How to Create Emergency Kits for your Average Workday

People create emergency kits for car problems and bad weather, but few create kits to deal with more common but less urgent situations. In particular, misplacing a wallet or forgetting a work laptop at home can play havoc with a person’s workday.

With a little bit of planning, you can create emergency kits that will let you deal with these types of situations in a calm and productive manner.

Besides your keys, your wallet is probably your most important daily companion. Without it, you lack identification, money or the ability to access any of your financial services.

No money, means you are unable to buy the essential products that gets you through a workday, like gas, lunch or even a coffee.

Luckily, there are so many prepaid cards options available today that creating a wallet backup kit is an easy task.

MasterCard and Visa both make prepaid cards that are accepted anywhere normal credit cards are accepted. You can even reload the cards if you use them in an emergency.Use industry specific cards to make sure you can always get gas, food or make a long distance phone call.Request an additional debit card from your bank that attaches to a line of credit or checking accountApply for a low limit credit card that you only use for emergencies100 dollars in small denominations. The small denominations allow you to use a portion of the money without depleting your stash. Also, small denominations are accepted everywhere.

You can protect your kit by wrapping it in a dark water resistant bag and making it look as innocuous as possible. If you keep cleaning supplies in your car you can hide it in a wipe container or at the bottom of an road emergency kit. Most thieves are not interested in stealing road flairs and cleaning products.

Please make a list of the cards in the kit and their corresponding numbers. Consequently, you can reload prepaid cards with more funds and cancel cards if they are lost or stolen.

Forgetting your laptop or briefcase can be annoying in some cases and disastrous in others.

Therefore, it is a good idea to create a backup kit for the tools and information you use every day. No matter what happens, you want to enter the office, meeting or sales call as confident, organized and professional as possible.

Most modern cell phones have the same functionalities that a laptop has, including the ability to edit spreadsheets, create power point presentations and email PDF documents.

Make the most of these phones by adding applications that will allow you to access and edit your information anywhere you are.

Remote Desktop Applications allow you to connect to your home or office computer. These programs range from free applications like MS Remote Desktop to paid options like LogMeIN. The paid applications will also allow you to access remote computers through a web browser.Office suite applications like Documents To Go allow you to edit MS office documents. You can always access the files and then email them for printing.Document scanning software comes in handy when you only have a hard copy but need to send it off in a pinch. Programs like JotNot lets you export scans to multiple formats.Virtual Private Networks (VPN) applications help you protect your personal data when you use hotel Wi-Fi connections or a public computer.

Whether you are at home or at the office, you should always have an online backup you can access on your phone or a computer.

Carbonite is relatively cheap, works in the background without interrupting computer functionality or bandwidth speeds. While it creates a full backup of your computer, you can still access and restore individual files.Dropbox and Windows Live Mesh will allow you to synchronize your work across multiple computers and offers free online locker space. 2 Gigs for Dropbox and 5 Gigs on Skydive for Windows Mesh.  Both are accessible through mobile applications and through a web browser.Email your work to yourself after working on a file.Complete all your work on online office suites like Office 365, Google Apps or Zoho.Keep an extra set of home and auto keys at the office. You can hide them under your desk or within a file folder.Just in case you spill something on yourself or need to stay in a hotel room overnight, keep an extra set of clothes and a toiletries bag in the car.Create a backup business portfolio where you can keep marketing material, business cards, pens, pencils and a writing pad. You never want to enter a meeting or a sales call empty handed.

No matter how organized or prepared you are, there are always going to be times when things fall through the cracks. With a little bit of forethought you can create a emergency kit for any type of situation.

Philip Viana works as a Financial Adviser for a bank in Canada. He is hard at work developing the formula to a meaningful, mindful and happy life. He writes about productivity, financial advice, technology, and lifestyle at Burnthenegative.com or at his about.me page.

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The 5 Principles of a Profound Workday

‘Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.’ ~Laozi

Let us toss out all we know for a moment.

Toss notions of productivity, time management, efficiency, and the bottom line.

Empty our workdays of all we’ve packed them with, and sit still with an empty room.

What should we put in this room? Do we want to spend our limited space on busy-ness, on making money, on quick transactions and calculated meetings?

What if we put into it only that which matters? What if we left everything else out?

We would be left with a workday that was poetry, profoundly beautiful.

In my life I have deliberately cultivated a workday that is flexible, simplified, slow, mindful, creative.

The exact opposite of my previous life: a hurried, anxious, complicated, dull workday.

What I’ve curated is not difficult, but it is the perfect environment for creating work that is profoundly different from my previous accomplishments.

I’ve created this flow using some key principles. You might not be able to implement all of them right away, but it’s my hope that you’ll find the principles useful.

1. Empty: In Silence and Solitude. When your schedule is full, you have no room for change. When your day is full of noise, you have no space to think.

Empty your day. When you have an empty space, you can fill it with anything. Only with this emptiness can you create something truly different.

