12 May 11 What are the Time Wasting Culprits?

Have you ever wondered why you fail to manage time effectively? What are the time wasters in your life, where do you unknowingly devote long hours and end up messing with the whole schedule of yours? Here are the common time killers.

Telephone interruptions

We hardly consider how much time we waste on telephonic conversations each day. Many of us are quite glued to our phones and don’t even realize how we waste a potent portion of the day conversing on phone. While working keep your phone either in silent mode or switch it off. It’s a big interruption while working.

Extended lunch breaks

While working at office, lunch is definitely not just a matter of eating, but also unwinding oneself. At the same time, extended lunch break filled with gossiping can actually prove to be a serious hazard. Keep lunch break relaxing, but not too addictive that you wish to carry it on and on for hours.

Frequent coffee or smoke breaks

At work place people are often seeing taking too frequent tea, coffee and smoke breaks. These are highly addictive and time wasters. You may think it’s a great way of unwinding yourself, but when done too frequently it’s more like a bad habit. You may end up socializing during these breaks and wasting lot of time.

Small naps are never small

People are often seeing taking small naps in-between work. But in reality they are hardly small ones get extended and definitely waste lot of time. They are addictive too, you may soon start regular naps. Rather than taking naps in between work, try to finish work first and then sleep with a relaxed mind.

Socializing on the job

People often socialize too much at work place, indulge into gossiping and waste big amount of time in a day.

Television watching

Television is one addictive medium, which results into severe time wastage. If you wish to watch something particularly on television, make sure you watch it only and don’t keep the television on for extended long hours. It results into huge time killing.

Social networking websites

These days a major chunk of the professionals, students, even home makers devote a large portion of their daily schedule in social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, Hi5, MySpace and the like. They are highly addictive and cause serious damage to work schedule.

Poor planning
Ill planning of daily schedule or inability to set priority of work can land one into grave problem. Start planning your daily work, set a priority ladder of most important work towards least important ones. Work on the same, accordingly.

Multi tasking

Don’t try to juggle between too many works. Work on a specific job at a time. Too many works at a time can distract you from your goal and shared attention results into average quality work.

Tags: Amount Of Time, Bad Habit, Breaks At Work, Common Time, Conversations, Culprits, Interruption, Interruptions, Lunch Breaks, Naps, Office Lunch, People, Silent Mode, Sleep, Tea Coffee, Time Killers, Time Wasters, Wastage, Watching Television, Working At Office

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14 Nov 10 Writing for Web – Things to Keep in Mind

Writing for the Internet is different from writing for any other media, as there are far more distraction here than you can see anywhere else. There are so many things vying for your audience’s limited amount of attention that the attention is too thinly distributed among all the tempting elements.

Your copy or content has to perform in this chaotic world. Wouldn’t it be too much to ask your content to do without providing it the weapon necessary to cut through the clutter? Those weapons are scannability, keywords, and short paragraphs. You need to keep following things in mind when writing for the web:

Keep the paragraph short. You are not creating a literary piece, so there is no need to make the paragraphs long. 3 to 4 sentences long paragraphs are enough.
Divide your articles using headings and subheadings.
Use important items as bullet points.
Use keywords in H1, H2, H3, and other heading tags.
Use primary keyword as early in the title as you can.
Use important keywords in the first 50 words, or at least in first 100 words.
Use headings and subheadings to communicate key ideas.
Use standard font in the blog or article you post on your website, so that most of the people can read the items.
You can also insert images and tables in an article or blog post to make the article scannable.
Keep the sentences shorter.
Do not confuse your readers by addressing too many issues in a small article. Keep it simple.

Your article or blog post should be constructed in such a way that your audience gets the central idea in the first 30 seconds. This is the amount of time one has for any online item. The visitors may stay longer if you succeed in retaining the audiences’ attention within this time limit.

Tags: Amount Of Time, Audience, Audiences, Bullet Points, Central Idea, Chaotic World, Clutter, Distraction, H2 H3, Heading Tags, Headings And Subheadings, Many Things, Paragraph, Sentences, Short Paragraphs, Small Article, Time Limit, Time One, Weapons, Writing For The Web

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24 Mar 10 Freelance Writing and Time Management

Time management is a challenge for most of the people, and time poses even greater challenge for people involved in independent works. Freelancers do not have anyone looking over the shoulder and they do not have even fix timing. Therefore, time management become critical for success in freelance career, and freelance writers is not immune to this as well. In this blog post, I will share some tips that will help freelance writers manage time quite judiciously.

Time management tips for freelance writers

Tip 1: Fix schedule for each client

The very first thing a freelance writer can do to manage time is to set a schedule, client-wise. Let’s say you have three full time clients and one or two one-time clients. Fix one proper time for each permanent client and keep one-time projects floating in between them. For instance, you can work from nine to eleven on Client A and then from one to three on Client B and from four to six on Client C, and keep the other one-time projects floating in between them depending upon when you get time. Do not follow my two-hours to one client timing. You can vary the duration of work according to the amount of work given to you.

Tip 2: Make a weekly list of articles to write

If you have a permanent client who needs so many articles each week then you should take one day out, probably Saturday, to make a list of articles’ titles that you should write in the coming week. This will save you a lot of time cracking an article idea at the time of writing.

Tip 3: Use Word 2007 for blogging

I am writing this post using blog feature of Word 2007. This is very handy. You can use it to write and publish blog posts. All you need to do is add accounts using XMLRPC link to the client’s blog. IF you do not have word 2007 then you can also consider using other offline blog editors. It will save a significant amount of time.

Tip 4: Install Clutter Cloak

On computer, it is quite easy to get distracted, and it is equally easy to save yourself from distraction while writing. You can save a lot of time by installing clutter cloak or any other similar application on your computer.

There are many more things that you can do to save yourself the horror of missed deadlines. Stick to these and see the improved performance.

Tags: Amount Of Time, Article Idea, blogging, Cloak, Clutter, Duration, Editors, Freelance Writer, Freelance Writers, Freelance Writing, Full Time, Independent Works, Management Time, People, Proper Time, Time Clients, Time Management Tips, Time Projects, Time Tip, Writing Tip