Pretend you're about to come down with a debilitating yet temporary disease.
- Clear your calendar. Nothing sucks like getting paged at the movies.
- Decline spontaneous interactions with friends unless this helps your relaxation, even if your friends understand. Little is more frustrating than arriving somewhere to immediately leave, and you will be constantly worried about getting paged.
- Clean up your home and do the dishes. You may not have time in the evenings to catch up during the week.
- Consider making some food ahead of time (recipes welcome!).
- Stock up on easy to make foods. Soups, crackers, pasta, ready-to-bake pizza, frozen veggies.
- Get your errands done before you go on-call. Buy pet food, get groceries, pick up the dry cleaning, etc. You may not have time to do it during your rotation, and you don't want to lug all your equipment around while you do it. It is okay to take off thirty minutes early to get these errands done before you go on-call.
- Prepare to be unable to complete the most trivial tasks during your "day job" as you may be tired from late night pages or being constantly distracted. Now is a good time to delegate work to colleagues.
Be cognizant of your SLO/RTO and plan any activities accordingly. That being said, do not abuse the SLO/RTO. If you have a 15 minute window to respond/acknowledge your page, do so as soon as reasonably possible. Never intentionally wait until the latest allowed moment.
Make sure you have all of your necessary escalation points documented.
Have contact information readily available for:
- Your internal upline support (your next level up)
- Your management (for notifications of major issues and for rallying assistance)
- Other teams' on-call information (Application Support, DBA's, Network). This is especially true in highly siloed environments.
- Your hardware and software vendors and other service providers. This should include any necessary contract or customer ID information.
- Your secondary, if you are lucky enough to have one. If you are already dealing with one crisis or a crisis lasts for more than 12 hours, you may need to call in your secondary.
Be prepared to be patient. Sometimes you will be paged for issues outside your domain of responsibility. The person paging you is not doing this to annoy you, they are in need of help. Help them as best you can, forward their incident to the appropriate team. Do not simply shrug it off as not being your issue.
If you share your living space with anyone, please be considerate and make sure they are aware of your on-call schedule.