» IM - Simon Lau

12 Powerful Ways to Keep Your Online Life Simple and Peaceful

Leo has put together another great article on simplifying life. It inspired me to take what he wrote and while keeping the main list intact I put my own thoughts and reasoning behind them.

Focus on the essential. Find out what’s essential to your online life. What do you need? What gives you the most benefit for your time? What takes up most of your time? Is it essential? If not, cant you eliminate it? It’s best to focus exclusively on the essentials and deal with the not-so-essential at a later time when you’re not caught up with work.

Do one thing at a time. This is super hard when it comes to tech. Firefox let’s you open up a dozen tabs. Quad core processors let you run a million applications at once without lagging the machine. We live in a multitasking world. But it doesn’t have to be this way. While there’s nothing wrong with having multiple tabs open, it can be very helpful to focus on one task at a time. Have 10 tabs open, but do one tab until you’re done, then close it and move on to the next, and so on. If you’re going to do IM, just do IM. If you’re going to do email, just do email. Sure, you can do more than that at once, but it adds to the stress of your day and decreases your effectiveness because of all the switching. Practice doing one thing at a time and you’ll find your work to be much more peaceful.
Have periods of disconnectedness. This is really hard for me simply because it is so easy to get online when I’m at my computer. From home to school wireless is everywhere. However, if you unplug yourself from the web you immediately prevent yourself from being able to browse random sites.

Don’t live in your inbox. Stick to checking your emails are pre-appointed times and get rid of the email notifications saying you’ve got a new message. If you work from your inbox, you are constantly being interrupted by new messages.

Schedule your IM time. Same thing applies to IM. In reality, IM encourages people to interrupt you whenever they want because you’re easily accessible to them. I frequently use IM to keep in touch with people but when it’s time to bunker down and work, but yourself on BUSY or AWAY so others know. Alternatively, you can hide in invisible mode during peak work hours. If you need to flip someone a message, you can then open up a chat session without having others message you.

Turn off notifications. Again, email and IM and other notifications encourage interruptions and multitasking. Instead, turn everything off so that you check your email when you choose, not when others decide to send you something.

Set limits on what you do. For example, check email just twice a day. Write emails of only 5 sentences or less. Limits force you to choose the essential, instead of trying to do everything.

Create a morning routine. Routines are good because they are systematic and let you get things done quickly and efficiently. The Morning Coffee extension for Firefox is a great way to set up your routine with a single click. It opens all your essential sites in tabs, so that you can work through this routine one thing at a time and be sure that everything is finished.
Create a weekly routine. With Morning Coffee, you can also set up routines for different days of the week. This allows you to check a certain site or inbox once a week, for example, instead of every single day.
Clear out your inbox. I do this all the time at Overclockers Online. Every few days I clear the entire inbox of messages by moving them into an archive folder. I’ll just search for what I need instead of keeping a thousand messages in my inbox making it look incredibly cluttered.

Pare down your feeds. RSS feeds have made it incredibly easy to stay up to date on the latest happenings of the world. However, it takes a lot of time to go through all your RSS feeds. Keep it simple and cut down on which ones you really want. Start by eliminating 10 at a time then 5 until you’re down to just the essence of what you like.

Simplified filing. Instead of archiving your emails by thread, just dump it all into a folder and let the search button take care of any finding you need! Quick, simple and it’ll save you a ton of time instead of meticulously organizing everything. The same can be said about the files on your hard drive, but that I like to keep a little organized.

Tags: Email, IM, Routine, RSS, schedule, Simplify, simplify life, zenhabits