Recently, a business client called me in a nervous panic to fix a laptop that was experiencing a serious hardware malfunction and would not boot up. As I am asking questions about the hardware malfunction, I learn that this laptop had over 15+ years of business and personal data on it and they have no backups at all of their data. So, I get off the phone and agree to take a look at the system to see if somehow I can help fix the issue.

The next day I get the system and within a few short minutes into my evaluation, I quickly realized and determined that the hard drive had experienced a major mechanical failure and was not repairable and all of their data was gone. I then proceeded to call the client back and let them know what I discovered. Immediately, after the client answered the phone, the first question that blurted out of their mouth was “Is all my data ok?”. In this case, I explained unfortunately it’s not ok. You have lost all of your data. 15+ years of business and personal data gone. Contacts, emails, documents, photos, all of it gone. Devastation is the best word I can use to describe how this client felt. It literally took the wind right out of their sail.

It’s such a hard lesson to learn but its an important one and its this: Never assume that your technology won’t fail you during the time you own it, because it will.

For some reason, we buy a technology device and make the assumption that it will work forever and never have any problems. Technology is and can be super reliable, but nowhere in the manufacturer documentation of a product does it say that your technology device won’t breakdown, experience a glitch or malfunction. In reality, not only will it fail you, but it always seems to happen at the most inconvenient time. So be ready.

Get in the habit of backing up your data regularly. I realize that it’s not at the top of your priority list, but it needs to be. If your like me, I heavily rely on my technology to perform for me day in and day out and manage life’s activities. Because of that one reason, its worth taking the time to do it, so when it does fail, I can restore my data promptly and get life back moving again. There are many options to backing up your data (i.e. external hard drives, jump drives, backup software, etc), my personal preference is online data backup solutions. Here are some I have used and recommend:

1. SugarSync allows you to keep your computers, smartphones and mobile devices synced and backed up on the internet. Of all the online data backup services we reviewed, SugarSync offers the most features and continuous backup abilities. It also protects your data by keeping the five most recent versions of your files in the cloud, automatically updating them as you make changes.

2. Dropbox is a quality online data backup service that lets you store up to 100GB, plus it’s also a good way to sync your files across your various work and home computers and mobile devices. You can share files for collaboration, store and share photo and video galleries, and your data will all be safely backed up on Dropbox’s secure servers.

3. OpenDrive does double-duty as both an online data backup service and a cloud service. It offers the tools and features essential for quality backups, including automatic, incremental and scheduled backups, along with syncing, file sharing and more. It’s also a quality cloud service, giving you full access to your documents and allowing you to edit documents, share photos, stream your music and watch your videos from the cloud.

4. ZipCloud combines traditional online backup with cloud syncing, providing a comprehensive online data backup solution ideal for both home and small business users. In a nutshell, ZipCloud enables you to back up, sync and share your digital content across all of your computers and mobile devices. Such versatile functionality ensures your most important files are both protected and accessible anytime, anywhere.

5. JustCloud is an online data backup service that offers an excellent assortment of backup, syncing and sharing tools to make sure that you have access to your files anytime and from any computing device. Even though JustCloud offers a wide assortment of backup, syncing, security and other features, there are a few tools this service lacks that many similar web services offer.

Data backup is important. It ensures your data’s future is protected and that you will never fall prey to technology failure again.

Have you ever used technology when your emotionally charged up? I know I have and guess what? I know you have too. It happens to all of us. The truth is, that in those times when your feeling like that, is the perfect time to step away from technology completely or at least take a break from it to give yourself a chance to recoup, recharge and recover. If you don’t, you risk doing things you wouldn’t normally do because you’re not thinking clearly.

One doozy that still stings me to this very day is: I was at work and received an email from my manager at the time that was having a really tough day. Patience was a little thin and attitude was high. It seemed like bad vernacular was the theme for the day.

After reading the email, I ended up taking it very personally and getting majorly upset and frustrated. This frustration and being upset led to my emotions getting out of control. Needless to say, because I let my emotions get hold of me, I then proceeded to compose a scathing and hurtful email response back. Once I had the email response finished, I then popped open the company directory, selected the person’s name and sent it off. Whewww! I feel better now.

