My partner surfs the net to get news on a topic

by Jackie
(Iowa)

Dear Sir/Madam
I have an issue with my partner who continually surfs the Internet looking for news on a particular topic related to his work.


I am sure that there is a more efficient way to search for the news, but I don't know it. Also, when he surfs the internet, he ends up spending a lot of time being distracted by other topics which are of little relevance to what he works on.

Any ideas on what I can do - he needs to do the work.
Jackie

Kell's answer

Hi Jackie,
Since the advent of computers and the digital age, one of the problems is that we are going through an information explosion.

Just to give you an idea, a recent report published 3 weeks ago shows that people spend more than 2 hours a day reading and responding to emails.

One way of controlling the information explosion is to use the technology to more properly gather the information for you.

Now your partner uses the Internet to gather information on a particular news topic.

One way to make this gathering of information more efficient is to use Google News Alerts.

At Google News Alerts you can specify the search criteria, and each day/week/or as it happens, Google will send the news to your partner's Inbox.

For example, I am in the game of Time Management. So I could quite easily type "Time Management" into the Google News Alerts and I will get every article published across 4500 newspapers on this topic.

This should also help to minimize the time that your partner procrastinates or surfs on off subject topics.

If you find that procrastination is an issue on the computer you could start to gather information on this procrastination.

Do this by download time keeping software which runs in the background and jots down the activities and time spent on those activities.

At the end of the week you could, with the click of a mouse, have a clear set of data on how much time you spend on activities.

This information gathering forms the first step in overcoming procrastination.

I hope that this is beneficial for you Jackie.

All the best
Kell