Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

Speed Keys for Web Applications

If you're a student of David Allen's Getting Things Done, you may know that he encourages you to do a couple of things to improve your productivity in front of the keyboard:

  1. Improve your typing skills (see my previous post on learning to type)
  2. Learn and use speed keys (for example, <Ctrl>+C to copy, <Ctrl>+V to paste) so you don't have to move your hands over to your mouse as much.

On point #2, I've just discovered a great (free) add-on for Firefox that lets you create speed key shortcuts for any web site or web application you wish. It's called "Splinkd" and it's really cool.

You can use it to automate things like web-based applications (Salesforce.com, for example), web-based email (Google has its own hotkeys, but this allows you to add hotkeys to Hotmail and other services), and more.

Check it out - it's a great productivity tool for Firefox (no other browsers are supported at this time).

Related items:

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Links of the week #9 (week 44/2007)

In the past, I've written about Wikis and how useful I've found them to be for collaboration in my company. In the olde days, only geeky types used Wikis. Now, there are a lot of positive changes that make wikis more accessible to the mainstream (you've experience a form of Wiki if you've used Wikipedia, for example).

Here are a few Wiki options I know a lot about, and the links to get there if you really wanna wiki:

TWiki

TWiki is billed as an "enterprise wiki" and is the Wiki tool that has been in use in my company for the last 6 years or so. It is very flexible and stable, can be customized and is very scalable. However, you must install, administer, and maintain the platform yourself. This is better suited for organizations with a more technical user community and a dedicated (at least part time) Wiki administrator.

pbWiki

pbWiki is a Wiki "platform" including the software and service to get going on a Wiki without installing the software yourself. They have a free version of their Wiki platform geared toward individuals, students, and educators. From their home page, you can sign up for a free account or try out a demo Wiki they've published.

pbWiki also has a small business-centric version of their Wiki platform, with some setup and manageability improvements and more robust permissions management. This costs money, but the price seems reasonable for business collaboration. Here are some videos discussing their new features:

Wiki using Microsoft Sharepoint

Sharepoint has always been a group collaboration tool, but it can be a little (a lot?) clunky to learn. Microsoft has incorporated Wiki features into Sharepoint 2007 to get into this meme. Read more about Sharepoint Wikis here. We're just getting into this in our company, as a way for less technical users to collaborate.

Other options abound

The resources I mentioned are just scratching the surface, and were selected because they are the ones I've been personally exposed to. If you know of other options that you love, please add them into the comments on this post along with your brief review (even a thumbs up/thumbs down or short list of pros and cons).
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Learn a 5-Step Weekly Review: You’ll love it.

As I mentioned in "My GTD Odyssey"), I've been using aspects of "Total Workday Control" to augment my personal Getting Things Done playbook.


Short recap


I was challenged by context lists alone so I used TWC's task processing method to assign dates to my tasks so they'd show up on my "dashboard" (example in the graphic at right) every day to remind me what I wanted on my candidate tasks list for the day. This means I run through holdover tasks every morning and either:



  1. change their date to today's if I still want to consider them for today
  2. change their date to a future date if I want to have them pop up in the future
  3. remove the date so they go back to my Master Task list so I can reconsider them at my next weekly review

This system works great for me, and quite a few others who've taken it on.


Speed dating in Outlook


OK, now on to the speed dating aspect. One of the things about using this technique is that you need to enter lots of dates every day. I share an office with a guy named Gene, who uses a similar methodology to mine and he was complaining about how tedious it was to select dates in Outlook using their drop-down calendar.


I've been using a much easier method to assign dates. Gene thought it was useful, so I figured I'd share it here. Rather than typing the full date, or using the dropdown list, let's look at some other options.

In any date field in Outlook (tasks, calendar, reminders, you name it), the following shortcuts will work (all of these are based on Outlook 2003 - Outlook 2007 may have even added a few). Note that you don't have to worry about capitalization, and it understands that "2" and "two" have the same meaning.





