Unbeknownst to me, shortly after I sent the email off, I get a phone call from a Director in a totally different department at my company. They introduced themselves and proceeded to let me know that they had received my email. It stopped me dead in my tracks and I instantly thought to myself silently, “Who did I send this email to?”. Well, sure enough I went back and looked and I sent it to a person in the company directory that had the same first name but a different last name. Ouch! Everything ended up working out fine but that was a really hard lesson to learn.

For myself, when I feel my emotions starting to get charged up be it through an email, text message or social networking comment or status update, the first thing I do is Step away from the technology. This gives me a chance to take a deep breath until I feel I can look at things objectively. The last thing I want to do is send an outraged response and make the situation escalate. That’s definitely not the goal.

If you learn this one simple strategy, your restraint can pay enormous dividends. Who knows how many relationships are damaged, or at least adversely affected, every day, by someone not being willing to step away from the technology?

Share your comments and thoughts.

There it goes again. The red light is blinking, a notification pops up or alert sounded. Whatever the case, you just got distracted by your smartphone once again. Anyone who uses a smartphone knows this feeling all too well. The flashing red light, pop up notification or alert means your smartphone is calling your name, it wants something from you. Better drop what you’re doing and go tend to it now…

Such is the life of a smartphone slave…No one enjoys being one. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. The alerts, pop up notifications come at all hours: at home with the family, on weekends, and even while on vacation. Even worse, the blinking red light, pop up notification or the alerts can mean many things these days. Everything from email and text messages, to app updates. It’s all one big distraction, and it takes away from you focusing on your work, personal priorities and your relationships.

The only question is, who would ever want to be a smartphone slave? Not me…I can tell you that. I hope you feel the same.

Although smartphones have revolutionized the cell phone market, they can unfortunately be very distracting to those of us that own them. Close to 40% of the cell phone market is made up of smartphones, but that number is expected to rise significantly over the next five years as smartphones become more affordable.

As you know, if you are a smartphone owner, it’s super easy to become a slave to them because of all their cool features and functionality. Thankfully, it’s just as easy to shed those technology distraction shackles. The only way to break those chains and free ourselves from STD’s is to condition ourselves. One way we can accomplish this is to set up self-discipline safeguards. If we can’t escape the Pavlovian response to the blinking red light, the pop up notification or the alerts, we have to somehow limit its occurrence. Thankfully, this is easily accomplished on a smartphone.

Here are a couple of key tips on how to do that:

• If the sound of an alert is what draws you to the device, turn sounds off. If it’s the blinking red light or a pop up notification, flip the device upside down. Maybe you’ll miss something here or there, but unless you’re expecting an immediate response to issues, this shouldn’t be much of an issue.
• At a regular interval — maybe every 15, 30 or 60 minutes (or whatever works best for you), check your messages. But only check after those minutes are up. What most people find is that they didn’t miss anything that required an immediate response. The sender was quite content to wait the 15, 30 or 60 minutes for the reply. Then work on expanding this exercise into the weekends, and it can extend for hours on end. Set the phone aside and do something with the family or friends. Then, after an hour or two, check to see what you missed. Again, it’s not likely that anything required an immediate response.

Once we free ourselves from STD’s, we can then start to take advantage of its features and functionality and get organized and live simpler lives. Here is just a partial list of functions that our smartphones can help us achieve, for free or at least very inexpensively.

• Financial Assistance. There are dozens of free banking and budgeting tools. These tools make it easy to make online banking transactions and help keep track of what we spend and so we can stay within our budgets. After all, smartphones come with us everywhere, so it’s easy to write what we spend and compare that to a budget.
• Workflow control. When we use smartphone technology to our advantage, we control the workflow. Task management and calendars make it super easy to schedule what tasks get done when. And if we turn over our smartphones and put our noses to the grindstone, those tasks get done distraction-free.
• News filter. With smartphones it’s easy to pull the news items you want to read and leave out all the rest. Set everything to manually update, and you’ll never see an item as a distraction.

The key is to integrate these functions into your daily life, and not have them thrown at you. It’s a thin line between smartphone technology slavery and smartphone technology mastery. But once found, it can have a profound aspect on your life. Using your smartphone for the things you want, when you want them, and not having things thrown at you, is the key to breaking free of STD’s…

Love to hear your comments and feedback. What things have you implemented to keep from being a slave to STD’s?

