If you manage an office, do you have a floor plan saved online, in case there's a disaster or some other reason that people who are unfamiliar with the space have to enter it? If you rent a vacation property or even just rooms in your home, do you provide your guests with adequate emergency information? Where is your emergency exit map for your family and any guests who may be staying with you?
Thinking about emergency preparedness is never fun, but planning ahead and being prepared is much better than wishing you had done so after a disaster strikes. Here's a simple project to help you be better prepared: Create emergency exit maps, floor plans, and the other documents you need, and do it in about an hour.
The secret to keeping this project short is to use diagramming apps that are freely available online and dead simple to use. Just as important, these apps come with templates for all kinds of diagrams, maps, charts, and so forth.
When you work from these templates, all you have to do is rearrange the furniture, as it were. You don't have to draw anything from scratch.
Which Diagramming App To Use?
Assuming you know nothing at all about design or vector drawing software, there are two apps I recommend using to make emergency exit plans, floor maps, and other key documents for your home, vacation property, and business. They are Lucidchart and SmartDraw.
In my experience with these apps, Lucidchart is marginally easier to use, but SmartDraw has more templates for emergency preparedness. They're both extremely useful, however. Both have a free level of service, so you don't have to pay anything to make these critical files. And they both have a Web app, so you can use the app right in your browser without installing any software.
Emergency Preparedness Documents
I want to provide some examples of emergency preparedness documents because often you don't know which ones you need until you have a chance to browse some of the options. A few common ones are:
- Floor evacuation plan/map,
- Building evacuation plan/map, including safe meeting point,
- Home evacuation plan/map, including safe meeting point,
- Business continuity plan,
- Emergency contact list (every home should have one on a refrigerator or posted somewhere highly visible),
- Emergency phone tree,
- First aid and CPR information charts, and
- Wildfire, flood, earthquake, and shelter-in-place tips.
I could go on and on, but hopefully this list triggers some ideas for documents and diagrams that are suitable for your particular location and circumstances. Not every document is appropriate for every home or business, of course. Some of these documents are available to simply print, such as CPR and first aid charts. Others are so simple and straightforward to make that you could even draft them quickly in a Word processing app. You might even be tempted to write them by hand. I recommend going digital instead, however, because then it's easier to keep digital copies saved in the cloud. Having digital copies in the cloud means 1) you can update them easily and 2) you can get the information even if you aren't in front of the piece of paper you printed.
How to Make Emergency Documents
Using one of those two apps I mentioned earlier, SmartDraw or Lucidchart, will make this project fast and efficient. You might even enjoy using the tools.
Start by looking at the templates that the app provides. In diagramming software, "template" means sample document, so you're getting a lot more than just a file with proper formatting. Let's take the example of an office evacuation map. The template actually has a sample floor plan and evacuation route already drawn on it (rather than giving you a blank canvas and a library of appropriate objects to slap on it). All you have to do, both literally and metaphorically, is move the furniture around. You drag and drop objects that represent doorways, windows, desks, chairs, potted plants, water coolers, bathrooms, closets, and so forth until the sample floor plan morphs into a representation of your actual office space. Likewise, you move and rotate, lengthen or shorten red arrows pointing to the nearest exits.
You might not be able to find the exact template you want, but you can always co-opt other similar diagrams for your purpose. For example, a vertical org chart isn't all that different, schematically speaking, from a phone tree.
Take One Hour To Be Better Prepared
Diagramming apps make it so simple to churn out a few emergency preparedness documents that you should be able to knock out many of the most importants ones you need in an hour or so. Take any Friday afternoon at the office when you're feeling burned out from doing other work, or a Saturday morning at home for personal documents, and get a few critical files made.
Of course, this is just the top of the iceberg when it comes to planning for the worst. What will you do if the power goes out? What if your computers get struck by ransomware? Is all your data backed up on the cloud? When time allows, you should read up on how to disaster-proof your business, which includes information on disaster preparedness planning, execution, and training.