Do you know where you want to be in 10 years?  OK, for most of us 10 years is perhaps too far out for us to take seriously. So how about 5 years from now; where will you be and what will you be doing?

In reality, none of us really knows how to plan for the future anymore. The future comes quickly and the game board keeps changing. Typewriters and fax machines have been replaced by computers, scanners, and email. And if you haven’t noticed, computers have been replaced by smart phones and tablets and email is being replaced by texts, Twitter and Instagram.

Do you remember waking up, getting dressed, and traveling to work–maybe listening to Imus in the Morning, or a book on tape? Today many workers roll out of bed, check their smart phones for any urgent messages, make coffee, and then wake up the laptop. Getting dressed might mean combing your hair and putting a shirt on over your pajamas in case the web meeting uses video. Co-workers are now just talking heads or a bunch of emails with bad grammar and terrible spelling (even though spell check is turned on).

And just as you begin to adjust, there’s the next thing. Now everybody is talking about “THE CLOUD”. Clouds use to be fluffy white cotton candy floating in a bright blue sky, or a huge vast gray, dismal, overcast cloud as far as you could see, or a roiling, rolling black cloud heavy with moisture and about to drench you and your freshly washed car. But that’s all yesterday.

Today “the Cloud” is the future of computing, the future of DATA, the future of communication and connection. It’s not simply taking your data and hosting it on a server so you can connect and do your work. That’s simply a remote computer. The Cloud is what allows you to connect to other data so that you can analyze, augment, grow, and forecast your business. The Cloud allows you to take Linked In contacts and add them to your CRM data.

Most importantly, the Cloud allows you to access your data from a phone, a tablet, a computer, any time, anywhere. That is why we offer all our clients the option of deploying our Spitfire Project Management System in the Cloud.

So you have a choice: either learn about the Cloud and where the future is heading or keep your head in the clouds and ignore what is happening around you. It is prudent to create a business plan (maybe a 3-year or 1-year plan) in order to start thinking about how you can plan your future instead of letting the future just roll by (or over) you.