# Power Out... Organised: audiobook script *Keeping your household safe, warm and connected if the lights go out* By Ravi Sandhu · Audiobook script · Read online: https://ravi8.me/books/power-out/audiobook/ · Free course: https://ravi8.me/courses/power-out/ ## Welcome This is the audiobook of *Power Out… Organised*. It is written for the person in a household who is willing to lead on preparedness: the one who will set up the plan and keep it going. You don't need to be an expert, a "prepper" or someone with a garage full of supplies. You need to be the person who says, "Let's sort this out properly, once, and then keep it ticking over." By the end of this audiobook, you'll have a Todoist project set up, four stages to work through, and a clear idea of how to bring the rest of your household with you. Most of us only notice electricity when it stops. The lights go out, the fridge falls silent, the router's little lights fade, and for a moment the whole house holds its breath. Usually the power is back within minutes. Occasionally it isn't. This book is not about fear. Large blackouts are rare in Britain. It is about care: for yourself, for the people you live with, for the neighbour who lives alone, and for the emergency services, who can focus on the people most in need when the rest of us are ready to look after ourselves for a few days. The book is written mainly for households in the United Kingdom, so it refers to UK services such as the 105 power cut line, the Priority Services Register and the government's Be Ready advice. The principles work anywhere. When a topic needs a professional, such as an electrician, a Gas Safe engineer, your GP or your pharmacist, the book says so. In an emergency, always follow instructions from the emergency services. If life is at risk, call 999. There are three companion printables for this book: *The Ready Household* planner, in a full-colour and an ink-saver version, the *Ready Household Phone Pack*, and a wall poster. You can download them from this book's page. The book explains the why and the how. The printables are where your household writes its own answers down. The eBook goes into much more detail on every stage, with playbooks for the emergencies that travel with power cuts. This audiobook gives you the method, so you can start. ## Start Here: Five Jobs in Twenty Minutes You don't need to finish this book to be better prepared. These five jobs cover the things people most often wish they'd known. Do them today. **One. Save the key numbers.** Put these in everyone's phone and on paper. **105** for a power cut in England, Scotland and Wales, or **03457 643 643** in Northern Ireland. **0800 111 999** for a gas emergency or suspected carbon monoxide, or **0800 002 001** in Northern Ireland. **0345 988 1188** for Floodline. And **111** for NHS 111. **Two. Find your load block letter.** Look it up on your electricity bill or at powercut105.com, and write it down. I'll explain why in a moment. **Three. Find the stopcock and the fuse box.** Walk to them now. Check that the stopcock turns, and work out which switch on the consumer unit is the main switch. **Four. Agree two meeting points.** One just outside your home, and one out of the area. Add an out-of-area contact that everyone has saved. **Five. Sign up for what applies to you.** The Priority Services Register, if anyone in your household is eligible. Free flood warnings, if you're in a flood-risk area. And emergencySMS, if anyone is deaf, hard of hearing or speech impaired. And a bonus one-minute job: put one torch in a fixed spot that everyone knows. Torches, not candles. ## Your Goal and New Identity Every change needs a destination. Here is yours. **The goal.** Your household can look after itself calmly and safely for at least three days if the power goes off, and keeps that readiness alive year after year. **The new identity.** A calm, ready household that knows exactly what to do when the lights go out, and that looks out for the people around it. Notice what this isn't. It isn't a garage full of survival gear, and it isn't a promise that nothing will ever go wrong. It's about knowing what to do first, having what you need, and keeping it current. Here is the reassuring part. People often assume that how they react in an emergency is down to character: some people are calm, some panic. Research on disasters suggests genuine mass panic is much rarer than films suggest. People generally behave sensibly and help each other. What people struggle with is uncertainty: not knowing what's happening, what to do first, or who's responsible. Uncertainty can be designed out. A household with a plan, a torch where everyone can find it, and roles agreed in advance doesn't need to be braver than anyone else. It just has fewer decisions to make in the dark. ## What Being Organised Gives You Being organised isn't about tidiness. It's about having the