Managing your time seems like an elusive task, the requirements are simple but applying them is frequently hard to sustain. One solution could be to automate as much as possible with tools that frequently nudge you in the right direction.

The following are 4 tools you can start using right away to help you better be more effective in time management.

Microbreaks

— Tool: TimeOut (Mac) / Work Rave (Linux, Windows)

Definition: A very short break (e.g. 15 seconds) every short block of work (e.g. 15 minutes), where one does not switch focus to another task, but just stops the current…

How are habits formed?

It’s a hot summer day in Berlin, I am cycling alongside the spree, enjoying the fresh breeze, when I see a huge billboard for Heinken, with a glass full to the rim with what looks like very cold and refreshing beer (CUE).

I think to myself, gosh, it would probably taste amazing after I’ve been cycling for a few KMs now to stop and have a cold beer (CRAVING).

Five minutes later, I find myself searching for an biergarten to sit down and grab myself a cold one (RESPONSE).

Another five minutes and I am enjoying the feeling of cold…

Motivation — At the time of writing this post, there are 1,314 posts on Upwork for web scraping projects. As I contacted a few of them and checked their requirements, it became quite obvious that their needs are not complex but rather extensive.

I started building one scraper at a time, targeting the websites the clients wanted to scrape. After three happy clients, I realized that a simple format for defining the data (data to be scrapped) and making the script generic allowed me to cut the development time from a few hours to a few minutes.

Implementation

Basic scraping follows…