Protocol 80 Productivity Blog

A quick and easy trick for speeding up your browsing to regularly viewed sites in Firefox which I find myself using more and more.

Once you have a page bookmarked, right click it and select “Properties” and you will see a “keyword” text box, with this you can simply enter the keyword into the URL field and jump right to the bookmarked page without having to move your hands away from the keyboard, or hunt around in your bookmarks for the link you want.

So for example, I can now quickly jump to my GMail account by tapping Ctrl+t to open a new tab, which automatically puts the url in focus, and then just type “gm” and hit enter. To use the current tab, Ctrl+l will jump you right into the address bar.

For a more complete list of Firefox short cuts, there is a cheat sheet provided by Leslie Franke which has been praised frequently.

There are no shortage of ways you can constantly tweak your personal time management, and if you’re trying for that 2% more productivity per week, every little can count.

So these three things put forward by Work Place Life aren’t anything amazing on their own, but they can still have an impact when you add them all together, or perhaps give some inspiration as to how else you might shave off some lost time, even if just by a little.
Here’s three more you might try

1. Stockpile Stationary
   Keeping a collection of various bits of stationary you need in a draw can save you a fair amount of time. If you suddenly find yourself in need of something you don’t want to have to get up mid-flow and trek of to find a stapler or something.  For items in limited supply like staplers, keep two - one in common use that you don’t mind lending out. One you keep hold of no matter what, that you only ever use if the common one is AWOL.
2. Send Your Personal Mail Via The Company “Out Box”
   Firstly I’m not saying the company should pay for your personal mail, but my company is fine with accepting people’s personal mail, stamped as normal and dropping it in the Out Box for collection by the Post Office directly. Which saves me 10 or so minutes each time I want to post something because I don’t need to go out of my way to the postbox.
3. Buy Your Lunch
   Sure, it costs more to buy lunch if you look at the just the costs of material. But for me, it’s easier to buy a sandwich from the guy who delivers to the office, then it is to make my own. To make a basic sandwich is fairly quick, but the end result isn’t very interesting, and as soon as you start to make it interesting, the cost raises pretty close to what I’m paying anyway, only I have to spend the time putting it together. In other words, as with any money saving exercise don’t forget how much your time is worth.

I started reading PigPog about a week ago now, and I’ve been nicely impressed with their steady stream of articles that pick at my more creative brain regions. The latest article Improve your Writing collects a large number of resources for boosting the quantatiy and quality of your writing output.

I have to admit that more creative writing is still one of those things on my someday/maybe list that I could easily move off into something more worthwhile if I just make even a slight commitment to it, and like anything I’m not going to get any better just thinking about doing it.