Of Life Hacks and Plain Old Productivity
Well life hacks seem to be all the rage these days. Even if its just another word for actually being efficient, its nice to see people are making a conscience effort to be more productive. Being the robot I am in the way I do things in my life, I thought I’d share a few.
Paper Folding
This is kinda stupid, but maybe it’ll set off at least one light bulb for someone. When folding a piece of paper, fold it with its content facing outwards. This way, when its lying on a table, with 10 other pieces of folded paper, you’ll be able to recognize it immediatly. Or when you pull it out of your pocket, you’ll know what it is without having to unfold it 12 times. (Yes, that myth was broken)
Read_Later Tag for Del.icio.us
If you’re not using del.icio.us yet, get on the bandwagon. Its not only great for storing bookmarks, but for finding new things as well. I’ll get to that later. Throughout my day I come across tons of great information I want to read or check out. If I don’t find it first, chances are one of my friends will shoot me the link. When I’m too busy to read it, I’ll post it to del.icio.us with a read_later tag. This way when I’m killing time or want to catch up, I can go strait to my read_later tag in my bookmarks on del.icio.us and find them fast. This works out much better than bookmarking in your own browser since the links are available from any computer and tagged.
Use RSS Feeds as Live Bookmarks
I know thats what they’re called in Firefox, because they got it right. Is their implementation of RSS perfect? Absolutely not. But your bookmark bar is a perfect place for certain types of feeds. I don’t use Firefox, because its junk on Os X, but Safari does a great job too, maybe better.
Anyyyyyways, the basic tip is simple. Toss your feeds in your bookmark bar. The catch is what types of feeds. I like to place feeds of things I’m “following”. Subscriptions to Engadget, weblogs, and other news stuff are delegated to ye old newsreader. But topical feeds are put up top. For example, when I got my PSP, I wanted to know every single thing that was happening in its “scene”. To do that, I grabbed the feed for the sitewide psp tag from del.icio.us and bookmarked it. Bam, instant reporting. Now, anytime someone bookmarks something about the PSP, I’ll be in on it by just checking that feed. And when the number that Safari places next to it starts to jump, I know something interesting is going on. I do the same thing with blackberry and xbmc.
Digg is another great site to do this with. They provide feeds for their search results. So if you search for “psp”, you can grab a feed for those results. Its a really great way to keep up on a topic as Digg gets bigger and bigger. And there’s no sign that its stopping. Techonorati does the same thing. You can see I’ve exposed my “ego feed” in the picture.
Throw this together with the last tip, and you can access those “read later” links super fast. Bookmark and tag it at work, get home, there it is in your feed. Mmmm the power of centralized content. And if you want to get real nozy, go check out the site wide read_later tag and get a glimpse of what everyone is putting off to read later.