Save Time, Improve Efficiency With Surfing Plan

If you work at home, or are planning to, chances are good that you'll be spending some time online surfing the World Wide Web as part of your business.

Whether you're looking for suppliers, communicating with customers or simply conducting business-related research, the Internet can be an invaluable resource ... or it can distract you and waste your time worse than any episode of the "Jerry Springer" show.

We've all done it: logged on with the intent of finding just one or two bits of information, visiting just one or two key sites ... and found ourselves logging off three-and-a-half hours later after having learned a whole lot of nothing about Spanish cooking, snorkeling in Hawaii, newsletters in Esperanto, Russian mail-order brides and the latest trend in multi-level marketing. And we still haven't answered the questions we had when we started out.

As a self-employed person, it's vitally important to learn how to avoid this potentially monstrous waste of time ... while taking advantage of the tremendous benefits. How do you do this? There are several keys to remember:

1) Dedicate a spiral notebook to your Web activities. By keeping a daily log of your surfing action, you'll be able to tell at a glance which sites have been most helpful to you, what information you need to find every day and when you last updated your Web pages and search engine entries. This is also a good way to keep track of site identifications and passwords, which are otherwise all too easy to lose.

2) Plan your surfing in advance. If you're a Web regular and you're using your notebook, you should have a good idea of which sites you need to visit every day before you actually go online. So jot them down in your notebook and check them off one by one as you visit each site. This will help keep you on track and away from all those tangential, little side routes that are so easy to go off on while online.

3) Focus. While you're writing down planned site visits for your next online session, make a point of zeroing on one particular topic or type of resource. Your research will be more effective and meaningful if you dig deep instead of wide. For example, limit your browsing to just "business communication workshops" instead of casting a wide net for "business communication workshops," "time management newsletters," "human resource consultants" and "office design guides."

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