How good is your insurance?

Do you have enough insurance? And no I don't just mean with an insurance company who will replace your belongings should they get lost, damaged or stolen. But if "disaster" were to strike, would you be able to recover? How quickly? Overcoming the procrastination habit, means looking at every aspect of your life.... and taking the steps to work through each area. However, there are some areas we perhaps don't consider - but should as they are vital.

Take care of the backups - don't neglect them. For example: If you had to vacate your premises would you know where all of your vital documents were? A large number of businesses who happened to be located in the twin towers went under after the attack of 9/11 because they didn't have a disaster plan in place - do you have one? Does you run a business from home, do you rely on one computer to do all the work? Then you too need to ensure you have a disaster plan in place and ready to go should it break down.  We can all be guilty of not putting things away, not doing the filing and failing to do the backups, but when disaster strikes you do tend to have a completely different perspective on things. At MotivateMe! we were almost there, we do have some paper based records (although most of these are scanned), but most of our work resides in the cloud, and what doesn't sits on 2 external hard drives in 2 very different locations. Every Saturday I have a routine whereby I backup my database of readers of the Daily Dose of Motivational Medicine and store it on one of the external hard drives. The only thing I didn't have was a copy of the send mail program which was a nuisance when the laptop I use to do most of my work decided it had had enough and started "blue-screening" repeatedly and had the "click of death". The laptop is now away being resuscitated and thanks to my partner, I now have another copy of the send mail program residing on my netbook, all I had to do was copy the address file into the new program and add all the new subscribers. When I think of the pain I went through after the first "computer disaster" there was no way I was re-building an entire newsletter list from scratch again.

So - learn from your mistakes, that way you don't have to repeat them.

Always ask - what you can do differently? I have a few extra things to do courtesy of my hardware meltdown this week - this is not a hand wringing time, but a decision - if it were to happen again, how can I minimize the losses and downtime? Sometimes you do have to go through the pain of a disaster to know you can't continue burying your head in the sand and hope things will always work out OK. And this applies to everything, not just technology - eating properly today means you are less likely to suffer chronic disease in the future because of your poor daily diet choices. The same goes for exercise, giving up or limiting the "really" bad things (cigarettes, drugs, caffeine, alcohol or any of your other "habits" you don't think you have). Having a reserve of money which means you can buy / replace those things that break down or die.Or think of it in this way - what would you say to your partner / spouse / kids / parents etc if you knew it was the last time you would ever see them? This rather puts last night's argument into perspective doesn't it!

Remember it is a good idea to do all that you can today because you never know what tomorrow will bring.