time, calm and confidence to look after your household. For you, as the leader, it means less to hold in your head, because the plan lives in one place, and readiness that keeps going, because the checks arrive as reminders. For the people you live with, it means clarity: where the torch is, who does what, and where to meet. Children especially take their cue from adults. A parent who says, "Right, power cut. Head torches on, radio on, let's see how long it lasts", turns a frightening moment into an adventure. ## Everything Is an Organisation One idea runs through this whole series. Everything is an organisation. Your body is one. Different parts of your brain and body want different things, and getting them to pull in the same direction is most of what we call willpower. A marriage is an organisation. So are friends, parents and their children, a community, a company, a city and a country. Each has goals, roles, and a need to check whether things are working. Science tells us that, left alone, things drift towards disorder. Physicists call it entropy. Living things survive by constantly maintaining their organisation. That's why I believe being organised is one of the most fundamental skills for all life on the planet. It isn't a trait you're born with. It's a set of skills you can learn, and the four Ds are those skills. And being disorganised is rarely neutral. If you don't organise something that matters to you, something better organised usually fills the gap. In this book, the organisations are the household, the street and the power system: a household that keeps what matters running, neighbours who check on each other, and a grid that, however well it's run, will sometimes fail. ## Setting Up Your Todoist Project A preparedness plan is mostly a set of recurring tasks and a few decisions, and Todoist is very good at both. The planner is where you write your answers down. Todoist is what reminds you to keep them current. The principles work with other apps too. If you're new to Todoist, I'd really appreciate it if you signed up through my affiliate link, which you'll find on this website. If my introducing you to Todoist helps you become more organised, using my link helps make all the effort I've put into these books worthwhile. *Disclosure: this is an affiliate link, so I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.* **Step one. Create the project.** Call it **Organise Power-out**. **Step two. Add a section for each of the four Ds**: Discovery, Dream, Design and Defend. As you work through Design, you'll add three more working sections: *Household kit*, *First 72 Hours* and *Warm room*. **Step three. Add a label.** Put a label such as **@power-out** on every task that belongs to the plan, so you can see them all at once. **Step four. Enable the Habit Tracker.** Please switch on Todoist's Habit Tracker integration, under Settings, then Integrations. You'll use it in Defend for the monthly checks. A visible streak is a small, immediate reward for a job whose real reward, being ready on the night it matters, may be years away. Features change, so check Todoist's current help pages. **Step five. Share it.** If you share a home, share the project, and make sure at least two people receive the recurring tasks. Preparedness that depends on one person has a single point of failure. One important point. On the night of a long power cut, your phone's battery is precious. So the plan must also be printed. Todoist is for preparing and maintaining. Paper is for the night itself. ## The Four Ds The four Ds are the method in every book in this series. They borrow from two disciplines: process mining, which looks at what actually happens rather than what people assume happens, and organisational change management, which helps people move to a new way and stay there. Most people who "get prepared" stop after a single burst of buying. They get a torch and some bottled water and feel better. Six months later the torch is in a drawer with dead batteries, and the water was drunk during a heatwave. The four Ds exist to stop that drift. Defend is not the end of the process. It's the part that never ends. ### Stage One: Discovery Discovery is about finding out what really happens in a power cut, and what in your home depends on electricity. **Most power cuts are short and local.** Most are caused by faults on the local network, a damaged cable, a tree on a line, or severe weather, and most are fixed within hours. You're not preparing for a disaster film. You're preparing for an evening, a night, or occasionally a few days. But "most" isn't "all", and the long outages tend to arrive at the worst times: in storms, in the cold, and in rural areas where repairs are slowest. When Storm Arwen hit in November 2021, over a million customers lost power. Most were reconnected within a day, but around 40,000 waited more than three days. The tail matters. **Know your load block letter.