Clear your schedule. Find space for silence and solitude. With this space you’ll be free, to hear your thoughts, to see the truth, to create beauty.

2. Slow and Mindful. Rushing paradoxically leaves us with less time — the speed means we don’t pay attention, and so the day disappears rapidly and leaves us before we notice.

Slow down, and pay attention. You’ll be able to focus on your creative tasks more, and though you’ll do less, you’ll accomplish things that are more profound.

Be mindful of every activity, small or large. Enjoy every motion.

When you are done with a task, wash your bowl. Then move to the next.

3. Profoundly Creative. Don’t use the gift of your day for mindless repetitive tasks. Don’t end the day with nothing to show for your work.

Start each day by creating. Make the space at the beginning of your day to create, before you get lost in emails and online networking and reading.

Create something amazing. Delight your audience. Leave them amazed, wanting to do your marketing for you. Make a difference.

4. Simplified. The principles for a profound workday might seem impractical to most people, because there just isn’t the time or space to implement them. The only way to create this type of workday is to simplify.

It’s the key to everything else. Subtract. Pare everything down to its essence.

What’s on your desk right now? What are the three items that actually need to be there? Remove everything else.

What’s on your schedule for today? What are the three tasks that would really make a difference in your life? Eliminate everything else that you possibly can.

What do you do every day? How many of those things can be eventually pared down?

How much do you do online? Could you do without it?

Simplify, and you’ll be able to find emptiness, solitude, silence, slowness, mindfulness.

5. Flexible and Natural. This type of workday might start to sound rigid, but in truth when you create space you also allow yourself the flexibility to deal in the moment with any change.

The natural flow of things is change, and if we are rigid we aren’t able to deal with changes. We become frustrated, anxious, angry, flustered.

If instead we have no expectations of what will happen each day, and deal with changes as they come, we let go of that frustration and anxiety.

Be open to whatever happens. Be flexible. Deal with change as it happens, and you’ll find true profoundness doesn’t come from within us, or from external sources, but in the space between the two.

‘Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.’ ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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Start a Productive Workday With the Right Websites

Morning Light by chefranden

Your peak performance period is that space of time during the day where you maximize your focus, productivity and energy for two to three hours.Make the most of this period by prepping your workspace for instant action. Close the door and create a routine that both relaxes and motivates you.

A step in the right direction is to create a GTD bookmark folder with a short list of essential websites

Choose one website that you can quickly scan and easily pick out important headlines. Then spend five to ten minutes getting up to date on the world.

Constant interaction with co-workers is almost a certainty these days and building a relationship with them can be hard when you have little in common. Consequently, using current events is an easy way to invite people into a conversation and build a rapport.This bond between employees boosts productivity as friendly work environments allow staff to share tasks and information with a positive attitude.

Another option is to use services like Google reader because they allow you to create specific news feeds tailored to your tastes. However, avoid adding too many feeds and listing too many headlines as they can disrupt your focus.

Sites like Google News or CNN are better suited for quick productive reading because they condense their headlines into small specific categories on a single page.

Corporate intranet sites are effective tools in keeping employees informed on internal changes, competitive information and relevant industry news. Use this to your advantage and eliminate the need to compile this information yourself.

Products, offers, regulations and people are in constant flux. If you ignore this fact and are reactive instead of proactive, you will miss opportunities.

In particular, sales people face embarrassment when a client is better informed then they are. You need to know how your company stacks up against the competition if you are to remain competitive.

Google calendar is a great option for synchronizing family schedules into one easily updatable calendar.

You cannot give your full attention to your personal or work life if they constantly interrupt each other. During a workday, people trade thoughts and update schedules with their family by shooting emails, texts, or phone calls back and forth. This constant communication breaks up your focus and reduces productivity.

Avoid this situation by creating individual calendars for each family member and synchronize all the calendars together. This way, each family member sees how his or her schedule affects another family member’s agenda.

Start your day by comparing your personal calendar and work calendar. You can then decide how to divide your time, energy and attention at work and then home. A good tip is to forward “non-confidential” appointments in real-time from the office to the family calendar. Therefore, this avoids scheduling appointments that can wreak havoc at work and home.

You should take the time to plan your full day and ask specific questions like:

“Can I put in an extra 30 minutes at the end of the day or will I miss an appointment or dinner?”“Should I go all out on this presentation and use up my energy or should I push some tasks to the next day so I have the energy to spend time with the kids?”

Balancing work and a personal life becomes more manageable with open communication between all the parties affected. You eliminate frustration and anger when everyone works on a level playing field.

You can maximize your performance by choosing a period in the day when you do your best work in the shortest amount of time and use your sharpened focus to create an effective daily agenda that increases your productivity at work and home.

Philip Viana works as a Financial Adviser for a bank in Canada. He is hard at work developing the formula to a meaningful, mindful and happy life. He writes about productivity, financial advice, technology, and lifestyle at Burnthenegative.com or at his about.me page.

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