A blog about personal development, making a living online, and following your entrepreneurial pursuits

With the growing prominence of technology and demands put on us from our business, family, and everything in between, time is becoming a precious commodity.

This is why I am always looking for ways to save time regardless of what I am doing- this includes the work I do online. There are plenty of things you can do online which will absolutely eat up your time if you let it. This could be looking for old friends and family on Facebook, checking out who is on Twitter, replying and writing emails, and so on.

This is the basis of a short series of articles where I will go over some online apps and sites you could begin using to help you become more efficient with your online time so that you have more time for other activities. I’ll begin with what is probably the biggest online time eater: email.

One goal I have for myself is one I have wrestled with for a couple of years now- time management. I think it is safe to say I am not the only one looking for a more efficient and easy way to manage my time so that I get the most of it. Because let’s face it, the one thing everyone in this world has in common is time. I truly believe that one of the keys to being happy and producing the results you want is effective time management.

In the past, the way I would organize my work schedule is to have a sheet of paper with each day of the week sectioned off in its own box. Each box would have the day of the week written at the top with a list of tasks I wanted to accomplish for that day underneath it. As I worked through the day, I would be multitasking to try and check off each task I had for that day. Some days I would get everything done but there were more days where I would get almost everything done. Which meant I had to find time later in the week to get caught up.

I’m not going to say this is either a bad or good way to manage one’s time. It has helped me keep things straight in regards to the work I needed to get done for a certain day. One of the problems with managing my time this way is work not getting done due to one thing or another on a certain day. For example, say I have seven assorted tasks to get done today which apply to four projects / businesses. If I’m either sick or have to be away from my office unexpectedly, then not only do those tasks not get done but I now have to find time to do them at some later time! Not a good situation to be in when you have deadlines or have a lot to do already.