** In the unlikely event of a national energy shortage, the government's Be Ready advice explains that rota power cuts could be scheduled area by area, for about three hours at a time. Each home belongs to a load block, identified by a letter. If you ever hear "Block P will be off from 4pm to 7pm" on the radio, you'll know whether that's you. **Know what stops working.** The obvious things stop: lights, electric cookers, kettles, fridges and freezers. The less obvious things catch people out. - Most heating. Gas boilers need electricity for their controls and pumps. - Broadband and Wi-Fi, because the router needs mains power. - Your landline. The old copper network carried its own power. It's being switched off by January 2027, and a digital landline won't work in a power cut unless it has battery backup. - Mobile signal, eventually, because phone masts have finite backup batteries. - Card payments and cash machines nearby. - Water, in some blocks of flats that rely on electric pumps. - Lifts, door entry systems and electric gates. - Medical equipment, stairlifts and telecare alarms. - Most solar panels, which are designed to shut down when the grid fails, to protect engineers. **Walk the house, room by room.** Set aside thirty minutes. In each room, ask one question: if the power went off now and stayed off for three days, what here would stop, and what would that mean for us? Fix the quick wins on the spot. A manual tin opener you can find in the dark. A torch by each bed. A carbon monoxide alarm if you have gas appliances. A fridge thermometer. Look for the hidden dependencies too: the fridge that holds someone's insulin, the CPAP machine, the smart lock that needs Wi-Fi, the electric car you assumed you could drive away in. **Sort by consequence, not by cost.** Put everything you found into three groups. Safety-critical: losing it could harm someone, such as medical equipment, fridge medicines, or the only way an older relative can call for help. Important: losing it causes real hardship, such as the freezer or water in a high-rise flat. Comfort: annoying but harmless, such as the television. Spend most of your effort on the first group. Many households do the opposite, and buy a power station big enough for the television while forgetting to write down the GP's number. **Find the single points of failure.** In most homes, the biggest one is the phone. It's the torch, the radio, the news, the address book, the bank and the way to call for help. If its battery dies, all of those go at once. Another is one person's knowledge. If only one adult knows where the torches are and how to reset the fuse box, the household's readiness leaves the house with them. **Start an outage event log.** In process mining, everything starts with an event log: a record of what actually happened. Ask everyone: when have we lost power before? How long did it last? What went wrong? What went right? Then, from now on, add a line every time the power goes off. **Learn the first move: is it just us?** Before anything else, check whether the neighbours' lights and street lights are on. Check whether a switch has tripped in your consumer unit. If you have a prepayment meter, check its credit. If the outage is wider than your home, report it on your network operator's website or call **105**. If there's immediate danger, such as a fallen power line, call **999**, and stay well away. Assume fallen lines are live. Here are your Discovery tasks. - Do the five jobs in twenty minutes. - Walk the house room by room, and fix the quick wins. - Find and record the shut-offs and meters. - List everything that depends on electricity. - Sort dependencies into safety-critical, important and comfort. - Identify single points of failure. - Start the outage event log. - Find your network operator and your load block letter. - Check whether your water depends on an electric pump, if you live in a flat. - Check what happens to your landline and any alarms in a power cut. ### Stage Two: Dream Dream is about deciding what good looks like, and how long you want to be able to cope. **Describe the happy path.** Imagine it's a winter evening and the lights go out. What would good look like? Here's one household's version. Within a minute, the nearest adult has the torch from by the door. Within five minutes, they've checked the neighbours, reported it, and switched off anything that could be a fire risk, leaving one light on. Within fifteen minutes, phones are on low-power mode, the radio is on and the fridge is shut. If it lasts into the night, everyone gathers in one warm room. If it lasts for days, there's water, food, medicines, cash, and a plan for whether to stay or go. Write your own version. Once you can describe good, you can design for it. **Include everyone.