The typical household has a minimum of 20 technology devices (TV’s, DVD’s, iPod’s, iPad’s, Computer systems, game consoles, smartphones, etc)

28% of people say they spend less time with household members in face to face conversations since being connected to the Internet at home

Shared family time without technology is down to 17.9 hours a month and dropping.

49% of women report being ignored often by a close family member due to the constant use of technology in the home.

These survey results suggest increasing technological pressures on family time. Although technology does offer many conveniences to our daily lives and can be used to create a sense of togetherness (i.e. watching TV or going to a movie together), we have to prioritize quality family time if we want our relationships and family bonding to stay strong. Spending family time together needs to be more than just sitting besides each other on the couch while you are preoccupied by a television, smart phone, or computer screen. We have to intentionally “take a break” from it and make good choices. Good choices that are made consistently will help maintain our family relationships and create strong bonding experiences for generations to come.

Here are 3 choices to make now, that will help protect and make sure your family time stays a priority:

1. Eat dinner together regularly – One of the best ways to set aside family time is to eat dinner together regularly. During dinner, no technology is allowed. Turn it off! Spend that hour talking together. If this is something you haven’t done in a while, it may be difficult to get communications started at first. One way to get everyone talking is to have each person share the high’s of the day and low’s of the day. My family calls it “high, low”. If you find it difficult to eat together every evening, appoint certain days of the week as family dinner nights.

2. Plan a family night once a week – Why not start the tradition of spending a certain time together each week as a family? Make of list of things you all like to do and choose a different one every time. There are many activities your family may enjoy that you can do. Whatever you choose should not require the use of technology. Game night is a great idea. You could play popular board games, cards, or an active game like charades. Does your family like puzzles? You could work on a puzzle together during Family Night, and then leave it up to finish as people have time throughout the week. Some families may also enjoy reading a chapter of a book together on family night. If the weather is nice, your family may enjoy spending some time together outdoors. If your family likes sports you could throw the football around or go on a bike ride. Depending on the amount of yard space you have, you may be able to set up a game like croquet or horseshoes. You don’t even really need any special equipment to spend family night outdoors. Maybe you can start the tradition of taking a walk once a week so you have time to really talk without the distraction of technology.

3. Go out as a family once a month – If you want to make lasting memories, plan to go somewhere special with your family every month. Pick a place that will let you talk and have fun together. Technology does not go with you though, make it a rule. When it’s warm outside, try a day at the beach or lake. If you are not the outdoors type, you can plan an outing to the local bowling alley, race some go-karts or go to a miniature golf course. When you have the time and resources, try planning a road trip traveling to a place you would all enjoy.

What choices do you make to prioritize your family time so that your tech time doesn’t invade it? Love to hear your opinion and comments…

Consumer technology sales hit a record $129 billion in 2007, up 6.5% from 2006. Technology marketing falsely leads people to believe that what you want is what you need. Many of us fall into the marketing tactics and traps by getting influenced by the right product, service, or device, if it is presented to us in a way that pretends to make life better, helps us fill a void we think we have, or prevents and or solves one of life’s problems. Whatever it is that ends up flipping the switch inside of us to turn that want into a need is what heads us down the path of lack of self-control, impulse buying, and ultimately integrating technology into our lives that we don’t need.

I know this is a simple concept to understand, but let’s take a quick look at a couple of dictionary definitions for want versus need so that we can better understand the differences.

Want: have a desire to possess or do (something); wish for.

Need: require (something) because it is essential or very important, a necessity.

Being able to decipher the differences between a want and a need is important because once you’re emotionally attached to the technology, it becomes difficult to detach yourself, and you end up turning that want into a need.

Let me give you an example of how this played out in my life. In October 2001, I heard about the first Apple iPod device. It sounded interesting to me to see, but it was not a necessity by any stretch, and I did not desire to buy one. So on this particular day, I was surfing the web and came across the Macworld keynote address where Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, pulled an iPod out of his pocket and said, “One thousand songs in your pocket.” Okay. Wow. It seemed like the strings of heaven started to play in my head.

