Many of us has mastered the art of wasting time online, especially at work. There are many reasons why people waste time at work including feeling bored, looking for something fun to do or the thrill of getting caught doing something against company rules. I have decided to cut down on these time-wasting online activities. My attempt here is to identify my top five time-wasters so that I could reduce the time spent on them or eliminate them altogether.
I’m a stay-at-home mom. Whenever I have a window of opportunity, usually when my daughter is sleeping, I will spend it on my laptop. Everytime I go online, I will be tempted to do many things apart from what I’m supposed to do, which is to write articles to expand my repertoire of written collection.
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Checking E-mails
One of the first things I usually do is check my e-mail. If I go online 3 times a day, I will be checking my e-mail at the beginning and end of each session, and sometimes in between whenever there is a pop-up from my Yahoo! toolbar to indicate that there is new e-mail for me. Since I subscribe to several e-mail notifications from a few websites, there are many e-mails which I seldom read and just dump them in the trash bin. What I have to do is identify which ones I would like to continue subscribing and which ones I should cancel the subscription. The second thing is to find a way to turn off the new e-mail alert on my Yahoo! toolbar so that I won’t be distracted by it.
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Facebook
Many of us are a member of at least one social networking site such as Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 or Friendster. I am a member of Facebook. Although I believe that it’s a great way to keep in touch with friends and family through Facebook, but there are many distracting, time-wasting activities here, one of which is the applications. Although I have stopped super-poking friends on Facebook, there are many games you can play and things to do. I play 2 games, namely Cute Catz and Lil Green Patch. I don’t normally forward useless messages on Message Boards, but I know many people do, because I receive them! I have switched off all e-mail notifications for these applications, leaving friends’ messages and new friend notification on.
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Checking Triond Earnings
It’s crazy but I check my Triond earnings a few times a day, like it’s going to increase drastically! It’s just so fun, but like I said, a total waste of my time. I also realize that Triond updates the earnings at certain times of the day. Instead of checking my earnings all the time, I should just stick to checking them once a day at a specified time which I know they would already have updated them. The best would be to check it weekly or monthly, but I don’t think I have come to that stage yet. It’s just so exciting to see my earnings increase, albeit a little bit each day. Actually, I do check other earnings too, such as my Adsense earnings and other affiliate earnings, but not as religiously as I check my Triond earnings.
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MyLot
I am a forum member at MyLot. I start my own discussions and make comments on others. I participate in a lot of other activities at MyLot. It is quite addictive. I have to confess. The fact that I did not write any articles for an entire week and very few blog entries in the past few days, can be attributed to spending too much time at MyLot. I have to cut down on MyLot whatever it is.
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Blog
Blogging can waste your time too. It is not that I’m against blogging. In fact, I blog myself. But the activities related to blogging can eat up a lot of your time. For instance, you need to research for new materials for your blog. You go hunting for new information and that takes a lot of time. Then you look for suitable photos to accompany your article. You may want to take your own photos, upload them and post them in your blog. Alternatively, you search for royalty-free photos on the internet. That takes a super long time! For me to continue blogging efficiently, it’s important to plan ahead. It would be great if I could write a week ahead at one sitting and look for all the photos that I need at the same time, in order to avoid going back and forth from one site to another. Using features available in blogging platforms to schedule your posts ahead of time, blogging should not be a time-consuming activity at all.
If you know that you are wasting a lot of time online and wish to change the situation to be more productive, I suggest you sit down and identify your very own time-wasting online activities you currently engage in, analyse them to see how you can cut down or eliminate these activities altogether. So, what are your top 5 time-wasters?
Thu, Jul 24, 2008, by Sydney Hazelton
Web Talk