Technology can be of great help in one's career, but it can also waste a lot of valuable time. The key to effective and strategic leverage of technologies is to have clear goals, an explicit procedure for using technologies, and regular reviews of technological performance.

Goal setting has been advocated since time immemorial by motivational authors of all stripes and colors, yet the fact remains that most people do not have written goals.

Without a written goal, all the best technologies in the world cannot help. A technology is like a turbo-engine under the hood: it can help you to get there fast, really fast. The only question is, where do you want to go exactly?

Take blogging, for instance. Blogging software, often offered free of charge (e.g. Blogger, Typepad, etc.), are absolutely useless if you don't have a clear goal about what you want to achieve with it.

Cell phones, Blackberries, MP3 players, as well as free-content websites such as Slideshare.net and Youtube, are amazing technologies, yet they are just tools.

A tool only becomes a competitive advantage in the hands of clear-eyed and goal-oriented individuals.

The most extreme, spectacular and global example is the 9/11 attack. A bunch of terrorists got together and figured out that a fuel-packed passenger airliner can actually be used as a deadly weapon to inflict massive damage and unleash terror on a planetary scale.

It is estimated that the terrorists involved used approximately $200,000 to pull that stunt, which cost the U.S. over $50 billion dollars in economic damages.

What is even more surprising is that they used technologies created by Americans (airplanes and Internet, through which they booked their flights).

If evil men can use their imaginative minds to leverage technology strategically, so can good men and women, to achieve productive ends.

But to do so requires that one invest much time into thinking about and answering three critical questions:

• What is the goal in using this technology?
• What is the method or procedure through which maximum benefits can be extracted from using this technology?
• How do we evaluate the performance and the return on using this particular technology?

Take cell phones, for example. Practically everybody in the Western world has one, often two. But do we really know how to use cell phones?

More and more wireless providers offer unlimited airtime, but let's pause and think about this for a minute. Free airtime sounds good, however, there's a catch: your time is not free.

Your time is the most precious thing you have and therefore, your cell phone might be an unwitting source of much time wasted, if you don't have a clear agenda and clear goals.

As the saying goes, "Any fool can make a phone call, and every fool will answer it."

It is very easy, indeed, to just answer calls or make calls, and think that one is being productive.

Ultimately, when it comes to time management, we all have to decide to consciously believe in one of these two statements: "Every minute counts" or "Every minute doesn't count."

Rich and successful people have already made that decision.

Billionaire Donald Trump, for instance, is ruthless about managing his time. He actually requires of his subordinates that they give him daily reports via the phone in 30 seconds or less. He doesn't read any report, and doesn't even check his email.

Billionaire Mark Cuban, for his part, doesn't use a cell phone. He prefers to use a Blackberry because, he says, "it allows me to keep a track record of every conversation."

In the end, technologies will increasingly become a pervasive part of our lives, so unless we begin to learn how to use them strategically, we might find our personal productivity diminishing. In the long run, this may have a negative, even damaging, impact on our career prospects.