Pitfalls to avoid as a Newbie - Managing Yourself: Grouping

Previously I have written on budget (time and money) and also on organising your email routine. I touched on basic tools needed and would like to share a little on browsing. I see you sit up and take notice - this is not on how to surf the net....;-) but rather how to organize your various programs and activities into one ‘dashboard' for lack of a better descriptor.

I found it incredibly difficult to remember which programs and activities ‘go together' - especially if I have not been working with them for a week or so. It would take me a half hour or so to fiddle around and eventually identify all of the bits and pieces that I need to have open to do the job for that day. Once again - time wasted and frustration levels raised.

I have found it very effective to use tabbed browsers. What's this? A tabbed browser allows you to have multiple sessions open simultaneously and keeps them all in one place. In the first instance, this makes my desktop a lot tidier as I do not have a whole ream of Explorer icons filling up my power bar at the bottom of the screen.

Another real benefit of tabbed browsers (the main one in my opinion) is the ability they give you to save your Internet sessions in groups. This is really cool, because the next time you want to do something, you now only need to start the browser, select the Group or Bookmark you created and voila - all of your related sessions in one place. My two favourite tabbed browsers are CrazyBrowser and Mozilla/FireFox.

I use them for grouping my Affiliate programs logically, so I have set my browser groups by type of program - cool when I need to check status etc. I also use the tabbed browser - CrazyBrowser - to group the various traffic exchanges I surf in logical bunches - for instance Group 1 I know is Monday, Group 2 Tuesday etc. One click and ten traffic exchanges open and I can go ahead and surf for credits.... Smart!

I also use tabbed browsers when testing new web pages - open up the sites I need and then it is easy to hop from site to site as I make changes and need to verify them.

A tool that is a MUST to have when you use the tabbed browsers (in fact for any work that you do online) is RoboForm. This is a password and location repository that will recognize a URL and then offer you a selection of previously saved passwords to choose from. This is a definite win, especially when you have to recall 40 or 50 different web addresses and related passwords.

One of the features is that if you do not recall the address of the site, but have the password saved under a name you have given, all you do is click on the name and RoboForm will take you to the site and log you on.

If I can leave you with one thought for today: Rather than waste time scrabbling around to recall site addresses or passwords, organize these into a neat compartment that allows you to manage your time and routine tasks more easily.