The Principles of Personal Productivity
Consider this. We used to be good at productivity. For example – the typewriter. Users of this now-defunct device were taught a technique that allowed them to produce work remarkably quickly. Only people trained in touch-typing, as it was called, are anything like as quick as many people were on the typewriter (including men – I learned to touch type in the 1970s.) Touch-typing like shorthand, will soon become a lost art. If you want to improve your productivity on a Mac or a PC, learning touch-typing will make a difference.
And that is my introductory point. If you want to be productive on a Mac, you can’t just “buy an app and it’s done.” You have to make it part of your behavior and learn to be productive.
So let me cover this topic by topic:
Interface productivity
Except in graphical applications, which are inherently 2 dimension or even 3 dimensional, the keyboard beats the mouse almost every time. I’m talking about the situation where you can either move the pointer to a button and click on it or enter a few keystrokes. However, if you have to dig deep in your memory to remember the keystrokes, then the mouse is better.
So for the sake of productivity, learn to use the keyboard to best effect, by setting up hotkeys to make frequently repeated acts happen. It would be nice if there were hotkey standards but there are not so you have to manage your use of hotkeys yourself. There’s software than can help in a big way, which I’ll cover in a separate posting.
The important point here is: You have to commit keyboard shortcuts to memory and that means making an effort and setting up a scheme for managing such shortcuts.
You have to balance having a memorizable scheme with the individual effort involved. So also as a general rule: The fewer keystrokes and mouse clicks the better, but never do anything that is hard to memorize.
Launching Applications
The carpenter has a set of tools each of which is for a specific task. With personal computers, the situation is truly inconvenient because of the way that the software market works. We don’t have a set of well thought-out tools, we have a bewildering array of Swiss Army Knives, all of which overlap in terms of what they can do. Even the word “application” is bad. When we are at the computer we don’t want to launch an application, we want to do some specific things, like; send an email, refine a photograph, play some music, watch a video, visit a web site. We can’t “send an email”, we have to launch an application that enables us to send email and then invoke the send function. We probably have more than one mail capability. I have 3, Mac Mail, Mobile Me and Gmail.
This quickly becomes a mess unless you organize it. The productivity principle here is: Choose one way of doing things and then stick with it. But I advise that you think it through and take your time to choose how to do something, because the cost of “reprogramming yourself” is high.