerful tool to advance your goals.
Establish workplace policies for outages: Do you work on a remote or hybrid basis? Ensure that you have talked with your employer about what work tasks can be done while offline in case an outage does happen. Also create a plan for notifying your management team about your downtime.
Keep local and cloud backups up to date: While it may be a pain to constantly update your local and cloud backups, they can be vital in an outage event. Keeping the latest versions of your project backed up will give you an edge to continue your work when there are issues with configuration or outages.
Thank you so much for joining us this week for the newsletter. Consider heading over to our Bastion Brief YouTube Channel and subscribing for our latest video content. Apologies for the late upload, hopefully my service will be restored soon!
See you next time!
