If you manage an office, do you have a floor plan that you can share quickly if there's a disaster or some other reason that people unfamiliar with the space have to enter it? If you rent a vacation property or even just rooms in your home, do you provide guests with adequate emergency information, like a meeting point outdoors if there's a fire?
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. Follow our steps and can do all of this in about an hour.
You Need a Diagramming App With Templates
The secret to keeping this project short is to use diagramming apps that are freely available online and incredibly simple to use. These apps have templates for diagrams, maps, charts, and so forth. When you work from 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 Should You Use?
Assuming you know nothing at all about design or vector drawing software, there are two apps I recommend for creating emergency exit plans, floor maps, and other key documents for your home, vacation property, and business. They are Lucidchart and SmartDraw.
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 don't have to install any software.
Which Emergency Preparedness Documents Do You Need?
People often don't know which emergency preparedness documents they need until they have a chance to browse a list of options. So let's look at a list of some of the most common ones:
- 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
- Wildfire, flood, earthquake, and shelter-in-place directions
I could go on and on, but hopefully, this list inspires ideas for the documents and diagrams that are suitable for your particular location and circumstances.
Some of these documents are available to simply print, such as CPR and first aid charts. Others are so 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, however, because it's easier to keep copies saved in the cloud, which you can easily share, edit, and duplicate. Additionally, having a digital copy saved in Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, or whatever cloud storage system you use, means 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" usually means a sample document with sample content already on it, 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 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 add). All you have to do, 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 important ones you need in an hour or so. Take any Friday afternoon 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.
For more basic security and safety advice, read our beginner's guide to backup and how to backup and restore an iPhone or Android device.