by Irene Lizarraga

Created on: June 18, 2009   Last Updated: May 20, 2010

Internet can be incredibly useful for your work, both as a source of information and as a communication tool to enhance your team work with colleagues and external people. However, it can also be an incredible time sink that will lower your productivity without you even noticing it, a few minutes here and there on Facebook or YouTube, that funny email you received that asks to be forwarded, those pictures in Flikr that catch your eye, and endless more reasons to stop working "just for a bit"...

Most of the time you are not slacking on purpose, and you're surprised at how the day has passed and you haven't managed to cross all those items in your TODO list as you expected to do. The first problem is that, probably, you don't notice how much time you're actually wasting browsing the internet (or answering and reading emails for that matter). There's tools that will allow you to check the time you spend on websites, you can try running one of them for a few days and seeing how the minutes add up to hours. Rescue Time Solo is a good one to start with, for example.

Once you have figured out how much time you spend on non work related Internet activity, you may want to start managing your time in a different way. For example, you can reserve a few minutes every hour or two to check your personal emails, or just do it once you have accomplished a set of work objectives. A bit of fun and games can help you be more productive, but you must make sure it's not interfering with your work schedule.

Another frequent source of distraction is when investigation goes too far, and what started as a quest for information to do your job ends up in a chain of progressively unrelated blog posts that aren't giving you anything useful. The best solution I've found for this is making sure you schedule time limits for all the investigation tasks, and keep frequent checkpoints on how are you advancing. If you notice that you're veering offtrack you can correct it (and remember bookmark those other interesting articles for the relax time!)

What about emails? They keep coming into your inbox, distracting you from whatever you were doing, even if it's just to check the subject, and resisting the temptation to answer immediately can be difficult. Unless it's part of your job to actually answer emails on real time, you must remember that, in most cases, if the sender wanted an immediate answer, he would have used the phone. Good practices in time management suggest that you schedule a time to check your emails (depending on the volume of emails received it can range from once a day to every two hours) and answer them. If you are expecting an email make a filter for it to be sent to a different folder and for your mail client to signal it to you with a sound, but try to avoid checking compulsively every mail that enters your inbox or you'll be unable to focus on your tasks fully and they will take more time. Try this for a week, then adapt it to your particular circumstances (for example, you might want to schedule a longer time to answer emails to be able to investigate the queries you receive, or maybe you want to group similar emails on the same time slot so you can work on the information required for all of them at the same time).

Nobody can be at full speed for 8 hours in a row or more, and the Internet is great for those periods where you just need to chill out a bit, but don't let it creep into your working efficiency, and instead take control and decide for yourself when breaks are going to be best for you.

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