Buying Time for Free: 3 Strategies to Optimize Your Effectiveness

Professional organizers often cite the omnipresent statistic that the "average American" will spend the equivalent of one year of life in search of lost items.

As I write this, I think of a childhood visit to my grandmother, also known as "GB". She greeted us at her door, notably flustered, "I can't find my glasses anywhere." I ended her search as tactfully as I could: "that's because they are on your head!"

My grandmother was full of irreverence; she sent me out to the backyard to play and said, "Now, go find our relatives--the pink bottomed hairy baboons." When I told her I couldn't find them, she told me that perhaps they'd all gone to the zoo--and to say hello the next time I visited.

It was years before I connected the dots at school and realized that she was passing along two life lessons: 1. her belief in evolution, and 2. her enduring philosophy that we all descended from primates and shouldn't think too much of ourselves...


I digress, but my intentions are good: The purpose of this posting is to share three online resources that can increase efficiency and allow you to spend more time enjoying life outside your job search...


1. JibberJobber (http://www.jibberjobber.com/)

A CRM for your job search, this site enables you to store contact information--and positions of interests--and provides you with career management tips and resources to boot. The origins of the site have become Internet legend: it was designed by Jason Alba, an out-of-work software programmer who has since gone on to write bestselling books on using Facebook and LinkedIn.

2. Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/)

A social bookmarking system that allows you to save your bookmarks by "tags" so that you can find them easily, and access them easily on your site. Once you've created account, you can click on the del.icio.us icon on many websites and easily mark new items that you've read.

3. Google News Alerts (http://news.google.com/)

Google News Alerts are one of my favorite tools of all times, you plug in keywords for search terminology, allow Google to do a "news scan" for your keywords on your behalf, and tell Google how frequently to alert you of the findings.

Given that employers, friends and casual acquaintances frequently "Google" each other, I recommend that you monitor your online presence by setting a "Google Alert" on your name. While it may seem a little funny to "stalk yourself," by monitoring your web presence you can help maintain the integrity of your online profile: i.e. the only time I want to be able to find "Chandlee Bryan" and "hairy baboon" on the internet is through this particular post!