Cybercrastination

Have you ever found yourself "quickly" checking Facebook, MySpace, Beebo or any of the other social networking sites, maybe "briefly" updating Twitter or messaging with a friend for "a bit" or checking one or two blogs and suddenly it's over two hours later? What just happened? Did you get sucked into a time vortex? No, not really, although that would make a great excuse. No, you simply found yourself cybercrastinating - procrastinating the modern way. Putting things off that should really be done, by doing something else, something a lot more enjoyable. And you have also done something for your social life, kept in touch with friends, maybe played a little game, all lovely stuff. Except that it kept you from doing what was on your agenda, on your To Do List or something that simply needed doing.

I really don't know what it is about the social networking sites, they have something addictive about them. I can't say that I am immune to them at all. I frequently visit one of them but I am aware what it can do to my schedule. It completely messes it up if I'm not careful.

What can you do about it? You want to stay in touch with friends via this excellent medium and that's fair enough. Here are a couple of tips what you can do:

• Decide beforehand how long you want to spend on the computer for that reason, but be realistic.
• Set a timer - this could be a kitchen timer or use a useful online tool at www.online-stopwatch.com by opening another tab in your browser or another browser window. Make sure you use the Count Down option, otherwise you simply measure how long you are surfing. Also have your speakers on, otherwise you miss the alarm bell when it goes off.
• Another option could be that you give yourself a treat for things accomplished. Allow yourself a longer session after "being good" with your To Do List for instance.
• If you are working at the computer, make sure you log out of your messenger programme so that that you are not constantly reminded who logs on or off. One distraction less.
• Again, if you do lots of your work at the computer, maybe in your home office, create yourself a "work" user account. Take out all the programmes such as web browsers, instant messengers or chat programmes and other culprits. You are less likely to constantly log off and on as different user just to hop online.
• Set up an aggregate reader programme for blogs such as Google Reader, so that all updates to blogs you like to follow are in one place. You can then decide when you want to look through those updates without wasting time trawling through all the blogs separately.

As you can see you can use technology quite well for this purpose. And why not. Let's fight the procrastination super highway by making use of it.