The Daily Procrastinator

Greetings, procrastinators! Another beautiful Spring week has come and gone. I know you sit at your desk during the work day and wish you could be outside enjoying the season. Unfortuantly, odds are that your boss would frown upon that idea. There’s good news, though! You can access The Daily Procrastinator right there in your workspace! It’s not the same as sitting outside in the Spring weather, but it beats working…

Let’s look back at this week’s posts, one writer at a time, and make sure you didn’t miss a thing.

TallGirl led the team in posts this week. She began the week with a fond farewell to Harry Kalas, longtime voice of the Philadelphia Phillies. She continued by posting a photograph that simultaneously celebrates Easter and borderline insanity. In the following days, TallGirl posted a thought on (supposedly) discounted footwear and a stupefying bit of Octomom news. She wrapped up her week as a Procrastinator with a rumination on the effects the economic downturn is having on long-standing American businesses.

"You're going to procrastinate? In THAT outfit?"

Magnus, the Procrastinator responsible for marketing, techinical expertise, and all things geek-related, is normally pretty quiet, but he spoke up twice this week. First, he announced the iPhone-specific version of The Daily Procrastinator. A few days later, he posted a brief tutorial on the use of Real Simple Syndication (RSS) to make information bring itself to you, instead of spending your valuable time searching for it. I had no idea this service existed. It’s genius!

Finally, BigRedPoet threw his hat into the proverbial ring twice this week. First, he posted a celebration of the arrival of crawfish season and outdoor concerts in the American south. Later, BRP provided a list of five links to help the procrastinators of the world wile away a few valuable hours of work time. Click them. Trust me.

Visit The Daily Procrastinator at any of the links above and sign up to receive daily email updates so you never miss an article!

The Daily Procrastinator: Contributing to the Dramatic Reduction of Your Personal Productivity

Getting information is too much work. There’s no need to browse around to multiple web sites and reload CNN.com every few minutes to get the latest and greatest anymore. Let me show you how to let information come to you, so you can spend more time relaxing, reading and most importantly, procrastinate more.

RSS - (Real Simple Syndication). On most sites these days, you’ll see this image:

RSS Link

This means that you can subscribe to the information the site publishes and pull it into an “RSS Reader”. An RSS reader can be Bloglines.com (my fav), Google Reader or any of hundreds of different software readers out there you can install on your computer or phone. By just using any of the above, you’ve just saved yourself a ton of time by not having to check, or bookmark any of the individual sites that you used to visit. 

Twitter – For real time news, sign up for Twitter. Then follow the people / items you want. Be it Oprah (who for some reason is tweeting to Ashton right now) or CNN. If there’s a topic you’re interested in following in detail, simply go to Twitter Search and search for it and add it to your RSS feed from above. Twitter search also allows you to see in real time what people are talking about on their home page. Besides having Twitter on your phone as an application, you can set Twitter to SMS/Text you Tweets you want in real-time, or you can get yourself a Twitter desktop client.

For Windows users, I recommend Digsby, which also allows you to set up IM accounts for Yahoo, Facebook, MSN, AOL, etc so you don’t have to have multiple IM clients installed.

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That’s all you need. By using these tools available right now, you’ll save time and be more informed when it happens, without having to refresh your browser even once.