When Is The Best Time To Search?

 

There may be some curiosity about the best time of day to use a website like Swagbucks. When are you most likely to be awarded points? You are right to be curious. With perfect information, a good statistical analysis might give anyone a huge advantage

My answer will be one you might not expect. The best time to use Swagbucks, or any paid survey site, or any forum that gives away prizes, etc., is during non-productive free time.

Your job already pays many, many times more that you can realistically (and honestly) earn through most websites. Let's not even consider that to be some sort of free time. Even if the boss is making you mad today. Meals, exercise, and time with your children should also be off-limits. That is productive free time. When you are down to flipping channels or opening another bag of chips, we have reached non-productive free time. This is where you could do better.

With just a little experience, you will begin to see how you can put together a fairly productive “maintenance” routine that will give you a little something in just two to five minutes – maybe more if you are approved for a survey. After that brief window, your productivity will drop off noticeably. With Swagbucks, an hour could easily pass between awards for searching. I imagine the new Bing rewards program is similar, but that question is for another day.

If you sit on any website for too long, your little window of productive, fun, and even profitable time will slump back into non-productive free time. Let's pick on a better known website for a moment, like E*Trade. No matter how interesting your portfolio is, you will read everything you need to know about your stocks for the day within five minutes. After that, you're daydreaming about what you would do with even more money. There are a couple of ways to avoid that slump. One is to position the free time you use on a favorite website between two other activities that make you feel more active or alive, as in exercise and an amazing dinner. This would help you avoid the temptation to waste too much time. Another is to be a member of several rewards websites where you know a simple routine on each will consistently give you a small but measurable reward. That way, you might have several bursts of activity with different reward systems that bring up your hourly average a little.

My posts here will reflect that second strategy – using at least two websites, focusing on the easy money/points, and going back for time-intensive activities like surveys later. I don't expect to get rich – just to get a little something extra – and this is why I will be ahead at the end of the year when other people are burned out and frustrated.