It is easy to become distracted from a project or task when working online. The Internet is a digital playground for anyone, from children to seniors, with everything you could want right there, a click away.
Checking email, chatting with friends, looking at amusing blogs, playing flash games or MMORPGs – there are endless opportunities to procrastinate. That really takes a chunk out of your productivity.
One of the most crucial elements of time management is staying on track. Every day, we waste time and money playing online when we should be focusing on work. When that work is of a creative nature, you are even more prone to coming across something way too interesting not to lose focus – an impulse that has to be fought and fought hard, especially when a deadline is looming.
But that doesn’t mean there is no hope. You can increase your productivity and work without the distractions (or at least as many), using these three tips and a couple of helpful tools.
1. Use Distraction Management Tools
The Internet has more than just interesting things to make you lose focus. It also has tools to help you potentially combat that and get more from your day. Many of them are even free and so can save you money while you use them.
It would be really great if we were able to use sheer force of will to keep us off of those sites that tempt us. But that just isn’t the way it works, unfortunately. The draw of funny cat pictures and YouTube clips can just be too much for us, and we find ourselves thinking, “Just a few minutes won’t hurt.”
But then an hour passes, and we go into panic mode. It is better to just block those sites that take up the most of our time, and LeechBlock does that. You download it as a Firefox attachment, then put in the blocked domains of your choice and the times that they should be locked out. That includes a time limit to block them out, such as a certain number of minutes per hour.
This extension does essentially the same thing, but for Google Chrome users. It limits the amount of time you spend on time-waster websites that you have listed yourself.
You can configure it more actively by deciding if you want a whole domain blocked or just certain areas, setting time limits for certain activities and more. You just set the amount of time, and once that has been used up you are done – it locks you out for the rest of the day.
Remember the Milk is a simple to-do list program that consists of dozens of options (online to-do list, task management, calendars, etc) and syncs up with your smartphone, PDA, tablet and other software. You set tasks on the program, it syncs with everything you register, and then it reminds you when something has to be done.
As you go through your day you tick things off your list. It even has an RSS feed tracker, a Gmail attachment and more. You will be amazed at how easy keeping a list is holding you accountable for yourself during the day.
Schedule Your Work
Setting a deadline is a great way of getting yourself on the right track and staying there. It sets a time when something needs to be started or done, and so you can just go through the motions. For example, say you have to finish a concept design for a website you have been commissioned for.
You might give yourself until the end of the week at 3 p.m. to have that concept design completed and sent out to the client.
Just make sure that your schedule is a realistic one and that everything in your day fits into it. Too many people keep separate schedules for work and home life, and then it gets thrown off when one thing intersects with the other.
Share Your Progress
Finally, hold yourself accountable by sharing your goals and progress with someone else. This could be another designer, a partner or just your client.
Make sure to show the different steps as you go along, so they can watch you making progress and you have someone to answer to. Another set of eyes can really go a long way toward making you work like you are supposed to. That is an opportunity that isn’t often afforded to freelancers or people who work from home.
Conclusion
Don’t allow distractions to keep you down. But also, don’t allow the project to become the distraction itself. Make deadlines, use tools to keep you on track and share your progress. All of this will allow you to spend the correct amount of time on each project and meet your deadlines as you are supposed to.
Just imagine, never having to ask for another extension!
Jennifer Moline writes about freelancing, small business and design for the PsPrint Blog. PsPrint is an online printing solutions company, which you can follow on Twitter.
Is music an important part of your life? Do you love listening to music while working or discovering new music bands and artists?
YouTube has a huge database of music clips of all imaginable genres and types. It’s a great source of inspiration – we just need more tools to enjoy it.
The following two tools will add a lot of fun to your YouTube music-listening experience: they will let you endlessly listen to your favorite music genres.
Zebralizer
Zebralizer is YouTube-powered online tool that will play your music as long as you want it to. It won’t work on Internet Explorer, nor will it work on FireFox if you are on Mac. Google Chrome has been the best option to use the tool so far.
The site has a fun search option that will suggest to you results while you are typing:
Once the results are loaded, music will start playing immediately.
While listening, you can browse through the search results to add any clip to the play list. There’s also a “radio” button that will instantly create a play list from the similar music clips to the one currently running.
You can even load the lyrics next to the current song and start singing:
The built-in player controls let you play the music louder, jump to the next track, watch the video in the full-screen mode and shuffle your current play list.
Jukesy
Jukesy is a fun, yet not widely-known web-based app that allows you to enjoy an endless sit-back-and-listen YouTube experience.
To select the genre, you can browse through the vast selection of popular tags (anything from “art rock” to “hip hop” can be found there) or use the search option.
Once the genre is chosen, you can enjoy an endless video and music stream: Just keep the tab open and keep working or browsing the web – the music of your preferred genre will play until you stop it.
