By Stephen Bucaro

The Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC) reported that last year 7.7 million dollars was lost through online auction scams. The actual losses are much greater. Most auction scams are not reported because they involve only small amounts of money.

Most auction Web sites are aggressive at fighting fraud. eBay has a fraud investigation unit that has helped them hold down fraud to only .01% of its transactions. If you paid for an item and never received it, or if you received item but it was less than what was described, eBay's Fraud Protection Program will reimburse you up to $200, minus a $25 processing charge. In order to qualify for Fraud Protection coverage, you must submit an Online Fraud Complaint with eBay after 30 days and before 60 days from time auction ended.

After making a purchase, buyers can leave feedback about their experience with seller. Before you bid on an item, check seller's feedback profile by clicking on number next to their User ID. There is also a feedback forum and discussion board.

Below are a few actions that you should take to protect yourself from Internet auction fraud.

© 2002 Elena Fawkner

Time is inelastic. Despite what some of us persist in believing, it will NOT magically expand to accommodate all we have to do. So, in order to maximize time we have available, we have to spend it wisely. Here's how to do that.

STRUCTURE YOUR TIME

The very first thing to do is understand structure of your time. If you think of time you have available as some amorphous dimension, you will fritter it away on this and that without any real consideration of what is best use of time available. How many times have you got to end of your day and felt like you'd accomplished nothing even though you'd been "busy" all day.

All time is not equal. If you're a morning person, your morning time is worth more in terms of productivity than your late afternoon time.

So think of time as variable in terms of potential for accomplishment and identify your most valuable time. Do same for your intermediate-value time and your lower-value time.

Reserve your most valuable time for your most intellectually demanding activities. Your intermediate value time should be spent on important tasks that don't require quite same level of concentration. Finally, reserve your low-value time for activities that don't require much in way of concentration.

Now, obviously, if you have a full-time job away from home, decision of how to spend your 9 to 5 hours will largely be out of your hands. So, best you can do if you're a morning person is to try and take care of some of your intellectually demanding activities first thing in morning, say between 5:00 am and 7:00 am. On other hand, if you're a night owl, working a full-time job probably won't be much of a problem for you.

If you run your own business from home, however, effectively structuring your time in terms of peak, intermediate and low- concentration blocks can make a profound impact on your productivity if you use that time intelligently.

IDENTIFY WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO

Now that you have some sense of how to best structure your time, you need to turn to what, exactly, you're going to spend that time on.

That means identifying what you have to do. And that means identifying what you don't have to do as flipside.

When identifying what you have to fit in to your schedule, think about all areas of your life. Making time for yourself is not something that you get around to only if there's time left over. Making time for yourself is as much a priority as anything else.

A good way of identifying activities that should be included in your schedule is to test them against criteria of furtherance of an objective. If activity does nothing to further any objective, why are you even doing it?