One of the best time management tips I know of is this: When you can't make progress in one thing, do something else. As happens to all of us from time to time, we get temporarily stymied in our attempts to make progress on a particular project. Maybe we have to wait on someone to complete a step before we can move on. The details don't really matter. What matters is that we don't use that as an excuse to sit around wasting time. (OK, if the wait is only a matter of 5 minutes, it might be a good time to take a break.) For those of us who need the internet to do a lot of our work, a loss of connection can be a real blow to the solar plexus, or even lower. What can we do to make good use of that potentally lost time?
Speaking Freely has some great suggestions.
1. Clean out and categorize your bookmarks. I don’t know about you, but I tend to just click ‘bookmark this page’ and call it good. Yesterday, when I hit the little ‘down arrow’ on Firefox to let the bookmark list scroll down I counted. Not sites, but seconds. 11 seconds worth of scrolling bookmarks is way too many. If you haven’t visited a site in a month it’s not important.
Create categories and organize the list of bookmarks after you’ve eliminated all those links you don’t need. Do not create a miscellaneous category. Catch-all categories do exactly that and soon become difficult to use.
2. Delete programs you don’t use. Why delete them when you have plenty of space on the drive? Because it makes things like Scandisk and Defrag run faster. It might not make your PC run any smoother, but you’ll feel good knowing you aren’t wasting space.
3. Unplug your PC, take the cover off and clean out the dust. Invest in some canned air. Heat is a PC’s enemy and even in a clean environment, cooling fans suck dust through every opening and it builds up fast. If you have pets, do it once a month. I cleaned out enough dust to build a rabbit hutch to keep all the dust bunnies in.
4. Write your next blog post. If you use a blog client like BlogDesk just write and save. If not, write to a text file and format it after your connection is live. Not being connected may force you to write about something different, like say, five things to do when you have no Internet connection.
5. Run any maintenance programs you don’t have auto-scheduled. Reclaim your drive space and allow your PC to run smoother.
And now for number six, the bonus item. This is something I put off for a long time because it’s time consuming and no one really likes to think about what happens to the ones we love should something happen to us. You may need connectivity to accomplish this one, which is why the title isn’t six things to do with a PC when you have no Internet connection, but this one is important.
6. Write down your logins and passwords for all your sites, blogs, email accounts, Adsense, affiliate programs, where you purchased your domain names, etc. All that information is the key to your business. If something should happen to you your spouse or significant other will need that information.
When you’re done, put the information in a safety deposit box or keep it in a fire resistant safe at the house and let the people that may need that information know where it is kept.
