I am a late-comer to a lot of things my kids take for granted (or have used since practically Day One). I find this amusing, since I was the one who got them a computer when they were really young (a much loved Commodore 64) and encouraged them to explore anything that caught their fancy.

I also was “online” starting in 1983 with a CompuServe subscription. However, I was a latecomer to the internet/world wide web because my budget really didn’t stretch to cover a higher powered computer until I learned how to build my own, and the early browsers (Mosaic in particular) drove me nuts trying to get any kind of performance on a 386, which was all I had until well into the Pentium era.

I was a whiz at online chatting, though, sometimes using two computers and two phone lines to yack away on two different networks at once (and keep up with multiple public and private conversations the whole time span). I think the zenith of my chat experience was in the early days of cable network broadcasting when a group of us from across the USA all watched the same “Lost in Space” rerun on the Turner channel and discussed it in real time via chat room.

A lot of today’s computer/internet users were either not born or not “online” yet in the years when if you had a CompuServe account and your friends had The Source, there was no way you could send them an email directly. Strange but true.

My kids poke fun at me for my lack of in-depth internet experience and they’re light years ahead of me in discovering the wonders therein. They do try to help old Mom by sending all kinds of links via IM and email. And I’ve gotten addicted to sites like Gizmodo and Lifehacker that provide me with all kinds of other neat stuff to check out.

Not enough time in the day, really. Which is why I was so delighted to come across the “Habit List” in the Productivity 501 blog, which gives me a way to map out the things I intend to accomplish every day for a month, and mark them as done or not-done each day so I can see where I’m piddling away my time.

I have also (thanks to Lifehacker) finally gotten into the glory that is RSS feeds and have set up Google Reader on my Google home page so I can see all the various blogs, cartoons and so forth that I like to read every day and can pick and choose what I want to look at, all in one convenient place.

I don’t think I have gotten my time managed really efficiently yet, but these new (well, new to me at any rate) tools are a step in the right direction.

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