“Hi, my name is Jane, and I’m an internet addict…” Who amongst us hasn’t felt at one time or another as if we needed a twelve-step group to conquer our internet addiction? It’s a worldwide phenomenon that has revolutionised our lives, and sometimes it’s hard to remember just what life was like without it. On the other hand, sometimes it’s hard to imagine how we can possibly get anything done with it. It’s a relentless, seductive time-sink, with the lure of email, a million different sites and dozens of ways to pass an idle, unproductive ten minutes, hour, or lifetime.

So how do you resist the siren song of the internet, when you really need to get a project finished, clean the house, finish your regular work-related duties, or just, you know, get stuff done?

Fear not – just read my five tips for stopping the internet from sucking up all your time, and learn to relegate it to its proper place in your life, as a good servant rather than a bad master.

1 Set up two operating systems to dual boot on your computer

Or you could get someone else to do it, if you’re not a technologically minded type. What does this do for you? Well, say you have both Windows XP and Red Hat Linux set up to boot from your hard drive, according to which you select when the boot menu is displayed at start-up. You may have Internet Explorer or Firefox or Google Chrome set up on both of them, but your email client on one only.

This means that, for example, at the beginning of the day you boot up Windows to check your email. Then you re-boot your computer, boot up Red Hat, and thereby remove the temptation to check your email again until you decide you really need to.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop you – technically – from re-booting your computer every ten minutes, and checking your email just as frequently as before. But really, are you going to actually do that? The point of this exercise is that it raises the bar of difficulty and makes checking your email just enough of a pain in the butt to be an effective deterrent against doing so. Ask yourself – do you really need to know if you’ve received any hair loss, weight loss or Viagra spam in the last ten minutes? » Read more: How to Stop the Internet From Sucking Up All Your Time

In a recent article, I focused on the issue that the operation of any organization has plenty to offer in terms of letting management know what is working and what needs to be addressed. Once there is agreement on this, the next questions usually relate to what to do and how to do it. The key to success here is to get executive visibility into the operation so that focus can be put on issues that 1) matter and 2) can be controlled and affected. Monitoring current and future performance factors will be much more effective than monitoring performance for decisions made in the past. For instance, controlling the purchasing process to buy only what is needed when it is needed will affect the bottom line much more that paying attention to the utilization rate of a fixed asset which was bought and paid for some time ago. Three steps can be utilized to facilitate this process of monitoring key issues for performance improvement:

- Measure Critical Few Performance Criteria
- Analyze Results and Recommend Actions
- Implement Focused Improvement Activities

Measurement activities need to target the life line issues that must be satisfied in order for the organization to survive. They also need to be factual, without emotional influence, so that owners of the process can objectively evaluate their performance and identify issues. Selecting a few key measures that tie directly to success will focus attention on the factors that affect success and will allow people to get a quick, substantive picture of current performance. Using drill down type metrics to provide more detailed information regarding the specific performance is fine, but it is most important that the appropriate message is received by the appropriate people via the top level measure. Areas to focus on include:

Customer Value: This is the most important area for any organization. What the customer considers as value is the only thing that is of importance to the organization. Having everyone understand how their actions relate to what the customer wants will allow them to re-evaluate what they do so that they can focus on eliminating wasteful non-value added activities. One way to think of value added activities is to consider if an item could be listed on the invoice for the activity in question. If not, then its value should be questioned. Suggestions for measures here include on-time delivery, total order lead time, quality per complaints/returns, and repeat business or lost customers. These metrics need to be at the customer level and not departmental level since the customer sees one organization, not a group of departments, some that perform well and some that don’t. » Read more: Monitoring Business Performance Leads to Improved Business Performance