What you can typeWhat Outlook will do with it
Enter a number in a date field (like "12")Outlook will convert this to the next "day 12 of the month" - if the 12th has already passed in the current month, this will change it to the 12th of the following month.
TodayConverts to today's date. You can also type "now" to get the same effect.
TomorrowConverts to tomorrow's date. You can also type "day" to get the same effect.
Relative dates

Outlook understands quite a bit here. You can type things like the following, and Outlook will do the translation:



  • Thursday
  • Next Thursday
  • Day after tomorrow
  • 2 weeks
  • 2 months
  • Next year
  • 2 years

You can also use this to fill in dates in the past like "yesterday" and "last Thursday"


You can get fancy, too - type "One week before valentines day" to set a handy reminder to get a gift for someone.

Day and month name shortcuts

While you can type "Next Thursday" as in the previous example, you can also type the day and month abbreviations:



  • Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun
  • Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
Holiday names (like "Christmas" or "Valentine's Day")Outlook will fill in the correct day for the holiday. It doesn't know that many, and this is more a novelty in my opinion. Others it knows include Halloween, Independence Day, and New Years Day. There may be more, but I haven't discovered them.
Time unit abbreviations
  • "mo" == month
  • "y" == year
  • "d" == day
  • "w" == week
    • Calendar math expressions

    If you want to do something a certain number of days before or after a date, you can use simple math expressions to tell Outlook when to schedule things. Some examples:



    • "tomorrow + 2 weeks" or "tomorrow 2 weeks" translates to two weeks from tomorrow
    • "Christmas 2d" will schedule something 2 days after Christmas

    Note - Outlook likes the plus sign, but doesn't like the minus sign, because it is too confusing for dates (12/24 and 12-24 are the same to Outlook). You have to use "One week before..." or "3 days before..." kinds of language like that described above in "Relative dates"

    Time unit abbreviations

    • "mo" == month
    • "y" == year
    • "d" == day
    • "w" == week
    Holiday names (like "Christmas" or "Valentine's Day")Outlook will fill in the correct day for the holiday. It doesn't know that many, and this is more a novelty in my opinion. Others it knows include Halloween, Independence Day, and New Years Day. There may be more, but I haven't discovered them.


    Those are the ones I know about - do you know others? As you can see, some of these take longer to type than enter the date ("7/4" is much easier than "Independence Day"), but some of them like "today" or "2w" can save lots of time when scheduling activities, tasks, or other things requiring dates in Outlook.


    Productivity and Efficiency Mojo

    A couple of productivity-related items have come my way recently that I think are well worth sharing.

    Time Management Manifesto

    The first item is a manifesto that Francis Wade has written at ChangeThis, called "On Time Management: Toss Away the Tips, Find the Fundamentals." Great stuff - click through, vote and encourage him to write it.  [NOTE: The manifest has expired - click through the link below to see how this guy thinks]

    Francis lives in Jamaica where he can truly enjoy all the free time he creates with his time management kung-fu. If you want to see more about how Francis's head is wired, you can see some of the concepts he's developing on his blog.

    Enjoy!

    Automate your grocery list-making

    If you're tired of writing and re-writing your shopping lists (and you've got some cash to spend to solve this problem), you should check out "SmartShopper." This is a device you can hang on your fridge to capture your needed items as they make themselves apparent.

    You press the Record button, it listens to what you say, it shows you what it thinks you said and asks you to confirm, then stores a running list of items you need. Then, when you're ready to go shopping, you press the print button and it prints out a categorized list (click here for a sample).

    It has a glossary of about 2500 common grocery items, along with a bunch of common errands ("Go to the dry cleaners" for example) so you can use it to manage your list of errands. And, you can add your own items to the database if your item isn't found.

    It's pretty cool (you can see an online demo on the SmartShopper site) but it's spendy - $150 at this writing (though I found SmartShopper on Amazon for $131.15, with free shipping for Amazon Prime members like me). If list creation is a real pain for you, it may be worth it. If you get one, let me know how it works.

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