People often spend too much time on Facebook. The site is not intrinsically a bad one, it’s just that people are pummeled with far too much information, given human nature. For many millennia, humans lived in communities where the good or bad news they heard about was from within, perhaps, one hundred miles at the outside. With the introduction of mass media in the last two hundred or so years — I refer to the increasingly wide availability of it and not its mere arrival — we are getting far too much bad news, useless news, and random facts about other peoples lives that tend to pull us away from the things we should be doing: working on things to improve our own lives. We need to develop skills in Time Management.

Working is important. But working is not all just ‘work’, so to speak. Improving yourself by exercising, reading, creating or building something, helping others, etc., are examples of things that would fall under the rubric (heading) of what I have indicated above as “working on.” There are so many things we could be working on, right? Well, it may be an idea, then, to choose one and begin it so that we can accomplish something besides time on the internet. Sometimes, there are so many things to do we feel overwhelmed, and do not do anything instead. But, if we take the most important few things, and do those in manageable stages, we will have accomplished things that needed to get done, and however overly simplistic this formula seems to appear, it works. This blog is about writing, and writing things down can be a useful way to help you with your time management and make sure you get things done.

It was once said that “what gets written down, gets done.” I make use of the wisdom of this proverb on a regular basis, and it helps. I just make a list of the things I need to do, the familiar “to do list”, and I try to accomplish as many as I can. I do not put too many things on the list, because my lists are usually for one day only, and it is better to focus on a few things that need to get done and get them done, rather than expecting yourself to do more than you are able to do in a given day. And besides, if it needs to get done, then you want to give that task lots of wiggle room and not crowd it with too much other, less important, work.

Completing the important things we need to do can be negatively impacted by the time we spend each day on the internet, doing whatever it is we do there. Mostly, we are filling our minds looking at other people’s lives, opinions, and latest news, but the important thing is we are spending time reading about other people’s lives. But for each hour we do, we are not spending that hour on our own life. Remember, as you spend time and energy on the bustling world of internet updates, in some sense you are taking it away from what should go towards your own daily “updates”, your life.  Consider this quote from Horace Mann:

Horace Mann 1796-1859