How To Effectively Use Your Online Time
Lifestyle

How To Effectively Use Your Online Time

Days, weeks, months, even years of your life can be passed browsing through your social media feeds, absent-mindedly watching YouTube videos, or playing online games. There’s nothing wrong with finding enjoyment online of course, and nothing in this post is intended to shame you for having fun online. Sometimes downtime or time spent enjoying content you like is worthwhile, and it can help you decompress well.

That being said, sometimes it can feel as though our online habits get the best of us. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Tik Tok, Reddit, YouTube, forums you enjoy, and paid services such as Netflix or video game storefronts can keep us glued to the screen for hours, sometimes more productively, sometimes not. It can be worth tracking how we use our online time if we hope to be more productive, and through this process, we can find out the potential we really can enjoy if lucky enough to hold a good internet connection. With this in mind, please consider the following advice:

Internet speed

There’s nothing worse than having a slow internet or connection that keeps dropping out, particularly when you’re working with large files. We are fortunate to have really fast internet in our home but I’ve been there when it’s slower than you would expect making the simplest of tasks feel like they are taking forever. There are many home broadband suppliers who can help you with high speed internet and Frontier internet is one of them, who can help provide home internet and phone services keeping you connected.

Use Article-Saving Services

There’s much in the way of expertly written features and astoundingly well-written content from many publications online, some in a general sense, some focused on your most niche interests and hobbies. It can be worth separating the wheat from the chaff as far as that’s concerned, especially if you hope to learn something and stay involved in a certain practice or hobby. That being said, it can be hard to keep track of everything during a standard browsing session, and it’s not as if sitting down to read thirty articles, one after the other, is a pleasant use of time for most people. This means that using article-saving services such as Pocket, or the web clipper for Evernote can help you save, index and categorize articles you wish to return to later, always curating the best content that helps you remain educated or delving deep into your hobbies.

Learn A New Skill

Learning a new skill online can be fantastic, especially thanks to how much-structured information is out there. For instance, Kahn Academy is known for providing courses from the early childhood level all the way up to pre-college, giving you the chance to brush up on your ancient history, old maths requirements, or subjects you wish you could have taken but haven’t. Additionally, learning a new language can be practiced with others online through apps or services such as DuoLingo, helping you prepare for an upcoming vacation or generally giving you an extra use of your time.

Not to get into a greater philosophical discussion, but it’s quite enlightening to consider just how the internet may be regarded among those in long-gone history. It would resemble a superpower to the normal man, as using a service that collects and smoothly presents the collected knowledge of humanity and offers most of this for free, through astounding sites such as Wikipedia, would be considered one of the most prized resources imaginable. Instead, most of us use it to check our social feeds and share cat memes. There’s nothing wrong with the latter of course, but sometimes recognizing just how much potential there is for the standard web browser can help you assess your viewing habits to no uncertain degree.

Financial Management

Financial management is perhaps one of the most important things to get right in life, because without it you’ll always be playing catch-up. This means that using apps such as You Need A Budget, calculating your tax expenditures or declaring your tax through your self-employed online government forms can be essential.

But this is hardly the only pursuit that could serve as a vital financial skill. For instance, learning matching betting through Beating Betting can help you maximize your side hustle income via betting on two outcomes in order to make the most money from sign-up online matchmaking offers. This can help you earn a little extra pocket cash, and can also help you become introduced into a world of financial potential you may have struggled to find elsewhere.

Contribute & Read Advice Forums

On this last point, it’s also a worthwhile idea to contribute to and read advice forums to help you learn new ways of managing your life and new skills to build. For instance, r/PersonalFinance and r/PersonalFinanceUK both allow users to discuss a range of sensitive financial matters, give advice, or learn from others in a different direction.

The more you can ask questions, provide support, or simply get involved in a community, the more you can engage with a group of your peers the world over. This can be a vital part of connecting with people and can be quite healthy from a social perspective, despite many believing that online use is inherently anti-social. No matter if you wish to discuss a television show and its directorial principles despite it being off the air for 20 years, you will find your people. This can only be a healthy use of your time, especially if hoping to meet new people or supplement your social activity. Of course, this is still the internet, so be sure to take your correspondence with a grain of salt, as it’s hard to verify who someone is, and posting rampant personal information is of course never a good idea.

Providing Help

It can also be worth challenging yourself during your online time, all for the best cause possible. For instance, proving help by installing the Amazon smile extension during your shopping efforts can help you generate cash for your chosen charity. Signing petitions you believe in through change.org or even contributing to political boards you find appealing can all be a great means of getting involved. Whatever you champion, make sure it’s something you believe in.

With this advice, you’ll be sure to effectively use your online time, not only in a manner that helps you stay away from harmful pursuits such as refreshing social media feed over and over. This way, you can use your time more wisely.

Claire x

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