Michael

Yesterday, I wrote about my computer problems in Practicing Patience. Surprisingly I got the new battery in today. With anticipation and excitement I put the battery in and rebooted my computer.

Oh my! Now I got the worse error imaginable: hard drive failure. After two hours on the phone with Dell technicians, it was determined that my hard drive has a mechanical failure. They are shipping me a new hard drive for next week.

There is only a small, remote chance of getting all of my data back. I always make backups of my most important files: photographs, music, financial data and etc. So, most things are okay, but a lot of little things I was working on are gone now, possibly forever. One of my action items yesterday was to back up files again, but I didn’t get to it because of the crash.

There are two very important lessons here:

1. Backup all of your computer data regularly, preferably on two separate external drives. It’s not if your drive will fail, it is when.
2. But more importantly…..Don’t practice postponement. Postponing backing up some of my files has potentially cost me losing them forever.

Don’t postpone anything. Do it now. Don’t wait until tomorrow. You never know what is around the corner. I’m not talking just about work and technology. Don’t postpone telling that special person you love them. Don’t postpone the special day with your children. Don’t postpone the travel adventure you have planned. Don’t postpone having fun now for later.

Don’t postpone your life. Live it now.

Michael