** Ask each person what a good power cut would look like for them. A teenager may care most about phone charge. A partner may care about the freezer. An older relative may care most about not being left alone. A young child may care about not being frightened of the dark. A pet can't tell you, so someone has to speak for it. A plan that ignores these won't be followed. **Set your resilience target.** The UK government's Be Ready campaign, launched in October 2026, asks households to be ready for three days of disruption to power, water, phones and the internet. The government is clear that this isn't a call to panic-buy or spend a lot. Start with what you already have, and build up gradually. Three days is a sensible headline, but I suggest three levels. - **Level 1, the evening:** up to 12 hours. Light, information, phone charge, food safety, staying warm or cool, and a plan everyone knows. - **Level 2, the weekend:** up to 3 days. Drinking water, food that needs no cooking, medicines, cash, staying warm overnight, checking on others. - **Level 3, the long tail:** up to a week. Deciding whether to stay or go, larger stores, extended power for safety-critical devices, community support. Aim to be solid at Level 1 within a week, Level 2 within a few months, and to have at least a written decision plan for Level 3. If anyone depends on electrically powered medical equipment, your Level 1 target is different. It's to have that equipment covered for as long as it would take to reach help, and to have spoken to the equipment supplier and the clinical team. Do this first. **Respect your capacity.** Not everyone has spare money, cupboard space or a garage. A good target is one you'll actually reach. Three torches and a written plan are worth more than an ambitious shopping list that never gets bought. Here are your Dream tasks. - Ask everyone what a good power cut would look like for them. - Write your happy path. - Set your targets for Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3. - Choose your budget. ### Stage Three: Design Design is about building the better way: the kit, the plan, the roles, and the arrangements for the people who need extra help. **Light: torches, not candles.** Keep one torch in a fixed place near the main exit, and one per bedroom. Head torches leave your hands free. Battery LED lanterns light a room for hours. Label spare batteries with the date. Avoid candles. They're one of the most common causes of house fires, and the risk rises in a power cut, with people moving around in the dark. **Information: the radio.** When the power goes, your phone becomes your news source, and its battery starts draining. Keep a battery, wind-up or solar radio, and write your local station's frequency on a card kept with it. **Phones and power banks.** Keep at least one charged power bank per adult, and charge them every month. In the first minutes of a power cut, switch phones to low-power mode. Agree one household message pattern, such as "Power cut at home, all fine, will update at 9pm", rather than everyone calling everyone. If someone in the family relies on a digital landline, especially an older relative living alone, contact the provider now. Providers must offer at least one free backup solution, lasting at least an hour, to customers who rely on their landline and have no mobile or no reliable signal. Ask exactly what they'll supply. Check any telecare alarm too. **When you're apart.** Agree an out-of-area contact, three meeting points, and a time rule, such as "If we can't call, we go to meeting point two and wait until the next hour mark." Agree who collects the children from school if you can't, and a household code word. Children should know at least one grown-up's number by heart. **Water.** The government's Be Ready advice asks for **three litres of drinking water per person per day**. About 10 litres per person per day covers basic cooking and hygiene. Do the sum: people, times days, times litres. For four people over three days at three litres, that's 36 litres, plus extra for pets or formula. Store sealed bottled water somewhere cool and dark, note the date, and rotate it into everyday use. Keep a bucket aside for flushing the toilet with non-drinking water. **Food.** Store what you eat, and eat what you store. Choose food you already like that keeps without a fridge and needs no cooking: ready-to-eat tins, crackers, oatcakes, nut butter, dried fruit, cereal bars and long-life milk. Don't forget a manual tin opener, baby formula, pet food, and a treat. Chocolate matters more to morale than it should. And eat fridge food first, then freezer food, then the cupboard. **The fridge clock.