emergency planning

The S&N Financial Independence Series is go!

by

Today I have something fantastic to announce: the first “S&N (Sarah & Nadine) Financial Independence Series” publication by my sister in planning, Nadine Edwards! This series is a collaborative effort to help translators and other freelancers escape the fight-or-flight response to money issues by starting conversations and providing tools address our needs. It started with … Read more

memoQ Light Resources, and a Freebie

by

Apologies for the delay in the next installment of the emergency series–I have not forgotten about it, I promise! It just turns out tech-related emergency planning takes a lot of research. But, speaking of technology and emergencies, here’s a Tech Emergency Quickie for memoQ users!

Do you have all your term bases and all the little hacks to your TEnT tools/CAT tools backed up? (And your invoices? See Backing Up Your Records in TO3000 Version 10; the first half of that post also applies to Version 11.) I’ve gotten pretty good about backups, but there are always a few little things that I miss for my memoQ setup. Term bases? Check. TMs? Check. Light resources? …Well, shoot, I didn’t think of that!

Luckily, others can learn from my mistakes. If you, too, hate having to figure out complicated “memoQ Web Search” settings and whatnot for each new computer, read on. These are more complicated to back up than you might think, but it can be done!

Read more

Life Happens

by

I’d planned to end the week with a tiny update of miscellanea on emergency planning. I’m still doing that, but originally it was going to be upbeat, and it hasn’t quite turned out that way. Still, here’s your emergency planning quickie: 1. And lo, planning works! Almost a year ago, I had a hard drive … Read more

Emergency Business Planning: Illness & Injury

by
Image of an emergency room door and sign saying "Emergency"

In my first post about emergency business planning, I asked the question, “What can go wrong?” That was a little terrifying, but now for the good news: Once we know what can go wrong, we’re ready to start strategizing!

You will probably have noticed that some disasters I listed on the “What could go wrong?” list were qualitatively different than others. #4 in particular is in a category of its own: “I could become sick or injured.”

Hopefully none of us will spend too much of our time so ill that we can’t work, but both short- and long-term illness/injury can happen to anyone, of any age. So we need to prepare for this. We don’t want short-term health problems to impact our client relationships, and we don’t want long-term ones to tank our businesses!

In preparing for this piece, I put together my own knowledge, my research, and notes from an interview with a friend who has unfortunately encountered this particular emergency. Here’s what I came up with:

Read more

Happy 2015! Do You Have an Emergency Business Plan?

by
Sign pointing to the emergency evacuation slide of a ship.

Happy New Year! Yes, it’s January, that month when many of us think about what we want our lives to be like. We ask ourselves, Do I need to lose weight? Do I want to quit a bad habit? What do I want to accomplish most? We all know the “resolutions” drill.

But if you’re a freelancer or you run a business, there’s an urgent question that you may not be asking: Do I have an emergency plan for my business?

Any month is a good month to safeguard your business, but I’ve decided to devote this January to blogging about my emergency-preparedness plan for my translation business. Today’s post is all about the first step: admitting that eventually, there’s going to be a problem.

Read more