Do you want to be wealthy and happy? Probably most of us do.
Some things tend to be common to us all.
How we go about it, what our priorities are and our appetite for risk can be unique.
Our diversity is often what identifies us.
My habits and work schedules will be different to yours.
The tools we use are similar.
Our individuality defines how we use them.
This is why we see such a variety of practices and habits when using computers, the internet and applications.
That variety will create habits and processes.
Some will be really good.
Lots will be average and some will be poor or even destructive.
Spotting those unhelpful elements is key to doing something about them.
After hitting a string of problems some time ago, I started to look at why this was happening.
It became clear to me that it was often the decisions I was making about how to do things that was creating the opportunities for problems to occur.
I was deluding myself into thinking I was doing all the right things when, in fact, I was doing other things that were undermining, or even cancelling, the good things I was trying to do.
For example.
I was scheduling a regular defrag on my PC thinking this would be a good idea.
(New machines often come with this already set up).
However, completely separate to this I was trying to save energy around the home.
I fitted remote control wall points for various items around the home.
Instead of leaving things on standby overnight I was switching off everything using the remote controls when going to bed.
Guess when my defrag was scheduled to start? 2.
00am - when everything had been switched off.
Had I been using a laptop this might not have been such a big problem (with its battery) but for my desktop machine this was bad news.
To make things worse I had scheduled a weekly full C drive backup to start once the defrag had completed.
I had also decided it would be prudent to allow Microsoft Update to load new updates automatically when they arrived.
I hadn't appreciated that this would also allow a new (and very buggy) version of Internet Explorer to install itself as well.
I needed to revert to an earlier version but my backups hadn't been working had they.
If I did a Windows Restore I would lose all my recent work.
While these events themselves were not overly difficult to overcome, the fact that they were all happening on top of each other made it a little less obvious which problem I was dealing with and which one to sort out first.
The symptoms I was seeing left me feeling uncomfortably suspicious I had acquired a virus and maybe I needed to do a full system scan before I did anything else.
Unfortunately, that was going to take quite a considerable period of time on my heavily fragmented C-Drive.
In this example, the problems could be fixed but not without quite a lot of lost time and unwanted stress.
It wouldn't have taken much for this situation to have descended into a much bigger problem that would have been hard to sort out.
Understanding how the decisions we make can combine together, can make a huge difference to how effectively our good intentions work out.
We can always be confident that external influences will conspire against us (viruses, dodgy software updates, power failures and the like) but we don't usually imagine our own actions might also be conspiring against us.