** When the power goes off, a clock starts on your fridge and freezer. Keep the doors closed. A fridge should stay cold for up to four hours. A full freezer should keep food frozen for up to 48 hours, and a half-full one for about 24. Keep a fridge thermometer in the fridge permanently. Food Standards Scotland's guidance is that chilled food is safe while the fridge stays at 8°C or below. The simplest rule is this: note the time the power went off. If it's been off for more than four hours and you have no thermometer, or the fridge has gone above 8°C, throw chilled food away. If in doubt, throw it out. Never taste food to check. If anyone takes medicines that need the fridge, such as some types of insulin, ask your pharmacist **now** how long they can safely stay out, and write the answer down. Don't rely on a general rule. **The 72-hour kit.** Start from the government's short list: a charged power bank, a battery or wind-up radio, a torch and spare batteries, a first aid kit and regular medicines, bottled water, no-cook food and a tin opener, hand sanitiser and wet wipes, some cash, printed copies of important documents, baby supplies if you need them, and important numbers on paper. Skip the "survival" items online lists love. If an item would only be useful in a disaster film, leave it out. And clean minor wounds with clean water, not hydrogen peroxide. **Sort the list with MoSCoW.** MoSCoW sorts a list into four groups. Must have: drinking water, a torch per person, a radio, a charged power bank, regular medicines, numbers on paper, and a carbon monoxide alarm if you have a fuel-burning appliance, plus anything you marked safety-critical. Should have: a first aid kit, warm layers and blankets, three days of no-cook food, cash, and buckets and bags for an emergency toilet. Could have: a solar charger, head torches for everyone, a lantern. Won't have this time: parked, not forgotten. Keep Musts a minority, buy them first, and in Todoist add one kit item a week to the *Household kit* section. **The first hour.** Write this down, in order. Fill bottles, pans and the bath while the taps still run, especially in a flat. Find out how big it is: check the consumer unit, look outside, report it, and switch on the radio. Send one message, then put your phone on low-power mode. Keep the fridge and freezer shut. Don't rush to the shops; what's in your cupboard is the plan. Move into one warm room, or in hot weather the coolest room. Keep anything that burns fuel outside. And check on your people. **One warm room.** When the power goes off on a winter night, stop trying to heat the whole house. Choose a small room with a door, close it, roll a towel along the bottom, and cover the windows. Bring everyone in, pets included. Wear loose layers, keep dry wool socks sealed in a bag for this moment, and wear a hat to bed. Eat regularly and have warm drinks, from a flask filled earlier if you can. **The safety lines.** Most harm in winter power cuts comes not from the cold but from the ways people try to fight it. **Never** use a barbecue, camping stove, patio heater, generator or gas oven to heat a room, or anywhere indoors or in a garage, not even with the windows open. They produce carbon monoxide, a gas you can't see, smell or taste. Fit a carbon monoxide alarm in every room with a fuel-burning appliance, make sure at least one runs on batteries, and keep one in your warm room. Symptoms can feel like flu: headache, dizziness, nausea, breathlessness and confusion. If an alarm sounds or anyone feels unwell, get everyone into fresh air, call **0800 111 999**, and call **999** if anyone is ill. **In a heatwave.** Stay out of the sun between 11am and 3pm. Close curtains on sun-facing rooms by day and open windows at night when it's cooler outside. Drink water regularly. Call **999** for signs of heatstroke: confusion, hot dry skin, fast breathing, a seizure, or no improvement after 30 minutes of cooling. **The Priority Services Register.** This is the single most valuable free step in the book. You may be able to join if someone in your household is of state pension age, is pregnant or has young children, struggles to speak or read English, has a disability or long-term medical condition, relies on medical equipment that needs power, or is going through a change such as recovering from a hospital stay. It can include priority support in an emergency and advance notice of planned power cuts. Register with your energy supplier, your network operator, your water company, and your gas supplier if it's separate. You can register on behalf of someone else, such as an older parent, with their consent. **Medical information on paper.** For each person, write down their name and NHS number, medicines and doses, allergies, any medical devices and the supplier's number, and their GP surgery. If anyone relies on medical equipment, speak to the supplier and clinical team about power cuts, keep backup batteries charged, and agree a point at which you'll go elsewhere rather than wait. This is the one area where general advice isn't enough. Follow what the people responsible for the equipment tell you. **Children, pets and neighbours.