Efficiently Work Offline

As more and more professional work moves to online environments, being without good Internet connectivity can cause work plans to get stalled. This page goes over strategies to maximize work productivity while offline, and is useful for people whose work involves using the Internet, but who find themselves on flaky Internet connections, or without connectivity for parts of the day (such as while travelling).

Steps

Considering Alternatives

  1. Upgrade to a smartphone and data plan that allow for tethering. So you can create a hotspot with your smartphone and use that to access the Internet over your computer. Keep in mind the data and speed limitations of tethering.
  2. Check wifi alternatives. Check for wi-fi options provided by your transit agency, cafe, or other areas where you work frequently. So you can connect to Wi-Fi Internet. Beware of security issues particularly if accessing stuff over non-secure sites. Consider using a VPN if you have security concerns.
  3. Think about your distractions. If you're working offline because you have many distractions online, consider browser plugins that block distractions.

Using Your Local Drive And Offline Tools

  1. Keep as much stuff as possible on your local drive. Download relevant documents to the local hard drive on your machine. If using Google Docs, enable the work offline feature.[1]
  2. Use your browser's "Work Offline" feature. It allows you to access the cached version on your hard drive of pages you visited recently. You can increase the cache size to maximize the power of the feature. If "Work Offline" proves insufficient, explore plugins or extensions to your browser that automatically save all pages you visit.
    • Unfortunately, for Chrome, you cannot increase cache size using any settings available within Chrome. Rather, you have to pass in a startup parameter. Details are available for Windows[2] and Mac OS X.[3]
  3. Download music and video. If your work involves listening to music or watching videos, get the software to download the music or videos.
  4. Find apps and tools that work well offline. So that you have to rely less on Internet connectivity.

Being Up to Date

  1. Be up-to-date before going offline. If using Dropbox or Google Docs, make sure you're synced up on all the material you intend to work on before you go offline. Similarly, if working on a code repository using Git or something similar, make sure to pull in changes from the remote branch so you are working with up-to-date code.
  2. Plan your internet needs. If you intend to browse particular webpages, open them all up in browser tabs before your departure. Unless your computer has memory or processing power limitations, it's better to open more pages than the ones you are sure you'll need. A typical laptop with 8GB of RAM can handle 50+ tabs open in Chrome just fine.
  3. Load the videos. If you intend to watch videos, load up the video page and let the video buffer up completely on your local drive. YouTube allows you to continue watching videos offline if the video is buffered completely, as long as you don't close the tab or navigate away from the video page in the tab.
  4. Open the code editors. If your offline work involves editing a Google Doc, WordPress blog post, Wikipedia page, or something similar, open the editing area before going offline. WordPress and most CMSs allow you to continue editing offline as long as you keep that tab open and don't navigate away. You can also open the editing areas of other documents or pages that you might want to copy/paste from.
  5. Use Meteor framework. If you want to develop web applications that work offline and automatically synchronize data when connectivity is restored, use the Meteor.js framework

While Working Offline

  1. Use your phone. If you have a smartphone with online access, use that to check any quick facts that you need.
  2. Don't sweat out every detail of your work. Particularly details that require you to be online. Just mark those as things you need to check when you get back online. If there are many such things, pick up another piece of work.
  3. Avoid working offline in cases where the situation is evolving rapidly. Or at any rate, if doing so, be prepared to have to discard much of your work once you get back online. Examples are reports on evolving news events and work on documents where others are also making changes to the same document.

When You Get Back Online

  1. Make sure you have local copies of whatever you were working on. Do this if you are afraid that the syncing process might mess it up.
  2. Fill in any details that you had marked as things to check when you get back offline.
  3. Sync up your offline work. For some things (like Google Docs and Dropbox) this can be automatic, whereas, for others, it requires a manual syncing step.

References

  1. ↑ https://support.google.com/docs/answer/2375012?hl=en
  2. ↑ How to change Google Chrome’s Cache Size for better performance on Windows 10, The Windows Club. Retrieved May 1, 2019
  3. ↑ Change Google Chrome cache size on OS X, Stack Overflow. Retrieved May 1, 2019
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