The Efficiency Dr Blog

I’m a big keyboard shortcut fan.  I am a touch typist, and therefore can key in pretty quickly what I want to do.  By using keyboard shortcuts, I can keep my hands here rather than moving over to a mouse to do the same thing, distracting me from what I’m working on.

Here are some of my favorite keyboard shortcuts:

If you’re a mouser rather than a keyboarder, you may not agree that this method is any faster than using your mouse; however, if you are a touch typist, I encourage you to try some of these and see if your speed doesn’t increase…

How’d you do?  Let me know!

In our last post, we talked about doing tasks right away rather than adding them to the to-do list for later.  Here’s a corollary:  keep a scratch pad next to the phone or computer to jot things down quickly.  If you keep your to-do list on the computer, you can sometimes minimize the window or task pane, and jot it down on that list as easily; but if you don’t, it’s sometimes helpful to jot things down to remember later.

If I’m writing an article for a magazine, I may want to remember to include an anecdote.  Rather than write a formal outline of the article, I’ll simply jot down “include story about xyz” to ensure that I don’t forget to include later on.  Is this something that needs to go on my to-do list?  Probably not, since I’m in the midst of writing now (although “write article by next Tues” may be on my list, subtopics under it most likely are not).  By use of this throw-away technique, you can ensure you are making the case in point while not cluttering up a more formal memory jogger instrument like a to-do list.

Makes sense?  What are your thoughts?

A perusal through time management books, efficiency books, etc. will show you the importance of to-do lists.  To-do lists definitely have their place – it’s one of the ways that we make sure that we don’t forget to do important (and not-so-important) things.  However, look at how long you are taking to work on your to-do list for the coming week or day – could you spend 30-50% more time, and actually DO the task?

Let me give you an example:  I remember that I need to set up a doctor’s appointment for Monday.  You can either write down “Call Dr for appt” or you can pick up the phone and actually make the appt.  [Of course, this presumes that you are writing this during business hours.]   It may take you 10 seconds to jot it down, or 2 mins to complete the call; however, there’s one less thing for you to do.

Try keeping your to-do lists for things that take 5 minutes or more – and take care of the smaller things as you think of them.  We’ve implemented this methodology in our staff meetings, and so end up with a shorter list of actionable, but longer implementation time, items rather than a long laundry list of things that will take 2-3 mins to do each.  It’s improved our internal system considerably; give it a try and let us know how they work for you!

How many times have you been steadily working on something when “oops” all of a sudden you accidentally close the window, or hit the back button, or a power failure causes you to lose your work? It’s happened to me 3 times this week! Many programs are getting better at incorporating auto save but many, especially web-based applications do not have this obviously useful feature yet.

Most recently I was working on our company newsletter using the web-based newsletter creation tool, and accidentally hit the “go back” browser button rather than the “Undo” button within the newsletter application. Errrgh!

To make it more frustrating, even though the application says “be sure to save your work at regular intervals”,  doing so,  by clicking the save button (always at the bottom of the page…) takes you off your editing screen and asks if you want to test the newsletter now. Then you have to go through two screens to get back to the editing screen! How inefficient is that?

What can be done about this poor programming? Unfortunately very little, unless you design your own app, or shop around specifically for this feature next time. We can learn from it though. After all, what’s there to do but go back and start over?

Yes, it can feel like starting over is a huge loss, but what you do differently the second time around can make it better than before. You might catch mistakes you overlooked the first time, you may find an easier way to complete the task, or you may even have a creative moment that didn’t happen the first time around. You never know! It’s definatly not the end of the world, and if you don’t look at it as wasted time, then it won’t be.

How has being forced to start over made your work better?