Times are busy – Guest Post

A great guest post about how to make the most of your time when you think you really can’t squeeze any more into your day. Aaron Hockley is a photographer, blogger, and the guy behind Social Photo Talk, a site devoted to helping photographers make the most of social media. Follow Aaron on Twitter. Aaron over to you;

With the vast quantities of information that stream through our lives, I’d like to share a tip for a way to keep up with a bit more of what’s going on:

Take advantage of “waiting around time” to catch up on information. As I look at the types of information that flow into my virtual inboxes (and have the potential to be overwhelming), I see things like email messages, tweets, and blog posts and other articles arriving via RSS feeds. What is waiting around time? It’s the time you spend daily waiting around for something else. It’s the time spent on a bus or a train during your commute. It’s the time standing in your kitchen waiting for coffee to brew (or the time spent at the local coffee shop waiting for your order).Waiting around time might be time spent in line at the store, or time during commercials if you’re watching television.

All of this time is potentially non-productive, but there’s a way to change that and maximize your information flow. You’ll need a wireless device with internet access… for most folks this will be a smartphone like an iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android device. The basic premise is that when you have a minute or two of downtime, use that time to consume and prioritize information. The key is to understand which types of information can be consumed in short bursts… you don’t want to get partway through a larger chunk only to have it interrupted.

Here are some things that I’ve found can be easily consumed in 1- to 3-minute bursts:

• Short emails that don’t require reply
• Facebook status updates
• Twitter (sending or reading… either one can be done quickly)
• RSS feeds for items which are full-text (so you don’t have to hassle with clicking through to a website)
• RSS feeds for relatively short articles (see note below)

A note regarding that last item (RSS feeds for relatively short articles): I have a special tag in Google Reader for those blogs and feeds which tend to create longer articles that I’ll want to spend more than a couple minutes reading. When I’m on the go and only have a couple minutes, I won’t bother checking that tag. Read a few email messages while waiting for coffee, catch up on RSS feeds during a TV commercial, and keep up with Twitter while you wait for checkout at the grocery store – you’ll find you’re able to plow through a lot more information in this time which might have otherwise been wasted.

So what does everyone think?

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