** Children take their emotional cue from adults. Make sure each child knows their name, address, a grown-up's number and the meeting place. Give them a real job: keeper of the radio, guardian of the head torches, the one who reminds everyone to keep the fridge shut. For pets, pack three days of food and water, a lead and carrier, medication, and a recent photo. And agree with any neighbour who may need extra help that, if the power goes and you can't call, you or someone you trust will knock on their door. **The household plan.** Bring it all together on paper: who lives here, the key numbers, local contacts, where the documents are, the first five minutes, the first hour and the first night, roles, the grab bag, and where you'd go if staying became unsafe. Give everyone a role, including a **deputy** who can do everything the lead does. Then print it. **Ticked is not ready.** In 1975 the economist Charles Goodhart noticed that when a statistic is used to steer policy, it stops behaving as it used to. The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern put it simply: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. A checklist with every box ticked feels like readiness. A kit that cost £400 feels more ready than one that cost £50. Neither is the purpose. So pair every measure with a test that would fail if you were only ticking boxes. "Torch bought" goes with "torch found in the dark in under a minute." "Power bank in the kit" goes with "power bank actually charged this month." "Plan written" goes with "the deputy could follow it without asking." Here are your Design tasks. - Sign up to the Priority Services Register, and help a relative sign up if they're eligible. - Ask the pharmacist about fridge medicines. - Speak to the medical equipment supplier, if it applies. - Ask the phone provider about landline backup, if anyone relies on one. - Put torches in fixed places, and buy head torches. - Buy a radio, and write the station frequencies on a card. - Buy and charge power banks. - Fit and test carbon monoxide alarms, and buy a fridge thermometer. - Work out your water target, and build the water and food store. - Write the medical information sheet for each person. - Agree an out-of-area contact, meeting points, a time rule, a code word and roles. - Choose your warm room, and store its kit together. - Pack the 72-hour kit and the grab bags. - Talk the children through the plan, and write the pets plan. - Agree who you'll check on, and swap numbers with neighbours. - Print the planner, the poster and the wallet cards, and save the phone pack on every adult's phone. ### Stage Four: Defend Defend is about keeping it going. Practise, maintain, review after every real outage, and extend your readiness to the people around you. **Practise the happy path.** A plan that's never been practised is a guess. Once or twice a year, on a pleasant evening, switch off the main lights for an hour and follow the plan. Leave the fridge, freezer and any medical equipment running; you're testing the people, not the food. How long did it take to find a torch? Did the radio work? Did the power banks have charge? Could the children find their head torches? Could the deputy run the plan without the lead? Every bit of friction becomes a task. **Use warnings.** Many long power cuts come with warning: a named storm, a Met Office weather warning, or a planned outage notice. When one arrives, run a short pre-storm routine. Charge every phone, power bank and rechargeable torch. Fill a flask with hot water. Bring in garden furniture and bins. Check you have several days of medication. Check on the people you've agreed to check on. Keep it as a Todoist task you can duplicate with one tap. **Keep the kit alive.** Entropy comes for every emergency kit. Batteries discharge. Water and tins pass their dates. Medicines expire. Torches are borrowed. Children grow out of the clothes in the grab bag. The fix isn't more effort. It's a rhythm. - **Monthly:** test torches and the radio, charge power banks, and test smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. - **Every three months:** check the kit is complete and in its place. - **Every six months, when the clocks change in March and October:** the six-month review. Check phone numbers, update the medication list, rotate water and food, replace batteries, check the grab bag, and make sure everyone remembers the meeting points and the Priority Services Register details are up to date. - **Every year:** run a drill, review the plan with everyone, and take fresh photos of each room for insurance. - **Before winter:** check the warm-room kit, the car kit, gutters, lagging and the stay-or-go plan. That's your cadence. Every organisation that lasts runs on a rhythm, and because things drift when left alone, cadence is what brings you back on track. Set each of these as a recurring task in Todoist, and use the Habit Tracker for the monthly checks. Remember Goodhart, though: the streak is a prompt, not the purpose. The drill is where you find out whether the checks are working. **Street-level resilience.