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Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. These are the cherished words that were once spoken by Ferris Bueller during his bombastic day off. Except in the modern, digital age, these words have taken on a double meaning. Of course, we need to stay informed and aware of the world around us. But in order to do that, we might fight past endless hordes of information and irrelevant postings to help us get to the good stuff.

This matters in business. Not only is your business influence by the laws of your industry, but also the culture that surrounds this, culture at large, and constantly developing technological revolutions. We might decide to retrofit Ferris Bueller’s words to something more like ‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and update the timelines of your life accordingly, you might miss notable information.’ This is perhaps ten times less smooth, engaging and easy to remember, and yet it speaks to how our standard day is much different than it might have been in 1986.

Let us consider what a ‘life timeline is’ in the first place, and how you it might help you when running your firm or heading to your place of employment.

What Is A ‘Life Timeline’?

A ‘life timeline,’ perhaps even ‘lifeline’ for short, is a term recently crafted (in this post at least) to refer to something representing how you view your social media pages. In other words, a life timeline, when working effectively, should give you the latest news, trend information, insight on matters relevant to your daily life. It should also be delivered to you in a manner that you needn’t go out and seek it, or at least spend very little effort in doing so.

This way, you continually feel in-the-loop, as if someone knowledgeable is whispering important wisdom in your ear throughout the day. This is essential to set up, because let’s face it, in this digital age, ignorance is becoming less and less excusable when a simple search or subscription could do the job for you.

If time was money when the industrial revolution started, you can be sure it’s that by a tenfold factor in the present day. But if sitting down at your laptop and trying to collate information on your lonesome was a serious matter you had to deal with each and every day, you’d likely end up wasting hours trying to get to grips with common knowledge. On top of this, for any worthwhile person, common knowledge isn’t fully good enough. This also goes double for those trying to run an enterprise, especially one drawing most of its business from the online sphere.

It’s important to consider what that might look like, and how it might save you time. Let us explore that:

What Do ‘Life Timelines’ Look Like?

Ideally, they should save you time. They should also deliver information that remains easy to absorb and understand as you deal with your daily duties. Most of all, they should help save you time. This can mean that your workday can begin much earlier than you might have intended it, but because this information delivery doesn’t feel like work, it can be quite worthwhile. If you could optimize your workday without having to expend energy or time, you’d likely go for it, right?

So let us consider the moment that you wake up and are considering your daily duties around the house. Of course, giving yourself some time to become lucid is appropriate. But then, when asking for your flash briefing through home assistant’s such as Alexa, you might be able to fit in something relevant to your business interests or employment. For example the skill SEO Agency collates news and trends into a report to help you stay up to speed with everything going on in this space.

SEO is a notoriously fast-moving and oft-changing field of value, especially when Google or other search engines mess with the algorithms or provide somewhat immediate updates and bug fixes. Trends often directly influence the flow of what people search, also. This means that you could spend a good amount of time each morning simply catching up with the news. But with this fed directly to you as part of your morning, already you have an advantage over others in your industry.

But this needn’t be the end of the matter. Tailoring your life timelines has an almost endless degree of possibility, meaning that getting the most from things is important. Subscribing to a podcast on Spotify about leadership and business foresight could provide ample listening in the car during your commute, and can help you arrive at the office with your chin high and your mindset focused. An episodic format and morning crunch can often be an incredibly worthwhile means of gaining the most important information to light your fire for the day.

A morning aphorism or puzzle, such as a riddle, can often help your mind start working and the gears start turning. This can sometimes even help you out of the need for a strong cup of coffee, although we’re not going to go that far for your own sake.

But ‘life timelines’ needn’t only serve to give you the information necessary to your betterment professionally. Simply working at a task is of course never the end of your career development. This means that staying ahead of the curve requires other means, and we would suggest they are:

Social

If you have managed to avoid opening social media accounts thus far, good for you. However, for professional purposes, it’s best to do so. There’s an intense and constant dialogue flourishing in the digital space, and that means career insights and social markers you might want to follow could be taking place there. It’s important to consider what this might mean for your life timeline.

For that, let us use an example. Consider one person who does not use social media for professional development. They head to work, come back, and everything goes as predicted. But they’re missing tapping into a communication lifeline.

Now consider the person who opens a Twitter account, but doesn’t browse it to waste time. They might have pinned certain people, such as their manager, the firm they work at, and a couple of relevant news websites to ping their mobile should a tweet be considered. Perhaps their boss tweets about being proud of their department. Perhaps there’s something more appropriate to your role at the firm and how you might impress them. A life timeline should be convenient, and so only allowing these pings, or adding certain people to your ‘close friends’ on other platforms can help you get a social aggregate of staying in the loop, and understanding the social context behind your daily life.

You’d likely be surprised as to just how effective this can be for people. To that end, we would recommend you do it.

Synchronized Notes

It’s essential for us to note down things on a daily basis, just to keep ourselves directed and to never forget the smaller duties we have promised to take care of. Using a program such as Evernote or Google Keep, especially if a premium service is offered, can allow you to format and craft important notes that should keep you in the loop time and time again. Before long, you will likely find that these synchronized notes, organized effectively, can help you prioritize your time. In some cases, you may even speak to your phone and have the note created. Setting alarms and timers to view the note, and using those notes as indexes to other notes can allow you to remain continually in the loop, keeping track of the most important matters of your day and week.

After all, in busy fields, you simply cannot expect to remember everything you have to do. Forcing yourself to do that will only cause you stress and lead to issues not being attended to as you might have envisioned. After all, we only have so much ‘working RAM’ a day we can personally use, at least if you’re fond of computer metaphors.

Know When It’s Too Much

This continual data drip-feed can sometimes be too much for even the most patient person. After all, you can only keep in mind so many things during the day, and there comes a point of diminishing returns, where you might be listening to real value but have trouble taking it in.

This means that knowing when it’s too much is one of the first steps to helping your morning routine, as evidenced in our advice, actually digest in your understanding. In order to make the most of this, ensuring you have ‘social media blackouts,’ self-inflicted, is important. It might be for an hour or two an evening, or for a whole day at the weekend. The beauty is that with the aggregators we’ve recommended, in the morning, you’ll be filled in on everything you missed.

With these tips, you’re certain to stay ahead of the curve.