How to be prepared for anything

- Are you prepared for any situation that might arise in your career? Being prepared is essential, not only for your success, but for your productivity. Here's a little story to illustrate this principle. I was in New Jersey for a speaking event and had an extra day. So I decided to take trip into New York. I hired a driver to take me there. Halfway through the trip he turns around and looks at me and very seriously asks, "Do you know how to get there?" Not only had his GPS stopped working, but he was unfamiliar with the area.

Luckily, I had a phone with working GPS and was able to give him directions to my destination. You and I cannot afford to caught unprepared like this. Often, this requires having duplicates of everything that we need. In this driver's case, rather than having just one phone, or one GPS unit, he should have had second one, a backup. Think about your workday. What it is something that could possibly go wrong? And do you have a backup for it? Another way to be prepared is to give yourself extra time.

This means that if a project is due at work by a certain date, we don't need to rush through the project immediately. We want to ensure that we schedule our completion date to happen several days before that due date. Why? Because if something goes wrong, we've got that extra time built-in to address the problem. This is why, as a speaker, I always arrive at least one hour before the event to do a soundcheck, to make sure that everything is right in the room.

Another way to be prepared is to double-check your work. It's always very time consuming to retrace your steps and fix mistakes when you make them. Make it a habit, whenever you have an important project to deliver, double-check it. Review critical emails for errors before you send them out. If you're like me, and don't trust yourself to do a good job of reviewing, enlist some help. Get in the habit of using a friend or a co-worker to review your work before you present it for completion.

A little attention toward preparation, can save you tremendous amounts of time.