Because I had previously developed an interest in my mind to at least see what it was about and what its capabilities were, I then went through a mock workup of justifying to myself in my head why I needed this iPod. It played out somewhat like this: “Wow. One thousand songs in my pocket…this iPod could do so much for me. It would virtually eliminate the need for all my CDs and my CD player, and being that I am a music fan of all types, I could literally take my whole music collection with me wherever I go…

WAIT! STOP! That’s all great and fine, but I don’t need one thousand songs in my pocket, I never have needed one thousand songs in my pocket, and I still don’t. But I convinced myself that it was a need and not just a want. Not only that, but my friends purchased one, and that confirmed that it was the cool thing to do. This type of lack of self-control is referred to in the Bible as a fruit of the spirit issue. God talks about this in Galatians 5:22-23, and the play on your emotions is exactly how we, as consumers, fall for the trap every single time. It is called technology marketing, and it tells us that what we want is not just a want, but rather it is telling us that what we want is what we need, and we need it now.

Let me ask you something…Have you ever bought a new piece of technology one day only to discover that the next day or the following weeks after your purchase that a similar piece of technology or even the same one is half the price with more features? Why is it that the technology available today always seems to be better than yesterday’s technology? And what is it in our decision-making process or emotions that make us feel like we now have a void that never existed before?

For many years, I found myself falling into the trap of technology marketing big time. It was one of those areas in my life where I knew that if someone could convince me enough times through different strategies, tactics, and techniques that my want for a specific technology was actually a need, then I would buy things I  didn’t need and end up integrating yet another piece of technology in my life to occupy my time, stealing time from the precious things in my life—God, my spouse, kids, and friends.

Technology marketing is not a game; it is a serious matter. Listed below are some personal tips that helped me change the what-I-want-is-what-I-need mindset throughout my unplugging journey, and I believe you would benefit from them as well.

1. You always pay a price for technology. Let me say that again to make sure that sinks way down into your spirit—you always pay a price for technology! Anybody who tells you otherwise is lying to you. Technology, for many years, has been marketed as “This will make your life easier, and you are going to have more time to do the things you enjoy,” and “I can fulfill and solve every need.” The problem comes when you believe that and cannot exercise self-control. For most of us, the self-control part is the biggest challenge, especially when we have a void in our lives that we are looking to fill.

2. What you see is not always what you get.  Consider all the details, read the fine print, ask questions. Make sure you completely understand what is you are getting and what you are not getting. Otherwise, you will regret making the buy, and you may risk losing your money. Also, read reviews about the product(s) you are buying and talk to friends who have purchased the same product and see how they like it and what some of the pitfalls are. Get wise spiritual counsel for big purchases!

3. Wait a minimum of 24-48 hours before making any new technology purchases. The majority of the time, we make decisions based on how emotionally connected we are to a particular technology device or service. By waiting, the euphoria of your emotions tends to drop off, and you become less excited about the buy and are less likely to buy. Figure out how much available time you have in your weekly schedule to spend managing another piece of technology. If you discover that you have very little or no time to manage another technology product or service, then don’t buy it. It will be a curse to you and not a blessing.

4. Seriously consider the role it will play in your life. For example, if you buy a smart phone and you plan to use it for work, then use it for work purposes, not personal purposes. It is when you use technology to serve multiple purposes that gets you in trouble. It creates unnecessary confusion, like the never-ending workday because it blurs the separation of your work and personal life activities. Listen to your spouse if you are married; they are usually a good voice of reason. If you happen to be single, bring someone with you who has your best interest at heart. Many times, I have ignored my wife’s instinct or opinion and pretty much every single time regretted what I bought to some degree.

5. Never move forward without peace. If you get an uneasy feeling about the technology you are planning to buy, do not move forward with buying it. In the end, you will get buyers remorse and regret the purchase.

6. Limit your media exposure. Mass media promotes a spendthrift mentality. The more media exposure you consume through TV, radio, internet, etc., the more it influences your spendthrift mentality, which, in turn, results in convincing you that the technologies you have are not good enough and you should continuously upgrade.

What other ideas do you have that help you avoid developing the “what-I-want is what-I-need” mindset?