«Outsource» procrastination!

Have you ever got lost while browsing online? Procrastination usually happens very insidiously and unnoticeable: For example you are browsing for information for your next blogpost on the web and 3 minutes later you land on a page that has nothing to do with the topic you first intended to research.

What happened?

Especially when you browse on portals like digg, Techmeme or similar sites with a wide range of topics it is very easy to get distracted and – click! – you are into something else, that you didn’t intend to do at first place and you begin to waste time.

Filter and outsource procrastination

A simple, but very effective method helped me to get out of this dilemma:
Always when I browse for information on certain topics I have an empty text file open in the background. And whenever I get tempted to check out a website, that has nothing to do with my current goal, I copy the URL or a thought right into this text file and release it out of my mind. And that works because I know that I placed the “interesting” distraction at a secure place and as soon as I reach my goal (the one I set at the beginning) I take the file and go through the list of the “distractions” with a guilt-free feeling.

There is also another method to “outsource” that problem. Read It Later is a service that provides you the ability to store website adresses into a list with just a click in the bookmark bar of your browser. And it is possible to read that list afterwards on your iphone or any other computer – even offline. Check it out too.

How do you avoid distractions on the net?