Help! I Need More Time!

That’s the battle cry of the overworked, yet still inspired entrepreneur. A glorious 3-day weekend is coming to a sad end… yes, there’s almost an hour of daylight left, but time is marching on. I’m pretty happy in that I got a LOT accomplished: I pimped out my blog with some nifty tools – mostly thanks to Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick’s Become a Blogger Premium Coaching program (although I tried to add 2 plugins on my own. Apparently I skipped a step and it did not work as planned. Luckily Wordpress has another tool for non-techie people like me – you can upload zip files – so I was able to install them after all!) Find Yaro and Gideon at www.becomeablogger.com .

 Anyway, I was able to check several items (albeit not all of them) off my to-do list. I mean, after all, what is a holiday weekend to a moonlighter and multipreneur? It’s more time to get things done. Took a call on another potential business opportunity, updated my social media profiles, did a LOT of studying, downloaded even more material to review later, and almost best of all? I organized my Yahoo! inbox. I didn’t delete as much as I should have, but it’s cleaner now and not quite so overwhelming. The latter was prompted by an online video by Alan Singer, who was actually referring to Gmail, but the concept is the same, and I can use even more of the ideas he mentioned when I log onto my Gmail account. Google really does have a lot of cool tools…it’s just that my brain is close to exploding at this point.

The most fun: updating and improving the look and feel of my blog. A long way to go, but it looks so pretty I can’t wait to get back to it! I have new hope for my social media site (http://pinkpassportsociety.com) although still light years away from perfection. Still their manual was almost decent. (Hey, now there’s a concept – read the manuals and do the tutorials.)

Bonus: I did not leave the house Saturday or Sunday, which means I did not indulge in inappropriate food items! See? New diet plan. Become a hermit hunched over your computer and lose weight. Eventually.

End notes: This is the 3rd Quarter and I feel like I’ve made quite a bit of progress in the last six months. But I don’t want to slow down now. This quarter I’m fine-tuning my efforts and focusing on effective time management – through delegation and closely scrutinizing how I spend my free time, such as it is. I’m also looking at ways to become better organized and to that end I’ve discovered a few useful online tools I’m trying out that promise such benefits as consolidating or summarizing one’s online presence. A couple of nifty tools are:

• Ping.fm – I think most of you are familiar with this one. I’ve been using it for awhile now and I’m quite happy with it. There are a lot of choices – you use it to simultaneously update multiple social media sites – but I’m only using it for my facebook, twitter and LinkedIn accounts. I used to have a wordpress.com blog and Ping will update that blog and others. For some reason it does not work with the .org version of wordpress.
• Favicon - This is cool! Have you ever wondered about the icons showing up in the browser when you’re on different sites? Well, this is how you do it! You can upload your logo or a picture. Fun, quick and easy to use.
• Nutshellmail – summarizes your various social media activity and send the summary to you via email at times and days of your choosing. (The social media portion worked, but I had a bit of trouble signing up and haven’t managed to consolidate my email yet, although nutshellmail is supposed to do that, too.)
• LaterThis is long overdue for me. I’m always in such a hurry – trying to skim through everything. This tool lets you click on and save a website for later viewing. Sounds great – sign up was easy, but I missed the part about how to actually add the sites. Have to go back to the tutorials. Sigh. Very excited about it, though. I notice a lot of great info on the fly and now I have a way to go back and view them when I have – let’s say it all together now – time.
• PageOnce looks good because I have a lot of online subscriptions, and that’s primarily why I signed up. This notification service promises to alert you with due dates and amounts owed and other account activity. I signed up my Verizon wireless account easily. I signed up for my cable and utility bill also, but you need to have an online account set up with them first, and I don’t think I do. So I have some pre-setup work to do first. But I’m very impressed. You can use it for your utility bills, bank accounts, travel accounts and so much more. Supposedly extremely safe as they use military level security features and encrypt all data transfers. More to learn, but worth a look!

So those are a few new things I learned this weekend.  All of them are “.com” except of course ping. I am most assuredly not brilliant – I found most of these in a list of a hundred on the Mashable site. But these are the ones I’ve tried and can vouch for. I’m still looking for a tool that will help organize all the RSS feeds I subscribe to. I’ve seen a few, but they require that you put in the URL. Who pays attention to that?! So, I’ll leave you with a question: do you know of an easy-to-use RSS feed consolidation site?