** In almost every account of a long power cut, the same thing happens: neighbours start knocking on each other's doors. Someone has a gas hob and boils water for the street. Someone has a battery radio and shares the news. Someone notices the older man at number 14 hasn't opened his curtains. Know who might need help on your floor or street. Swap numbers with one or two neighbours. Mention the Priority Services Register, because many eligible people have never heard of it. If you live in a block of flats, ask your landlord or managing agent what happens to the water, the lifts and the corridor lighting in a power cut. **After the lights come back.** Switch appliances back on gradually. Check the fridge thermometer and follow the food safety advice. Recharge torches and power banks. Check on the people you were looking out for. In Great Britain, network operators must meet set standards for restoring power, and you may be entitled to a payment if they don't, so check Ofgem's current rules. Then run a short review with the household. What happened? What worked well? What did we wish we had? What will we change? Add it to your event log, and turn each change into a task. Every real outage is new Discovery, which sharpens the Dream, improves the Design and strengthens your Defend. Here are your Defend tasks. - Monthly checks: torches, radio, alarms and power banks. - Every three months: check the kit. - The six-month review when the clocks change. - A yearly drill and plan review, and insurance photos. - An autumn warm-room and winter check. - The pre-storm routine, kept ready to duplicate. - After any power cut: restore safely, check food, claim what you're owed, and run the review. ## The Six Cs The four Ds are your method as the leader. The six Cs are different. They're the shared language for everyone in the household, describing how you treat each other while you prepare and when the lights go out. **Compassion.** Power cuts frighten some people more than others: children, older people, people who've been through emergencies before. Treat fear as understandable, not silly. And don't shame anyone who hasn't prepared, including your past self. Preparedness is a skill, not a moral test. **Communication.** Everyone knows the plan, where the kit is, who does what and where to meet. In a power cut, share updates briefly and calmly, use the agreed family message, and say so if you need help. **Capacity.** Prepare within your means. Build the kit gradually, use what you already have, and focus first on what's safety-critical. No one is expected to spend money the household doesn't have. **Commitment.** Keep the system alive: the monthly checks, the six-month review, the yearly drill. Small, regular actions beat one big burst of effort. **Consideration.** Think beyond yourselves: the neighbour who lives alone, the relative whose landline has gone digital, the family member who needs medicines kept cold, the pet that can't tell you it's cold. **Consistency.** Follow the same first-hour routine every time, so it becomes automatic. Return torches to their places. Put things back where the plan says they are. ## Leading Your People You can't make a household ready on your own. The plan only works if everyone knows it. There's a short companion called *Power Out… Organised: Support*. It's written for the rest of your household, takes under ten minutes, and explains what to expect, the words you'll use, and what to do and not do. Share it early. Then share the Todoist project, and assign the deputy role in Todoist as well as on paper. Give children real jobs. Ask each person what they'd need in a power cut, and write their answers into the plan. Not everyone wants to talk about emergencies, so keep the tone calm and practical. Offer, don't lecture. ## Next Steps Here's what to do next. Today, do the five jobs in twenty minutes, and put a torch by the door. This week, create your **Organise Power-out** project in Todoist, switch on the Habit Tracker, and walk the house room by room. Check whether someone you love should be on the Priority Services Register. This month, build the Musts in your kit, one item a week. Download the planner from this book's page, fill it in, and print it. Then set your cadence, and keep it going. Readiness isn't a shopping trip. It's a small routine. For the full detail, including playbooks for winter storms, water outages, heatwaves, flooding, having to leave home and losing phone and internet, read the eBook of *Power Out… Organised*. If you're new to Todoist, I'd really appreciate it if you signed up through my affiliate link, which you'll find on this website. *Disclosure: this is an affiliate link, so I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.* When the lights go out, you'll know exactly what to do.