How to be productive by cutting down your typing -1
It always pays to hasten your typing once you have the content ready in your mind, more so if you are not a formally trained typist. Here are some ideas:
- The good old Copy-Paste technique is a great force multiplier when you are creating content or writing messages and mails. The technique however hits a roadblock occasionally when your source text is embedded in a picture or the source does not allow copy. The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools should save the day. You don’t even need to pay for OCR tool, if you already have MS Office. The MS Office product, OneNote, does a neat job. This is how you convert a picture to text:
- Capture screen or take a clip of area of interest. Windows OS has a nice tool, Snip & Sketch, for the purpose.
- Paste the picture in a scratch OneNote document and then on right click select “Copy Text from Picture”. You got your text ready to be pasted wherever you want.
- Speech to text: You almost don’t need personal assistants for drafting your content. Speech to Text tools have come of age and are useful in drafting content. First draft is anyway trash, so why not get it generated with a babble on your smartphone during your daily chores and walking. This method will also get rid of your mental block for getting the first draft in place. These tools are available not just for English but also for several other languages. Dazzle your audience with the right script of the language than its romanized version.
- Every domain has its own often used jargon. Some of the words are too long and make us nervous while typing (often mistyping) them, more so when these words are not part of a standard dictionary as then the spell check does not prompt what we need. We can repurpose a feature, AutoCorrect, that is available in all MS Office products. AutoCorrect, if you don’t know, is the feature that, among many other things, automatically turns (c) to copyright symbol, © or :- ) to smiley, ?. These text replacements are pre-configured, but you could add as many of your own. For example, I have to use our server names such as DeepTarget0 or DeepTargetDemo, or product names such as 3DStoryTeller in mails so often. I have configured them in text replacements. When I type DTD, or 3DS, they get replaced immediately with DeepTargetDemo and 3DStoryTeller respectively. You could use even often used phrases and sentences as part of the replacement text.
Happy speedy typing and content creation!
Journaling for Personal Productivity
Here is an interesting way to maintain a journal that makes you more productive as well. Journal means different things to different people and what I mean here is recording everything that you do in your day. Not exciting? Hear me out!
First and foremost (as you would expect me to say this), it should be digital. It should be maintained in spreadsheet App, like Excel, as to me journal is tabular data then a series data. A row represents a day and a column represents a track or a role that you play. Typically, you will have four columns in your journal, namely, Job track, Vocation track, Reading/Learning track and Personal/family track. See the picture.
You should record all that you do on a day, in one of the tracks, in the corresponding cell. Record all that which took your significant time and also something that was important although took just a little time. Ideally, you should record the work as soon as you finish it and end of the day should be the good time to complete it fully for the day. Color the week-end rows in red to create boundaries for work weeks.
You will also realize that, the journaling is mostly copy-paste from mails that you sent or other sources. So, one thing that you will find handy is to enable large Microsoft Office clipboard to retain your copied stuff for longer or to to bulk copy-paste.
Let’s see the benefits:
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Reflection and completion: When you record a task in your journal, it prompts you to reflect on it, identify any loose ends, and gives you an opportunity to complete the task thoroughly. This reflective process is invaluable.
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Personal reward system: A journal acts as a visual representation of your hard work. There’s nothing more satisfying than looking at a row filled with interesting tasks across all your tracks. Take a moment to acknowledge your achievements!
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Chronological reference: One minor yet interesting benefit of journaling is having a clear record of when you completed specific tasks.
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Report generation: You can extract any track from your journal to create regular weekly reports. These reports can then be folded into monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports. With this data, updating your career documents, self-appraisal, profiles, and resumes becomes not only incidental but also exciting. Our brains naturally enjoy constructing stories when the necessary points are available, and a journal provides those points.
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Balanced attention: By reviewing individual columns across multiple days, you can easily identify if any specific track is receiving less attention. This allows you to adjust and prioritize your focus accordingly.
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Productivity monitoring: Journaling provides a simple and effective way to record and monitor your productivity. It’s much easier and less time-consuming than tracking hours and minutes.
You have to be regular with it though. Initially to get into habit you should set some reminders for yourselves. New year is round the corner and if you are looking for some resolutions, try this one.
How to organize your smartphone storage for efficiency and fun – 1
How often this happens to you when you want to share a photo, or a video clip or a meme to someone and after a tiring and disappointing search in the gallery app of your phone, you promise him or her that you would send it at later time, which you somewhere know might never come. This happens when your gallery app is choc-a-block full of tons of stuff that your messaging apps keep pouring. If you want to impress your friends with quick turnaround on anything you promise to share and save your time as well, read on.
The trick lies here in creating a bunch of folders or albums in the gallery itself, that most gallery apps should allow. What albums you create totally depends on what you want to retrieve. Let me suggest few for inspiration: selfies, family, friends, funny pics, funny videos, shopping, good pics.
Now, as and when you gather a bunch of pictures and videos in standard folders of Gallery, run a quick pass through and delete the stuff you don’t ever need and sort the rest into those pre-created albums. Your goal is to keep all the standard gallery app folders empty. Not only you will have lots of reusable stuff collected in these albums but you would have deleted big load from your phone also. Next time you want to share something, you would just go to the right album and be done with sharing in no time.
Since this is quite easy and largely interesting task, you may not want to use your productive time slots for this. So, reserve lowest energy time slots for this activity. Even if you have largely unorganized gallery at this point of time, let this activity run over few days during your low energy time slots; where’s the harm!
(featured image: Photo by Riccardo Bresciani from Pexels )
Organize your browser bookmarks for better productivity
A web browser is central to our daily work. Using it smartly and efficiently can greatly enhance productivity. One of the most powerful yet often underutilized features of any browser—particularly Google Chrome—is the bookmarks system. A well-maintained bookmark structure allows you to revisit your favorite web pages instantly, saving time and avoiding unnecessary scrambling.
