By now it has become a drug for many people. They can not stay longer without the Internet, and in those moments when you’re not connected you feel like a smoker without packet of cigarettes.
For an Internet Marketer it could also be even worse if you’re used to living half your day on the net …
Whether for work or for our social life, the internet has become a fundamental part of our lives and it is essential to learn how to manage it to the best to avoid problems of technological stress.
As you can imagine, not knowing how to manage our online life well can make us lose many beautiful things that “offline” life has taught us up to 15 years ago when, without internet, we lived a completely different world.
Well today I want to share some advice and some ideas to avoid falling into the internet trap, enjoy life and not become a network addict.
Be clear, as usual this article is dedicated to people who “live in the internet” mainly for work. These tips will be a boon to better manage our time and have more to spend it with our family.
1) Stop distractions
This is the biggest and most common problem. There has been a lot of talk about the use of Facebook in the offices just because the companies consider it as a great waste of time.
In reality, Facebook is not the cause. How can it be Facebook so it could be Twitter or Skype or any other website.
The problem is checking ourselves to not check every 5 minutes what our friend does or to discover the new tweets or to see if the potential customer has already replied to our email.
I know it can be difficult but if you think about it, stop a job, a task to jump back to Gmail and check the emails is just a way to be unproductive.
The winner must be you. Think about when you cannot read your friends’ updates on Facebook and how happy and relaxed you are when you have the opportunity to read them.
Try to concentrate these moments in one or two “breaks” a day or maybe dedicate some time before and after your working day. You will leap forward in your productivity and you will feel more satisfied.
I myself organized my day this way. In the morning, before starting my work, enter on Facebook to “browse” and caregiver a bit. While I drink the first coffee of the day.
In this way I have dedicated an important part of my life but at the same time I do not let this tool affect my daily productivity in the slightest.
2) Make Cloud your main weapon
Having your information in Cloud, available wherever you connect and whatever device you use, gives you the opportunity to save time in always designing a way to access certain files.
Of course, do not overwhelm the photocopies of your passport but try to always have what is important to avoid problems and waste of time (and they are more than you can imagine).
And besides, if you’re used to having hard drives in your bag, you can not imagine how useful this can be for your back and for the safety of your files.
A hard device can break, it can be stolen much more easily than a password for a Cloud Storage account.
Use tools like DropBox or Google Drive and synchronize your account with your home PC, the office PC and your smartphone.
3) Minimize accounts
Nowadays, it is easier to find a person with 2 email addresses instead of just one …
We have several email addresses, different Facebook accounts, different ways to chat with friends … a mess!
Let’s just have one email: Gmail.
Gmail is the best at the moment and the one that filters us the best SPAM. Even Microsoft (live and hotmail) are great but it is easy to filter more than necessary and even if you say that the email is your boss or your wife, there is nothing to do, MS will report it as a spammer (well, let’s not go into the subject).
With Gmail we could easily divide ALL using filters and labels.
To manage our presence on Social and chat instead, we can use software that contains them in one place, like Sobees or TweetDeck or even Yoono. If instead we are taking care of the online presence of our Brand, Buffer is the solution to automate everything.
4) Organize notifications and updates
Whether they are essential updates via RSS or Facebook comments on your web pages, try to set a certain time to manage these updates.
The notifications on the PC or browser are cool, give us the opportunity to know in real time what happens to our sites or important news to be taken into account.
But what happens when you receive a notification? The truth is that they distract you from the work you are doing at the time, and this is negative.
Having a good organization also means managing the PC’s features and making it a tool that helps our productivity and not a public enemy of work.
We set a time and a certain amount of time to read emails or our feeds or new notifications.
For the best in time management, I would also say to “relax” from the heaviest work and perform certain lighter tasks in dead moments or in the midst of two more demanding tasks so as not to overload the brain and avoid headaches.
5) Canceled from unimportant newsletters
Doing cleaning helps work, always and in any area.
To unsubscribe from newsletters no longer interesting is a job that everyone should do. Even if you do not read an email, when the client marks “27359 unread e-mails” it is not positive for our morale.
Even if no one forbids you from reading a certain newsletter, why occupy useless space and waste time managing our email?
Today e-mails are the most social instrument (yes, you read that right) and more communicative. And it is easy to get distracted by emails, especially if you use it for work. This over time, will greatly help your productivity.
6) Use a Password Manager
Ha ha ha, we live in the era of passwords. Maybe one day we can enter Facebook with the thumbprint but for now it is useful to use a Password Manager.
Today, using the same password for all accounts today is very risky.
If a hacker succeeds in guessing a password or sharing it with a person of little trust or a PC full of malware, unfortunately, your whole online life is at risk.
And by risk I do not just want to lose credit card information. For this there is PayPal.
Using a different password for each account is crucial nowadays and a very light and very useful software called Password Manager is like an American “game changing”.
These software keep all your passwords in one place and allow you to log in to your accounts thanks to extensions in various browsers.
They will also worry about inventing passwords that are nothing short of indecipherable to get high protection from any bot that wants to get into your accounts.
The best Password Managers are LastPass, 1Password and DashLane.
And do not worry about not knowing how to access an account when you’re around … you can synchronize password storage with your smartphone to have all the passwords always with you.
7) Try to have free moments from the Internet
Staying connected to the 24/7 network does not help. You could seriously become a network employee if you’re not already.
Taking days off where you force yourself not to connect to the internet is really healthy.
I myself take a couple of hours a day to play with my daughter and I feel really free.
Organizing free days or a couple of hours a day is not difficult and could seriously help you live better and look at the rest of the world with a different eye.
Conclusions
Living online is not a disease but it can become so if we do not manage and optimize the time we spend on the Internet.