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

I find that diagrams have a habit of changing dramatically between initial
draft and second draft. I have found it faster to get the initial draft out
of my system with good old pencil and paper and only start working digitally
from the second draft. I have found that many drawing applications can be tremendous
time sinks when you need to make significant changes to the layout. I also find
it useful to resist the temptation to use color and fill effects early on. I
find I can end up worrying about the aesthetics of color long before the diagram
itself is sufficiently mature to make it worthwhile.

Spell check using Google

I often find it quicker to type a word into Google than to invoke spell checking
capabilities of specific applications. If your spelling is close enough i.e.
zylem, Google's red colored "Did you mean..." almost always gets
it right.

Keep contact management simple with a text file

I just use a word processor file for contacts. Over the years I have tried
a variety of contact management applications and been initially attracted to
their sorting/searching/reporting capabilities. However, over time I invariably
return to just a text file. The search capabilities of most word processors
are more than adequate for the common search scenarios I use. I don't find myself
missing the ability to view all contacted alphabetically or sorted by country
code.

Low tech data transfer

If you have two computers and you need to send information from one to the
other, it is often simpler to send it out to the internet cloud and pick it
up from there. A very low tech but very effective way of doing this is to use
e-mail to an online e-mail account as a data transfer system.