Nothing frustrates people more than a website going down at the same time they’re in need of it’s services. Just look to twitter when Media Temple or Gmail experience unavailability; people lose their cool. Twitter was down so much that it accidentally popularized their growing pains via the fail whale.

I look at downtime a little differently, though. When I see all the hundreds of millions of WordPress.com blogs disappear for two hours, I think to myself “let’s see how they handle this.” I breathe a sigh of relief when I read that WordPress.com was able to recover from a catastrophic failure costing millions of lost pageviews (read: revenue). In other words, there’s a service provider that can come back from downtime and I have no questions about whether they can handle a similar incident in the future.

Performing regular backups is not enough. When magnolia admitted to not having backups of it’s users bookmarks, people were rightfully upset. But, even if they had been saved, would there have been a there a process in place to restore the data? Would service be restored in a timely manner? Even more, has the data ever been tested for recoverability or just thrown on a disk or into the cloud assuming everything is all set in case of emergency?

When I see pinboard, my favorite bookmarking service, take a spill twice in two weeks I rest peacefully. I go to sleep knowing that Maciej has a hot backup server that he can quickly switch to and continue running with just a few minutes of downtime. I love that. No data will be lost, just a hiccup in the day. One hiccup that, if it were to happen yet again, could easily be handled.

Of course, my data is portable in many of these cases. I can extract it at any time and back it up however I choose. There’s no reason to rely on my service provider. But, that’s really not the point of portability. Even though there may be no service agreement, you’re using a service with some (perhaps incorrect) assumptions that it will always be there and always work. Perhaps that’s an issue with free services, they need not provide any guarantee.

But even the services we pay heavily for: our web hosts, the photo storage sites, the hosted project management tools. Some of these sites and services have gone on untested and unproven. I’m a little more wary of what might happen if something unforeseen happens to them. Could flickr recover from an issue and maintain my priceless photos and memories. Could my business still operate if 37signals went down? Am I paying them for any guarantee of restored service? I honestly don’t know. Even web hosts store backups, but that snapshot may have included the virus that originally took your site down… that’s no help.

I love downtime because it shows me how a provider will handle an adverse situation both in and out of their control.

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Like most project managers, account managers, or client-facing individuals, I have my email inbox open all day. One any given day, there could be a dozen different individuals that can reach out to me with an urgent question. But replying instantly is not always the best action. While we can’t ignore our clients (current and potential), we can help each other by getting into good habits. These are some of mine explained.

Urgent does not always mean important

There is a difference between something urgent (a phone call, a task with a deadline attached) and something important (improving product quality, preparing a contract for a new project). Like with any time management, it’s key to distinguish between the two. One of the best things I learned in college was the Urgent vs Important Matrix. Many people get in the trap of confusing email urgency with importance; try to avoid that.

Interrupted productivity

It’s fairly obvious that we could all spend eight hours each day in our inboxes. I sometimes catch myself responding to emails immediately to get back to Inbox Zero. But, I’ve lost at least 15 minutes of productive time having mentally changed gears and get back to what I was doing. By that point, another email has come in… and you wonder what you accomplished in the past hour. Setting aside productive time and batching email is one of the most powerful things I can recommend to anyone. Tim Ferris has a great manifesto on eliminating email overload.

Most questions can answer themselves

I’ve found that being in the habit of turning around and asking someone a question leads me to get lazy: I rely on the individual instead of other resources (guides, Google, etc.). While I’m in the business of good customer service, that doesn’t mean handing out answers all day; that gets expensive for everyone. Investing time in better documentation and frequently asked question lists will save you from yourself and constant questions (especially on projects with many stakeholders).

One caveat, I do monitor email all day long with desktop notifications. This allows me to determine at-a-glance what is both “urgent and important” and save the rest to batch later. As long as everyone’s expectations are clear, these simple takeaways can greatly help client-facing individuals stay productive. One way to put this is: “sorry if I don’t respond immediately, it’s to help serve you and other clients better.” You can’t really argue with that, can you?