Productive Ways to Spend Time on the Internet

It’s really easy to lose your way on the Internet and spend a lot of time on all sorts of websites. As entertaining as this may be, it’s not exactly a very productive way to spend your time. Here are some productive ways to spend time on the internet.

1. Cut social media sites out of your life

The best way to spend time doing productive things on the internet is to completely cut out all social media networks out of your life. However, if you find that you can’t cut them out completely, at least try to limit the time you spend on these kinds of websites to an hour a day at most. There are some extensions available for Chrome that will help you to achieve this, such as StayFocusd. These sites will ruin your life if you spend too much time on them.

Everyone tries to justify how much time they spend on social media networks by saying things such as “I only use Facebook to stay in touch with all my relatives and friends” or “I use Twitter to stay up to date with events” and many others. However, people don’t actually spend time on those websites doing the things they say they do. Most of the times people just mindlessly scroll through posts, cat videos, funny gifs and many other time wasters you can find on social networks.

2. Make to-do lists

There probably isn’t anything more efficient than a to-do list. Use a lot of details when you write your list and fill it with all the things that you have to do by prioritizing the items on the list according to difficulty. Most importantly, don’t try to be all fancy about it. Do not use a Google Chrome extension, Evernote or some other app. Just use a simple pen and a sheet of paper. The more discrete and smaller the tasks you write on your list are, the easier it will be for you to overcome them.

Plan the way in which you will procrastinate between completing the tasks on your list. Try to do something useful between the tasks like completing a lesson in Duolingo, playing a game of chess and so on. If you are too tired to procrastinate, take a power nap and then return to your tasks.

3. Practice efficient procrastination

If you’re feeling tired after completing a task try to “recharge your batteries” by doing something useful. Like I said before, you can play a game of chess, watch a TED Talks episode. Don’t just watch cat videos on the internet or browse meme websites. You can do whatever you enjoy most, but don’t waste time. Read a book, play a musical instrument… you get the point.

4. Answer the question “who cares?”

If you are about to post something on Facebook or on another social media site ask yourself this simple question: Who cares? If you do something that doesn’t help you grow as a person, don’t waste any time with it. If you find yourself being attracted by an article with a stupid title, don’t read it. There are no good possible things that could come out of reading such an article. Consuming such articles doesn’t bring any benefits to anyone.

5. Spend time on the internet browsing interesting websites

These following websites are very interesting and useful, so give them a try.

How Stuff Works

This website is a subsidiary of Discovery and it’s a great source of unbiased, credible and very easy to understand details of how things in the world work. There are many categories from which you can choose from that will feed your intellect.

Wikipedia

Even though most of us go to Wikipedia only through search, the website’s home page features a great variety of topics you probably don’t know anything about. This is a great way to open your mind to numerous new things.

Lumosity

Our brain constantly needs training just like any other muscle in our body. On this website you will find a series of excellent workouts that will help you keep your brain sharp.

Codeacademy

This is a very addictive site that will help you spend your time in a very useful manner. You will have a lot of fun on this website and will also get to find out how exactly coding works.

Brain Pickings

This is a very useful website filled with things you didn’t know you were interested in until you actually come across them. The website is powered by Maria Popova. The woman reads around 13 books a week and posts all the interesting things you can find on the website.

6. Spend less time on the internet altogether

The best way to stop wasting time on the internet is to spend less time on it altogether, especially if you can’t really control yourself. Try to accomplish all that you can without the use of the internet and only use it when you absolutely have to. If you don’t have a job that demands the use of the internet then you will be able to stop using it so much. After all, people in the past were able to not use the internet, why couldn’t you?

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