Top 5 Ways to Stop Wasting Your Time Online

Whether you are going to school online, running a business, researching a particular topic or using the Internet to communicate while you are online, there are often too many things to do to keep up, than time allows. Fortunately many websites, and functions of the Internet available to help us optimize our most limited resource: time. The following are just some of the ways you can stop wasting time online.

Use RSS Feeds- many people still do not know what these are, however to put it in plain English, it is simply a way to be updated with new information from your favorite websites and blogs. This way you can collect all your favorite feeds in one place, such as the Google Reader. With Google Reader (a free service) you can click on the orange square next to any URL in your browsers search bar and add the feed to your reader. You will be able to separate feeds into different folders, and search feeds as well. You can read back as far on a feed as you like, or just read the new posts, many options, and much easier than going to each specific website to see if there is anything new.

Google Homepage- when you go to Google online to search you can now login to your own google account. Everything that is owned by Google can be used with one account, so if you already have gmail, adsense, adwords, blogger, etc, you can use your login information from them. Once you sign in you will see a link called add stuff. Click on this link and start looking for tools you can use. The Google feed reader widget, lets you select what category of your feeds you want to see and how many show up on the widget, up to 10, and you can scroll through more than that. There is more though, you can check all of your e-mail, your instant message accounts, sports scores, free give aways of the day, sales of the day, horoscopes, and much more. There are hundreds of widgets that can be placed on your Google home page, and each one can help you save a little more time online. You can close, minimize, drag and drop widgets on your page, as well as add more tabs (pages) to your homepage. You can also get games, such as Sudoku, and Who Wants to be a Millionaire. There are far too many options with this homepage to list here, and as it is all free, it is well worth the effort to check it out.

Firefox the Browser- using firefox to speed up your time online is very easy to do. By using extensions and add ons to your browser you can easily go through your bookmarks, have your bookmarks posted on your Google Homepage (for access from any computer), take notes, make to do lists, track your time on the computer with a timer, and even use Internet Explorer in your firefox browser. If you make it a point to check out the new add ons each week you will quickly find ways to save your time online. Another great feature of firefox is the many add ons that work with your Google accounts, such as notebook.

Delete Emails- There is a general rule amongst people who use the Internet for business that you should only "handle" an email once. You decide when you see it if it is worth reading, or if it is trash, if it is trash, delete it, if not read it, and do what you need to afterwards, then delete it. There is no need to get distracted by more and more email, so save any mail you know you will need later, and only check your email once or twice a day. If you are using it for business, you might want to check a business only account once an hour or so, but make sure it is business only (and maybe family emergencies).

Trillian Messenger- If you spend a lot of time online chatting, and it is with people who all have different types of accounts (yahoo, msn, aim, icq) this is the best messenger you can use. You can easily sign on to all of the accounts at once, and you can make some invisible, and some not. Say you are working and you don't want to hear from your friends and family, you can turn that account off or to invisible, or if you are home, you don't want to hear from those still working, so you turn them off. This saves running 3 or more programs on your computer by only using one, therefore your computer and Internet can move a little faster.

Using all of these time savers should give you more time to enjoy yourself while you are surfing the web, and less time staying tied to the computer doing what you need to do, stay tuned for more time saving tips.