Here are a few tips to make the most of your browser bookmarks:
1. Organize Bookmarks with a Folder Structure
Bookmarks can be structured hierarchically, just like folders on your computer or smartphone.
- Create folders such as Shopping, Payments, Leisure, Courses, or Business to categorize your bookmarks.
- Avoid leaving bookmarks unorganized—an endless list defeats the purpose of quick access.
- When you bookmark a page by clicking the star icon, Chrome lets you choose a folder. Select an existing folder or create a new one for better organization.
Pro Tip: Use the Bookmarks Manager to move, delete, or search for bookmarks when needed. If you have a large collection, consider pinning the Bookmarks Manager in a tab for quick and perpetual access. [Learn more about pinning tabs here.]
2. Maximize the Bookmarks Bar
The Bookmarks Bar is a prime spot for frequently visited websites, such as Amazon, your banking portal, LinkedIn, or project dashboards. Here’s how to make the most of it:
- Quickly Add a Bookmark: Drag the lock icon (from the address bar) and drop it onto the bookmarks bar.
- Save Space: Right-click on a bookmark, select Edit, and delete its name—leaving only the website’s icon (favicon). The icons are often instantly recognizable and save valuable space on your bookmarks bar.
- Group Related Bookmarks: You can create folders directly on the bookmarks bar to group related links. For example, a folder named “Tools” can house links to calendars, dashboards, and productivity apps.
See the example image above for inspiration on how a clean and organized bookmarks bar can look.
3. Sync Bookmarks Across Devices
To take bookmarks to the next level, ensure they are available wherever you work:
- Google Chrome lets you sync bookmarks across all your devices, including desktop, tablet, and mobile.
- Simply sign in to Chrome with the same Google account on each device, and enjoy a seamless, unified experience.
With this feature, the bookmarks you organize on one device are instantly available everywhere—helping you stay efficient, no matter where you are.
Final Thoughts
A thoughtfully organized bookmarks system saves time, reduces stress, and keeps your browser clean and efficient. Start by creating folders, optimizing your bookmarks bar, and syncing across devices. Small tweaks like these can make a big difference in your day-to-day workflow.
Use Your Calendar Effectively
It’s no exaggeration to say that calendar apps have become the lifeline of our workdays. They liberate our minds from the mental burden of remembering future commitments and provide a clear picture of our availability for new ones. To make your calendar even more effective, here are some practical tips:
1. Distinguish Between Two Types of Tasks
To use your calendar wisely, it’s essential to understand the difference between two categories of tasks:
A. Time-Sensitive Tasks
These are tasks tied to a specific date and time, such as attending a meeting, joining a webinar, or catching a flight. If you miss them, they’re gone forever. Let’s call these time-sensitive tasks.
B. Flexible, As-Needed Tasks
These are tasks that need to be completed as soon as possible but don’t have a fixed time constraint. Examples include preparing a proposal, reviewing a document, or drafting a project plan. While they’re important, you have flexibility in scheduling them.
2. Use Your Calendar Only for Time-Sensitive Tasks
Your calendar should exclusively record time-sensitive tasks (Type A). Adding flexible tasks (Type B) to your calendar can lead to bad habits, like repeatedly snoozing reminders. Over time, this can undermine the trustworthiness of your calendar.
Why does this matter? A calendar reminder should feel like a serious call to action, not just another notification. Diluting its urgency with non-time-sensitive tasks risks eroding your reliance on it—and missing critical appointments.
Instead, consider managing flexible tasks using a task management tool or to-do list app. These tools are better suited for tasks that don’t depend on a fixed time slot but still require attention.
3. Maintain a Single Version of Truth
To avoid confusion and conflicting schedules, aim to consolidate all your appointments into a single calendar. If you’re using multiple email or calendar apps, you likely have appointments scattered across different platforms. Integrate them into one primary calendar that’s accessible on all your devices.
Calendar apps like Outlook and Google Calendar offer features to sync multiple calendars, ensuring you have a unified view of your commitments. Check the documentation for your preferred app to set up this integration.
Three strategies to make quick progress on any task
We always have a few goals and dozens of tasks to meet those goals. Some of the tasks progress smoothly, but some appear to not move, which are the proverbial frogs in our plate. There are these three strategies to make progress on them:
- split
- split more
- split some more
It might sound like an overstatement but most of the tasks or projects appear hard just because we hesitate to split them down into a bunch of sub-tasks that are readily doable. The whole task may look loathsome but not necessarily the subtasks after the split.
This is how it works:
You should always look for opportunities of vertical splitting and horizontal splitting.
Vertical splitting is when you must repeat some activity a few times to complete a task, you split that task into those many subtasks. The best example that I can give you here is about filing tax returns – a hated but important job. At the end of the year, collecting data of the whole year, most of which is already forgotten, to provide to your CA makes it a stressful ordeal. Instead if you split it into monthly data collection sub-tasks, your year end work becomes a non-event.
The horizontal splitting is about dividing a task into the stages. The creativity lies in being able to see those stages that are not always obvious. A task as simple as sending an email can be split into subtasks of drafting it and pushing the send button. This realization enables you to start working on the draft much in advance of the committed sending date.
Once a task is split, you will soon discover that many of the sub-tasks can be delegated, and before you realize a bunch of people start working on your task.
Splitting tasks that are newer to you helps to bring the unknowns to the forefront and once we plan subtasks to resolve these unknowns, the whole task moves ahead. I say this half-jokingly that even the hardest task will have at least one doable subtask – ask Google!
So, next time you are stuck with a stalled task, apply these three, easy to remember ?, strategies.