Available To Everyone

Ever thought how much time you waste on repetitive tasks when using your computer?
Simple things like just running your programs or typing the same thing over and over can really add up in terms of time waste.

I know I easily get side tracked so finding software that increases my productivity is a good thing. (Does that mean I get more time to waste?)
And as an added bonus, I’m going to give both a Windows and a Mac version of the applications covered …

The Areas
We’ll be looking at 2 innocuous areas that are overlooked in our day to day computer activities

• Opening programs
• Repetitive Text

Let’s have a think about the time it takes to open a program from a menu, for a moment.

• Stop typing and move from keyboard to the mouse
• Move the cursor to the Start Menu (Windows) or to a Finder window (Mac)
• Click into Start (Windows) or click into Applications (Mac)
• Navigate through a number of hierarchal menus and locate the program directory and click (similar for both OSs)
• Click program icon to execute

We do this hundreds of times in a day so the expenditure in time is significant.

The other area I’ll be covering is text we type all the time (and waste time with).

• Signatures in emails, documents, notes etc
• Spelling mistakes we constantly re-edit (I have many occasions where I even misspell my own name when typing too fast)
• Repetitive boilerplate paragraphs

App Launching
One of the first applications I fell in love with on my Mac is Quicksilver - a free application launcher.

It’s mouse free and invoked by a keyboard combo such as Ctrl-Space which displays a further input area. Simply starting to type the beginning letters of the name of the application you wish to run has Quicksilver scanning through it’s database of all the files and applications that are stored on your computer.

The Quicksilver command window (and a number of other application launchers) contains three panes.

The panes roughly correspond to the subject, predicate and attributes of the desired task. You first choose the subject of the command (an application, a file, an e-mail address, an IM contact, a bookmark, etc.), then an action to be performed on that subject, and finally additional details (attributes) for the action if required.

Most of the actions require typing only a few letters into any of the panes: i.e. typing into the first pane searches the Quicksilver catalog for items matching those letters (the direct object, or "subject"). The names actions matching these letters are displayed in the pane. As more letters are typed, the list gets shorter, as fewer actions match the typed letters.
And Quicksilver bubbles often used applications to the top of the list. Quicksilver uses a priority system based on previous usage to determine which items to list first of those which match your actions.

For Mac: Quicksilver FREE from http://www.blacktree.com/
For Windows: Skylight (it’s a Quicksilver clone which is why I like it) also FREE from http://www.candylabs.com/skylight/

Text Expanding
The area of text replacement is incredibly beneficial for time savings.

TextExpander for the Mac is my favourite application at the moment. Cost is $US29.95 so still very affordable when you start looking at the time saved … and it even has cost saving estimator built right in too.

Text replacement is usually built around ‘trigger’ phrases. An example might be for spelling mistakes such as my own name. Fill in one box for the trigger such as Matrin and the replacement is Martin … as you find yourself correcting other words, simply add these to the TextExpander database for future time savings.

And it comes into its own for lengthy insertions. You could set up a trigger called mcsig and attach this to a multi-line signature statement that includes graphics and hyperlinks (website addresses). Look at your own computer usage to imagine how much time you’re going to save with this and it’s likely to be significant.

For Mac: TextExpander $29.95 (30 day trial available too) from http://www.smileonmymac.com/textexpander/
For Windows: Phrase Express FREE (for personal use) from http://www.phraseexpress.com

There’s a number of these types of utilities so please do trial ones that suit you best. Everything comes in different flavours ☺