Simple productivity tips for the PC user

I am an intense PC user and a programmer. That is a dangerous
combination! When faced with something repetitive or complex or
problematic in my day-to-day work with PCs, my instinctive reaction is
to try to program or design my way out of the problem.

Over the years my attempts at engineering higher personal producivity
has worked in some cases. In other cases, I have ended up with Rube
Goldberg machines that fall apart over time and leave me creeping
humbly back to simple solutions. Sometimes, simple really is the best
policy.

Deleting spam quickly

No matter how good your filters are, some of this stuff always seems to find
its way through to your inbox. Deleting it can be time consuming. I find that
I can get through the spam faster if I change the sort order of my inbox from
date (my normal mode) to subject. The similarity of many of the spammers subject
lines makes some of the spam "cluster" so that you can highlight blocks
of messages and delete them with a single action.

Slow online video replay

Choppy replay of online video is very annoying and slows you down. You have
better things to be doing than waiting for the stop/start/stop video to struggle
onward. Instead of watching it stutter, start the playback then hit pause. Most
video playback utilities will then continue to download the video behind the
scenes while you do something else. Most also have a visual cue so that you
can see how far along the buffering has proceeded. Come back to the video later
after buffering has hit 100%. Playback will now be smooth.

Web browser home page

There are a bunch of websites I use every day and a bunch of local files I
use every day. To make these easy to access I created a home.html web page that
just contained links to them. I have set my browser to use this home.html page
as my home page. The results are twofold. First, my browser now loads faster
because it is not going out to the internet to fish out a home page. Second,
I am always just one click away from a listing of the most important assets
in my digital daily life. As an application developer, I tend to have to use
multiple browsers during the course of the day and it is great to have the same
"home page" for each. This would not be possible if I used the bookmarking
facilities of the browsers.

Paper and pencil first for diagrams

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