Shulist Group Inc.

One of my annual process checks is to revisit my personal Disaster Recovery Plan. I usually try to develop a thorough way to recover from any personal disaster that could affect how I work in my business and how I keep my life sane.

Making a list

One of the things that I have been particularly lax about is developing is a quick call list in my mobile phone to be used in an emergency. A year ago I replaced my prior smartphone with a Blackberry and needed to re-establish the emergency process. Almost every phone will allow some number of speed dial entries so I have the routine numbers on speed dial including 911, spouse, family, trusted friends and others that I may need to reach quickly. For other numbers you might need in the event of an emergency, you might want another means of storing them so that they can be retrieved while you are under duress. So here is my technique for this process.

Entering numbers into your phone

In order to keep the numbers on the top of your phone list in your directory, and to find them quickly, I always precede the name with the characters “AA#” and for my Blackberry I store that information in the ‘Company’ field—for your particular phone you may have to experiment to determine what field to use so that it gets listed first in the directory. So, for example, the name of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) is entered as AA1 OPP and so on for my ten emergency numbers. That way they are either the first ten entries in my phone’s directory or can be found quickly.

The list

Emergency Contact

While you may wish to have a different list, you can use this as a template to get yourself started.