Blow up paddling pools, buckets and bags of soil; oh and lots of papers, books and media. You see, when you're faced with a "disaster" chances are going to be good that the water won't be clean, so not only do you have to contend with wet papers but with dirt, slime and sometimes mould as well - especially if you can't dry everything off in a very short space of time.

Which is why we are going to re-create the experience for our trainees....

But what has this got to do with motivation and overcoming procrastination? Well everything. If the unthinkable happened and you had to vacate your house - very quickly, could you pick up all your important documents in one go, pick up the kids, the cats and be out of your house before the tornado touched down? No, me neither. And I am an information manager !! I know what I should do, protect the vital records, ensure there are back ups and in doing so, clean the house of clutter and "stuff" I don't need.

In reality, my house is just like everyone elses. Trouble is most work places are exactly the same. Papers everywhere, filing in trays rather than in correct files, and even if the items are stored in boxes, chances are going to be good they're going to be in the same building as the rest of your operations. Unless you use offsite storage that is.

But why is this important?

Well remember Hurricane Katrina - of course you do, what was interesting from a Records Management point of view, was the amount of clean up work that had to be done. Everything from property title deeds, to DNA samples for people on deathrow were caught in the flood waters. Imagine if your life hung in the balance of a document that used to be stored in the basement of the court house that got flooded? And yes it really did happen.