The built-in player controls let you easily adjust the volume, toggle the full-screen view or repeat your favorite song.
That’s a great music discovery tool: With its vast search capabilities, you are most likely to come across a new song or band that will become your favorite one. Besides, the tool offers plenty of information about genres and bands (powered by Last.fm).
You can continue searching for music, while the current clip keeps playing. You can add a new clip to the play list or queue video clips right from the search results (without interrupting your current music stream).
If you create an account, you can save your play lists as well.
Are there any other tools for the similar lean-back music experience? Please share them in the comments!
Jennifer Moline writes for the PsPrint Blog. PsPrint is an online commercial printing company.
Here at Crenk we have been trying to improve the basics of our site and service, and today while I was browsing the net I came across this great article. The article talks about 13 ways to improve your 404 error page.
404 error pages are to show your readers that certain content has been removed from your site and this also helps search engine optimization of your site.
So what do you do now that you understand 404 pages and you have one in place? Here are our top ways to improve your 404 error pages.
Dont get too technical
The majority of web users understand the term 404, so there is no real reason to use too many other technical terms.
Link to your home page
All good 404 pages should help you users or readers to find other interesting content. Thus, why not add a link to your homepage or even other closely related pages to the content that was previously on the page.
MirrorCreator provides a simple way to upload the same file you would like to share to 30 different hosting sites: RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile, DepositFiles, EasyShare, etc.
If you usually share files in the web, then there’s no way you’ve never used some of the most popular sites: RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile, DepositFiles, EasyShare, etc. But you should know also that sometimes the availability and speed of those hosting sites do not offer any guarantees; so why not upload the file to all hosting sites in one step and receive all the possibilities?
MirrorCreator simplifies the task and provides with one step to upload the file to all the hosting sites you would like. The site also gives us the limit upload on each site, so we can avoid any problem within the process.
After selecting the hosting sites and uploading your file, you’ll receive an e-mail (previously set) with all the proper links.
TinEye represents a very interesting web app which allows us to use reverse image search in the web: Upload the image and TinyEye searches around the web to find the same image source, modified versions or finding higher resolutions.
I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing similar in the web right now, and can help a lot of webmasters and bloggers to find if some images they’ve uploaded are being re-used by other people. Most certainly web and graphic designers can use it to protect their work.
TinEye has indexed almost 2 billion images from which they run the comparison every time we upload an image (this web app also can use the URL of the image as well).
Screenr is a simple web app which allows creating screencasts from your computer and we can share those in a Twitter friendly link for all of our followers.
Screenr does not install any software in your machine, works directly online using Java as the engine to record the video. The quality of the recording is quite good, and includes also HD support. The videos will be also available to run on iPhones and iPads.
Using this web app is also pretty straightforward; we only have to select the area of the screen and click on “REC”.
PhotoRem represents a very interesting alternative for services like Flickr, YouTube or Picassa; providing a central place for us to store photos, videos and documents completely free.
PhotoRem also includes an application to edit your photos directly online, avoiding installing special software locally, editing it and then uploading it again. Other feature included is the possibility to create a slideshow with your images.
The files supported for video are: Flv, Mov and MP4; and the type of documents supported: PDF, DOC and XLS. Also PhotoRem is social network friendly, uploaded files can easily be shared via Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Pagemodo’s Page Builder is a free service to design Facebook pages in a very professional way. The interesting thing about it is that we don’t need any knowledge about programming or design.
Social Media business changed significantly with the growth of Facebook, forcing companies to use this social network to extend their business. And if we want to get Facebook’s users attention we will need something more than just a simple page of our company and/or startup.
Pagemodo provides a simple way to accomplish this by giving us all the necessary tools, with an easy method to embed images and instant publication. The site also includes paid versions (starting from $9 per month) with the possibilities to embed video, live support and with the feature of Google Analytics to be included soon.
MindFlash let us create in the easiest way online training and courses just selecting any existing documents we already have, like Word files, presentations, PDF, or even videos.
In the training we can include also quiz questions for the “students”, and MindFlash will also automate the process of creating the quiz, saving the answers and generating reports about the results. Here’s a short demo about how to use it:
The free version can invite up to 10 users, and for certain there kind of educational tools can simplify a lot of work and still provide some interesting ways to teach and share knowledge.
Phras.in is one effective web app which will help us deciding on which words to use when we are not certain on the right term. Just typing both, will automatically retrieve which of those is the most used.
“Tell me, how many times did you come up with two ways to say the same thing, and couldn’t decide which one was the best fit?” A rare question but for a common scenario in the writers life; finding a right word can be tricky but Phras.in searches around the web and provide us the result for the most usual term.
And includes also the option “Contextualize ’em” for retrieving also the sentences where each of the words are appearing.
