One day last month on a Wednesday — which happens to be a busy day in my office — my Internet decided to go out for whatever reason. Well, most of my work is done using the Internet so you can imagine that threw me for a loop. And oh, by the way, I was also on a Blog Talk Radio Show at the time and got dropped from the call. Thank goodness for cell phones!

I called the provider only to be told that it will be back on later. Later??? Well, exactly WHEN later?

I had a 3:00pm call scheduled in which my client was calling me. And I had no way to reach her as she wasn’t going to be in her usual space. I had to do a few jumps through hoops to figure out how to let her know to call my cell phone. Okay, so I learned a lesson: when scheduling client calls, give them my cell phone as well so that in the case they dial and can’t get through, they have an alternative.

Usually we plan about, oh, 2 seconds into the future or okay, maybe 10 minutes. And usually we are okay. But for those times when we aren’t, what can we do in advance to ensure that we can always run optimally?

One thing we can do is to have a secondary (or back up) plan for our regular day-to-day operations. When your Internet goes out, how and where will you work. A second outfit for work so that if we spill or notice a stain on what we planned to wear we can quickly and easily change to something else. A second idea/way of doing things if our first (and preferential) way of doing it doesn’t pan out as planned.

The funny thing though is most of us DO plan for the “what ifs”, we just don’t put concrete actions into place. You know that “I need to back-up my computer because what if the hard drive dies” … yet do you back-up your computer? I didn’t until my hard drive was dying and I needed to send out my computer to be fixed. Now, however, I certainly do regularly it, in fact! I know I don’t want to go through that again. I was lucky, I had notice that my hard drive needed replacing, but some people aren’t that lucky!

Instead of living your life by the seat of your pants and reacting to all that happens to you – be in the driver’s seat and create outcomes that are both pleasing and stress free. Create a back-up plan; that “what if” plan. Be prepared and you’ll find that when your day throws you a curve ball, it can actually be quite enjoyable and fun.

By the way, I also did a Blog Talk Radio show on the ‘Best Laid Plan’, click here to listen: http://bit.ly/Q6oExQ