I’m constantly looking for new ways to be more productive and avoid wasting my time. One of my biggest challenges is how to use some small fractions of free time, something like less than 10 minutes.

I think that, for most people today, the natural tendency would be to use these few minutes to check their social networks: go see if there is any interesting post on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. But in general this would be a way to waste our time.

How can we measure if our time was used effectively or if it was wasted? I think that a good way is to ask ourselves if we will remember what we did.

Let’s say we spent a few minutes scanning some dozens of posts on Facebook. What will we remember after that? Did we really learn something new?

Sometimes we go over our stream so fast that we don’t even pay attention to who is posting what. Depending on who are our friends and how many friends do we have, we will just see a collection of random posts.

Thus I decided to look for alternative ways to use these small fractions of time. Currently I’m focusing on book summaries. For the most popular books, such summaries are available both as videos or slides.

In the case of slides, I enjoy the collection of book quotes by GetNugget on SlideShare:

In the case of videos, I enjoy the channel FightMediocrity on YouTube:

These are only two examples. I’m sure that it’s possible to find many other ways to make good use of our few minutes of free time. And certainly there are better ways to use our time than constantly visiting Facebook or Twitter.

What about you? How do you use your small fractions of free time? Please share with us in the comments below.