I'm really bad to react vs. plan when it comes to personal matters. I preach about responsibility and avoiding emergencies to my clients then completely blow off simple personal tasks that avoid serious consequences. This was most evident when I found myself in a hospital in the middle of a heart catheterization procedure at 36. Whoops! That could have been avoided with some modest exercise and reasonable diet and lifestyle changes. The most recent example is my personal website domain registration expired.

Someone (thanks Sean!) actually emailed me through my corporate website to tell me my website was down. So, for the first time in eight years or so (save for a few hours of really, really slow response due to a slashdot, digg and cnet recognition) my website was hard down - unavailable. It wasn't because of server failure. It wasn't because of some complex systems failure of any kind. I just didn't pay the $10 to renew my domain. That's all. Once someone brought it to my attention I instantly logged into my Tucows reseller account and renewed the domain. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb!

The lesson here, which one would think I could have learned from the much more serious heart attack scare (and no, I don't presently have heart disease nor did I require a medical procedure - I just had a scare), is that you need to handle your own stuff no matter how stressed the times are because others are uptight about their's.

You have to perform personal maintenance. This starts with one's mind and body and extends to one's family and lifestyle. But, the same goes for personal professional issues. Your wardrobe, resume' or personal website also deserve attention. As I continue in my sync everything and lifestyle series I'll pay more attention to my own failings in this regard and talk about how to boost your success in those areas.

P.S. Once I renewed OpenSRS/Tucows it was instantly pushed back to the root servers - tada! Also, my home DNS caching service (OpenDNS) picked it up instantly as well, though I didn't wait to test it to see what'd happened so it may have never been down for OpenDNS users.