Ever feel you’re drowning under the weight of uncontrollable admin in your work and private life?

The information age was supposed to set us free but sometimes it feels as if all it has done is enslave us to the yoke of never-ending e-mails, texts and calendar reminders, not to mention all the nondigital flotsam that demands our attention.

However, the web can help with a host of sites that provide advice, tests and tools to help you organise your life more efficiently. Not only can you improve your powers of memory and concentration, but there are sites that will help you to unleash your creativity and keep your brain in trim by honing your mental faculties.

TIME MANAGEMENT
How many wage slaves do you know who find themselves working obscene hours simply to keep their heads above water? But unless they are working efficiently, those long days chained to the desk are for nothing. The answer is to make more use of the time that you have.

The time management section of www.mindtools.com offers targeted tips, such as analysing your daily behaviour by keeping an activity log and setting “sharp, clearly defined goals”. This may sound obvious – the log should range from lifelong aims to more prosaic short-term tasks – but the key to effective management is knowing how to prioritise each task and understanding how completing one task leads to another. You can download the entire guide as an e-book for $19.99.

The ability to process quickly large amounts of information is also crucial to making the most of your day. While it’s a dog’s dinner to look at, www.magicspeedreading.com/words/index.html throws some light on the the art of speed reading. For instance, there are interactive exercises that will train you to understand text while skipping over vowels. It also advises to use soft focus as you read, which means resisting the urge to peer tensely at the words in favour of relaxing your eye muscles and letting your peripheral vision do the work. This allows you to cover more ground more quickly.

MEMORY AND CONCENTRATION
When it comes to improving powers of memory and concentration, there are more snake-oil remedies online than in an 1870s Yukon town. But among the dross, up pops www.lumosity.com, which offers a free two-week trial without requiring you to hand over credit card details.

The well-designed site addresses four areas – attention, memory, cognitive control and processing speed – with imaginatively themed, against-the-clock games that are good fun to play. For example you are tested on remembering names and faces together and pictures of various shapes. If you like what you see, a subscription costs $9.95 a month.

The University of Kent website serves as a straight-talking introduction to the art of concentration (tinyurl.com/occzl). One of the biggest causes of poor concentration is distraction, and the site makes the distinction between internal and external distractions. It explains that the first step to blocking them out is identifying them. It also discusses physical factors: for instance, too much food will send your body into a “rest” mode, making it harder to focus.

Concentration is easiest when you enjoy what you are doing. If you hate your job then it may be time for a fresh perspective: www.learndirect-advice.co.uk has questionnaires you can take to see what your ideal career might be if you’re having trouble deciding; it can also provide practical advice on how to improve your CV.

BRAIN EXERCISE
The brain, just like the body, needs to be kept in shape to perform at its optimum level, and there are a whole host of computer games that purport to hone your mental faculties with interactive puzzles such as sudoku.

The most popular is Nintendo’s Brain Training game which has sold millions of copies. There is no magic formula that will turn you into Einstein overnight, and Nintendo makes no formal scientific claims for its titles. However, one new game called Mindfit (£69 from www.mindweavers.co.uk), comes with an endorsement from Baroness Susan Greenfield, the neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, and is apparently backed by research from the Sourasky medical centre at Tel Aviv University in Israel, which suggests that regular use of the program could increase short-term memory and attention.

Mindfit assesses your various mental strengths and weaknesses, before coming up with a training programme tailored to your needs. It requires you to take part in challenges such as rebuilding abstract patterns from given parts (like a digital jigsaw) and matching up groups of pictures.

To assess your mental agility (and see whether the training has worked) try the IQ tests at uk.tickle.com/test/iq/intro.html, which has 40 questions (largely based on verbal reasoning and maths-based conundrums) and takes about half an hour. The more you practise the better you’ll get.

On a more practical level anyone can improve their ability to score highly on psychometric tests, which are becoming increasingly popular with employers. Head to the practice tests at www.shldirect.com and www.psl.co.uk/practice.

UNLOCKING CREATIVITY
Forget that rickety whiteboard in the corner of the boardroom, these days brainstorming has gone digital. The beauty of www.mindmeister.com is that you can start using it to create mind maps – the proper term for those spider diagrams – instantaneously, and then share them with your colleagues or have a joint brainstorm over the web. Go to the website, play with the demo and start bashing out ideas.

Creativity coaches are two-a-penny online, and like speedreading gurus they are usually more ready to peddle their wares than dispense helpful advice. The relentlessly sunny optimism emanating from www.stevepavlina.com may make you want to put a fist through the computer screen, but once you’ve overcome that urge there’s practical advice among the positive thinking – his post on becoming an early riser can be summed up thus: go to bed only when you’re too sleepy to stay up, and get up at a fixed time every morning. The result, according to Pavlina, once your sleep patterns have readjusted, is an increase in alertness and creativity.

STREAMLINING INFORMATION
The web is as guilty of cluttering our lives with information overload as anything else. However, with a few shortcuts you can bypass the superfluous and head straight to the important stuff. When it comes to news and current affairs, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is the best way to check the newest material on a selection of websites without having to visit them. Instead, headline bulletins – also known as news feeds – are sent to you.

You need to sign up to an RSS reader – the slick, free and handily featured www.newsgator.com is a good place to start. Then head to InGear’s recent feature on the subject (tinyurl.com/yvljzw) which explains fully how to set up the reader and start collecting feeds.

Spend any amount of time online and it’s likely that you will accumulate a host of usernames and passwords. The ingenious www.roboform.com takes the sting out of trying to remember them all. Once you have downloaded the program, every password and username you use for subsequent sites is automatically stored and remembered when you next visit the site. The only thing you need to remember is the master password needed to activate RoboForm.

But perhaps the best way to make more use of your time is to follow the advice of Mike Davidson, a self-styled productivity guru. He has launched a campaign dedicated to reducing the length of all e-mails to five sentences or less. Check out his (brief) explanation at tinyurl.com/3x9se4.

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