Saving Time Online

I love the web. Sometimes though I fall down the rabbit hole and cannot even tell how I have gotten wherever it is I am. This is great when you have a relaxing few hours to burn up (and I hate you is this is you), but in general I need to quickly accomplish my online tasks and move on to the next project. This is where two more principles of waste reduction come in. Standard and work and kaizen are core concepts to eliminating wasted time.

Applied to your internet experience, this means getting what you need as efficiently as possible. Standard work is the current best method of performing the task as quickly as possible with the highest quality. Kaizen is a philosophy of continuous improvement in small steps to achieve long term goals. Below is an example from my daily internet use.

On any given day I have six sites that I MUST check to know what is going on in my version of the world. When I first began surfing, I would type all of these into the browser and load them individually to get my daily fix. This took a lot of time. Another problem was my following all of the story links from the main pages, and getting hopelessly sidetracked trying to find the interesting stuff. (Total estimated time 2 hours)

Next I discovered bookmarks (hey this was a long time ago OK?) I could load the page that I wanted from a bookmark, then click the next one when I had finished. I still had to chase down the individual stories from each of the main pages. (Total Estimated time 1 hour 30 minutes).

Then came Firefox and tabbed browsing. Now I could hold control and click all of the bookmarks that I wished then they would load in the background while I was reading the first page to load. If there was no new content however I still had to load the whole page to find out. (Total estimated time 45 minutes)

My current iteration uses RSS live bookmarks in tool bar. With this feature I can click on the RSS feed, read all of the headlines, hold control and only click on the stories that I am interested in or have yet to read, then let them all load while I read the first page. (Total estimated time 3 minutes)

I was performing the same work in each scenario, but over time I made small improvements by learning new ways to accomplish the task with the least wasted time. Now every morning I open the laptop. Click once above the live bookmarks and find maybe five stories that I would like to read from the fifty that are posted.

Of course kaizen philosophy dictates that I can never rest and never be satisfied with what I have.....I just need a new tougher goal to challenge me.