An Experiment in Productivity

As far as IT-topics go, I guess this is technically off-topic, but as busy professionals we can all afford to be more efficient in our time. As a student of Covey, I'm keenly aware of how non-important tasks can hide behind a sense of "urgency" and detract us away from what we really need to be doing. Because of that, I've been wary of web-based solutions to our time management problems. After all, simply by being on the computer researching these solutions, aren't we really just wasting more time?

That being said, there are some solutions that I've found to be worth their while and I've found that they do shrink the amount of daily time I'm spending on the computer. Which means I have time to do other more important stuff! :)

Turn Your Flash Drive Into a Portable Computer
Well, sort of. I use no less than four different computers each week, so a big time waster for me was figuring out where exactly my most used web sites were. A lot of times, I would find myself just Googling the site, trying to find it -- if that even worked. And more often than not, I would just find myself mindlessly surfing on somewhere else.

I could solve this, of course, by carrying around my laptop with me, but since a) I ride my bike a lot and b) I'm clumsy as all get-out, that's not a real viable option. Plus, my wife likes to use the laptop during the day.

I use my jump drive instead. A little program I discovered a few months back, PortableApps, allows you to install full programs onto your jump drive. With most drives available today having a capacity over 1GB, it's easy to install extremely useful apps onto your drive and run them on whatever computer you happen to be on. Any favorites you have travel along with your browser that's installed on the drive! The only downside is that half of the computers I use are still running USB 1.1, so speed can be an issue. But, I'm supposed to be working at work, right? ;)

The main program I use on this jump drive is Firefox. If you don't know already, Firefox is an open source web browser that directly competes with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I've been more of a fan of Maxthon Web Browser, which uses IE as an engine, but doesn't have all the problems, yadda yadda of IE7. I'm wont to change, and I've been on Maxthon for well over a year, so it's time for Ben to swap up. That, and the fact that Firefox has cooler extensions than Maxthon. More on some of these really cool extensions in a minute.

Make Your Favorites Come To You
I have about 20 or so sites I like to visit every day, which is more often than most of them are updated. Visiting 20 web sites only to find that 5 actually have anything new on them is a huge time waster. The solution to this problem is, of course, to know before visiting a site if there are any updates. Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, helps us achieve this. All you need is an RSS reader and the know-how to configure it to look at an RSS-enabled web site (Ben's Blog is one such site) and tell you if any new content has arrived.

Although it's not the best solution out there, I'm a big fan of Google Reader. The reason being is that it's web-based, and therefore accessible anywhere I can get an Internet connection -- with or without my jump drive. It's easy enough to set up, although Maxthon's built-in RSS reader was much easier to use.

Don't Skip Important Information for Mindless Information
Whenever a external link exists in a web document, the author risks his readers leaving the site and never coming back. Plus, we leave the original document we were reading and look at something else, where we risk clicking yet another link and beginning the whole process again -- spiraling out of control for possibly hours.

But, if we just ignore those external links, we miss out on stuff too.

A Firefox extension from IdeaStorm called Read It Later makes working with outside links so much more efficient. With this tiny extension installed, you simply right click a link and choose "Read This Link Later". The extension drops the link into a "Stuff to Read Later" bin and then -- yep, you guessed it -- you can read it later. I've been able to digest so much more information in less time thanks to this plugin alone.

Sometimes Old Technology is Better Technology
As tempting as it can be, sometimes using tried and true tools is just better. For example, I played around with Google Notebook as a possible replacement for my Franklin-Covey planner, but man, paper is just FASTER. There are not boot times to wait for, and I can get to any particular date I need within a second or two -- faster than the time it takes to open a Web browser. So, unless you find yourself attached to a computer literally all day, I still recommend using paper-bound solutions that work for you. (I really recommend the Franklin-Covey system, by the way.)

Don't be Afraid of Change
If you already have a system in place or if you don't think you need one, be open to new ideas. Some ideas work great and shave a few minutes off of my daily grind, some add to it. Be open to new stuff and be prepared to ditch your old system if something new works better.

Now, back to work!