Get less done! Better! Slower! Less productive!
How is it that one can loose a good hour surfing the web on any given work day (of course I’m speaking hypothetically here I’m a productivity ninja at the day job) but when there’s nothing else to do it seems that all there is to do is sit and refresh your RSS reader in the hopes that SOMEONE has posted SOMETHING in the last 10 minutes.
Sure you can stumble around YouTube in the hopes that you find that one gem but mostly you’re just going to find a bunch of boring crap. And while Digg gets updated quite often over the weekend, for some reason nothing that rises to the top is all that interesting. Well here are a few tips to get your lazy unproductive Sunday afternoon more efficiently unproductive.
My first suggestion is what I’ve come to call Wiki Roulette. It’s really very simple, just head over to Wikipedia, look up some random thing. It’s best to start with something you’ve maybe been interested in finding out a little more about but haven’t really put too much effort into actually tracking down. Next step is, as you read, any link that you find yourself being even remotely intrigued by, click on it but open it in a new tab (you are using FireFox aren’t you??). Hopefully by the time you’ve finished reading the first entry you will have a tab or four open. close your current tab and repeat step one. I’ve found that by the time I hit the fourth or fifth tab I re-discover something that I had forgotten that I had followed and the “learning” kind of takes care of itself. The whole process, and why it’s great, is probably best illustrated by this diagram.
If you’re of a more artly mindset I would suggest heading over to Drawn! It’s whole goal is to simply point out the cornucopia of amazing art portfolios scattered across the web. I check this site every day but never at a time that I can really delve in to the amazing work that is highlighted here. There is some truly beautiful work being done out there and you’re doing yourself a disservice not to check it out.
The last, and maybe the best, thing to do is just rummage back through your bookmark collection. How many times have you saved something thinking “I’ll check back on this later when I’ve got a little more time” and never saw that particular site or story ever again. This is a great way to rediscover some gem of a video or finally get back to that awesome site you found a year ago. Hey at the very least you might be able to delete a few of those dinosaur links that are just adding to the mess that is your bookmark folder.
These are just a few afternoon killing suggestions that work great for me. What’s your favorite weekend webby timesink?
