starting with a submission to a directory wouldnt hurt you in any way. start with free ones and then you can spend on cheaper directories on your link building. here are some of the nice list of directories, worth submitting to: http://www.directorycritic.com http://www.paiddirectories.info
Only submit to good and established sites, the rest is surely time waste. There are many who are good and are free and there are many who good and not free. Try for both of them.
Well, if you will submit to quality directories then it is not wasting of time but investment of time.
just remember only submit on seo friendly directories that indexed on google and other search engines. if you dont wanna loosing time so you should only submit to pr3 site or more and they accept submission.
Hi thedark! Well, directory submission is really a good idea to increase you link popularity. Although, it is time consuming... It is still worth it, once your link is starting to become popular. Just like what orangutan and dhruv37 said, I agreed to them. You should look for a good quality directories or sites with PR3 and more and accept submission if you want to save your time.('',)
I did try FFA Pages and Directory at first and never got a single hit or neither my page rank changed, Check for the page ranks of the directories , there are many sites which allow you to do that, i Use http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php to check the page ranks of directories if they dont have one its not worth it.
You can use directory submission tools like the one at www.directorysubmitter.com to speed up the process.