About a month ago, I started experiencing pain when typing on the computer. Now, this is not a new thing for me, as I happen to have a pain condition, but it had been a long time since the pain was consistently bad enough to stop me from being productive.

I’m doing better now, but the experience did drive home a few things that I thought I should share.

As an entrepreneur, you need to be prepared for the unexpected

In the online world, a sudden inability to type is kinda, well…a big deal! It’s easy to take for granted that you’ll wake up and be able to write an article, send emails, chat or Tweet, but stuff happens. Whether it’s a health crisis, family issue, financial glitch, or any other number of things that life can throw at you, you need to be ready to…

Get creative and realize you always have options

In my case, after I figured out that my pain wasn’t going to go away anytime soon, I started analyzing what my options were. Some of the things I considered were out-tasking my writing activities, getting voice dictation software, buying an ergonomic split keyboard, consolidating all my writing tasks (email, Twitter, communicating with colleagues and friends, etc) into one day per week, then taking the rest of the week to recover, etc, etc.

After thinking all of these options through, and eliminating the ones that were either impractical or not workable in my particular case, I decided to go with buying the voice dictation software.

I think it was the right choice; it allowed me to at least communicate online again, and I knew it was a tool that I could use over the long term (not to mention it would be a business write off). It also bought me some time as I tried to figure out the cause of my pain, and I’m happy to say that I can now type again…but it’s still touch and go, so I’m playing it safe and making sure to alternate between typing and voice dictation.

Which leads me to my last point:

When the going gets tough, focus on what you CAN do, not what you can’t

Let’s face it: it’s easy to get discouraged by obstacles and life events that get in the way of achieving your goals and dreams. But if you are resourceful and focus on the positive in any situation, you will go a long way, baby! You do have choices, and it pays to sit down, be objective, and come up with a plan of what you can do to get through a difficult or challenging time in your life or business.

If you’re interested in checking out the voice dictation software I used, it’s called MacSpeech Dictate. It happens to be Mac-only software, but you can also check out its equivalent for the PC, Dragon Naturally Speaking.

I have to say I was quite impressed with the MacSpeech software, so a brief product review may be upcoming on the blog for those of you who might be interested in adding a voice dictation option to your business toolkit. For those of you who prefer talking over typing, it’s the perfect solution

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