Everything would be right there, including the names, phone numbers and email addresses. I tried to put the list in some order of priority so that whoever was using it wouldn’t need to think to much. People to contact, both friends and family, but also professionals: lawyers, accountants, etc. I tried to imagine the kind of information my family would need access to quickly, and I created a note in Evernote that outlined this information. You don’t want to have to hunt around for information. The real value of a checklist comes, not from its routine use, but when an emergency arises. Create a checklist note of the most important things to doīack when I was private pilot, I learned about the importance of checklists. There was probably a total of 10 or 12 documents that got tagged this way. I really just wanted to make sure that the most critical documents were accessible so that there was no added frustration at a time when emotions run hot. It’s short, it’s simple, and no one who is looking through my relatively short list of tags, could mistake its meaning. “911” is the number you dial when there’s an emergency. So the first thing that I did was go through all of the documents that I thought would be critical: powers of attorney, wills, life insurance, etc., and tagged them with “911.” I don’t want people needlessly hunting for documents and information that should be readily accessible. When some bad happens, things get frantic quickly. Roughly speaking, these are the 6 steps I went through to make sure that my life continuity plan was useful and practical. Of course, it’s one thing to have the various estate plans setup, and another thing to for them to be readily accessible when they are needed.Įarlier this year I went through the process of setting up what I call a “Life Continuity” plan in Evernote and making sure that my family could easily access it in the event of my untimely demise. The corollary outside the business world, of course, is estate planning, something which we don’t like to dwell on, but which is necessary for the continued comfort of our loved ones after we’ve gone to the big ball park in the sky 1.

Or, as close to as-usual as we can manage. These are exercises in which we imagine some catastrophic disaster from which we then have to continue doing business-as-usual. At the day job, we’ve been going through various business continuity exercises over the last year or so.

How to use evernote offline