You open up your browser window to check your mails and four hours later you find yourself watching cat videos on YouTube with no single task accomplished. Going to the internet has often been castigated as a time waster. That the time we spend online lowers our productivity especially logging into social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Since you can’t completely cut yourself off the internet, you must find ways to minimize the activities that don’t add any value to your life like endlessly scrolling through your newsfeed. If need be, block social media sites that waste your time and limit the time they are accessible each day.
Here are ways to productively spend your time online.
Learn a new skill
The internet is rich with resources that can help you grow yourself and build your career. These can be the DIY YouTube tutorials to equip you with hands-on skills to do your own crafts and repairs or platforms like Udacity, Udemy and Coursera where you can learn pretty much every skill you wish for.
You can sharpen your skills on programming, database design, web development, and even artificial intelligence on such sites, or look to improve more fundamental skills like writing with the help of software like scrivener 3, which can be tailored to your writing style, instead of using online tutorials that are more generic.
You can sharpen your skills on programming, database design, web development, and even artificial intelligence on such sites.
Learn a new language
With the globalization of the world, being multilingual comes with a lot of benefits like access to more opportunities across the world and being able to communicate effectively with diverse groups of people.
Instead of wasting your time in unproductive online ventures, you can download apps like Duolingo and with a minimum of 15 minutes daily you can master whichever language you would want including French, Spanish, and Italian. In some areas of the world, access to the media that is used for such needs as this is not available for download in their country, this is where a Pirate Bay proxy can come in useful, as users can download different types of media from various locations and are able to start learning when they want.
Grow your hobbies
Chances are you have other hobbies besides your day job that you would want to pursue. This can be passion projects like gardening, sewing and making handmade crafts. There are a lot of online resources you can use to build on these like journals, books, blogs, podcasts and video tutorials.
If gaming is your passion, you can learn how to play Bakery Story 2 without much hassle as long as you have an internet connection. Using the internet productively, you can develop and grow any hobby you want including writing, photography and much more.
Advance your education
The internet has revolutionized the education sector such that you no longer need to attend the traditional classes, become a full-time student and pay heft tuition fees to access education. Through online classes, you can still study but at your own convenience and time, even from the comfort of your home, and at the end of it all graduate with a credible degree as any other.
Network
Social media is not an evil thing if you know how to harness its good parts to your advantage. Unlike decades ago when you had to find ways to get invited to networking events in the hope to meet the people you want, these days your mentor is just a friend request or email away.
These could be contacts you need to grow your career and take it to the next level.
Hey, I’m Rory and I am the ultimate accidental geek.
Born in London I was never interested in technologies until I started a part-time job at Apple and now I can’t get enough. Join me as a help you navigate the world of tech with some of my fellow geeks.