For Entrepreneurs: How To Better Streamline Your Daily Activities With New Media Tools

I came across a very good video today. It’s Randy Pausch’s lecture on time management. I thought it might be a good idea to relate this to what I’ve been doing recently with social media to improve efficiency.  As we all know that we can use Web 2.0 tools to drastically boost our daily productivity, it’s also a well known fact that overdoing it can be a huge time waster.  For instance, numerous studies and researches have been done to find out how many hours a typical person spends on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.  It’s not uncommon that it takes you an entire weekend just to catch up with your friends on Facebook, check LinkedIn messages, or upload and tag photos on Flickr.  So what can we do to streamline our daily activities without unnecessarily investing a big chunk of our time on social media sites?  Here are the solutions: my 5 simple tips to streamline your daily activities with new media tools.

1. Turn off your email notifier.  Right now, I only check my emails once every 3 hours.  For example, if I check my first email at 6 am in the morning, then it goes like this: 9 am (2nd time), 12 pm (3rd time), so on and so forth.

2. Content needs to be distributed.  Instead of going to different websites/blogs myself to find new articles or posts, I now only follow those authors and bloggers on Twitter, and check their Twitter updates every hour or so. This turns out to be much more productive for me!

3. Since I am present on multiple social networks, I currently use sites like Ping.fm to post messages on different sites simultaneously, although Posterous would also do the trick.

4. I used to be obsessed with checking my site traffic and Google analytics.  This behavior ended up getting me distracted from the core daily tasks I set up for myself.  Even worse, it kills efficiency. Right now, I only do it once at the end of each day. This allows me to thoroughly compare my current traffic graph to the previous ones. Also it gives me time to think more about how to adjust my strategies to get more traffic in the future.

5. I started to use Google Voice at the beginning of the year. As a result, I filtered out a lot of unwanted calls. Sometimes, when there are pressing tasks, I just simply turn off my cell phone and check my email inbox for missed calls.  This is an effective way to improve my efficiency.

It’s not my intention to overburden our readers with numbers.  That’s why I only listed 5 simple pointers here.  Essentially, we all need to have great self-disciplines in order to succeed at each of these.  If we don’t have a daily goal or we lack time management skills, it’s going to be tough to implement these techniques.  But you can start this process by watching Randy Pausch’s lecture on time management.  I promise, it’ll help!

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