Jamdo Marketing Blog

I am an internet addict. It’s just the way I am. I would plug my head straight into broadband if the technology was available! I make my living on the internet and a lot of my leisure time goes there too.

And that is where my problem starts.

It is really very easy for me to get caught up doing fun stuff when I should be doing income generating stuff (which is also fun, but has an obvious serious element to it). In fact I use Firefox and usually have at least 10 tabs open at any one time. At least 5 of them will be sports, forums or games - ie. nothing that is immediately productive in a professional sense. Sometimes I’ll also throw in a computer game or two just for fun (at the moment I am becoming re-addicted to Sid Meier’s Colonization - an oldie but a goodie!).

This can obviously have a pretty bad impact on my productivity.

There are a few tools I use to try to keep the things I do on my computer reasonably focussed on work.

In fact there are a couple of options of organising yourself online - something I have started to do to fight my complete laziness.

For starters, I like MyYahoo! The diary tool is fantastic for planning things that you want to get done by certain times and dates. It has the capacity for you to input plans up to the quarter hour. That of course, is handy for obvious reasons, but I have been using pretty heavily to plan for a new blog I am going to be launching in the next couple of weeks.

MyYahoo! also has a “Notes” module which I use as a “to do” list. I just put one task per line and delete them as I get them done. This is a very handy thing to do at the beginning of the day. That way I don’t let myself do any fun stuff until my notes section has been cleared. There is also a “Briefcase” module that you can use to upload files - that is especially handy if you are going to be working from more than one computer (another trick is just to email the files to yourself, but hey!).

Of course, Yahoo! also has the email thing and as far as web based email goes, it’s pretty good.

The way I organise myself for projects that I am doing with other people is to use BaseCamp online project management software. That way we can all log in and get the “to do” list completed or assign tasks to certain people. It is very handy for this type of thing. Once again, I simply make sure I have completed all of the tasks that I have before I allow myself to open up the sports pages or start a computer game.

Of course, these little tips require a little bit of self discipline (which I sometimes lack) but in general they work for me. The beauty of the internet is that there are a lot of clever people on it creating tools that are very useful.

That is just one way I utilise a couple of them.

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