Hasta La Ideas

When you constantly use keyboard shortcuts, it takes you less time at your computer to do the same amount of work as someone who is mouse dependent.

If you’re looking to improve your speed and productivity behind your keyboard, start by learning and practicing the basics:

• For Mac
• For Windows

Once you have these mastered, it’s time to give your productivity another boost.

• For Mac users, keep a list of the programs you typically open in a given day and create launch and program-specific action shortcuts by going into Settings –> Keyboard Shortcuts. Then, hit the + sign to create your own program actions.
• Windows users can download the program ActiveWords and create actions through it. (Free trial available, $30 for purchase.)

Then, stop typing the same words repeatedly by creating shortcuts for commonly typed symbols, code, and words.

• For Mac users, download TextExpander and paste limitless text into your documents, e-mails, and programs.
• For Windows users, keep using the program ActiveWords that I mentioned previously. In addition to creating program and action commands, it also inserts words with keyboard shortcuts.

I love TextExpander on my Mac and use it to enter Amazon links, the blurb at the beginning of every Unitasker Wednesday post, the templates for the Workplace of the Week and Ask Unclutterer posts, all five of my different e-mail signatures, our site’s submission guidelines, and hundreds of other paragraphs, sentences, and words that I type repeatedly.

How much time are you wasting by not using keyboard shortcuts? Take the time to learn, practice, and use keyboard commands to improve your productivity.

Reader Nick submitted the following to Ask Unclutterer:

I’m curious what strategies you’ve come across to declutter a group drive, such as in the workplace? Do folks structure their group files by situation, by file type, by projects, or by user? Something else entirely?

The necessary, but always disorganized, shared network drive is unfortunately a staple in many offices. It exists so that there will be a nightly backup of company data and for employees to easily share their information with each other, but that is often where the benefits end. Unless your company has a mandated filing system, people will save data to the shared drive any way they please.

My first piece of advice is to never store files by user name. People resign, get fired, and are promoted too quickly for it to be a valuable structuring method. The same is true for storing data by specific job titles — the Vice President of Marketing might become the Vice President of Corporate Outreach without any change in duties, offices, or staffing.

My advice is to organize by the kind of work your business or organization completes. If you’re at a business with a handful of clients, have folders based on client name and subdivided into projects. If you’re at a business that creates products, have folders based on the product and subdivided into projects relating to those products. If you are a non-profit or a service-based organization, you can probably get by on simply organizing by projects.

A standardized file naming structure can also help: YearMonthDay_project_document.extension or 20090508_Ask_Drives.txt

A naming structure such as this allows you to identify when the file was created (May 8, 2009), what project it relates to (Ask, for Ask Unclutterer), and its topic (Drives).

Honestly, though, what matters most is the search program you have associated with the drive. If you can access the drive with Google Desktop or Copernic Desktop, you should be able to find whatever file you need with these powerful search engines. They are your salvation when the filing system is so far gone that you can barely find the files you added to the drive.

What advice do others who work on shared drives have for Nick? Please let us know your ideas in the comments.

And, thank you, Nick, for submitting your question for our Ask Unclutterer column.

Do you have a question relating to organizing, cleaning, home and office projects, productivity, or any problems you think the Unclutterer team could help you solve? To submit your questions to Ask Unclutterer, go to our contact page and type your question in the content field. Please list the subject of your e-mail as “Ask Unclutterer.” If you feel comfortable sharing images of the spaces that trouble you, let us know about them. The more information we have about your specific issue, the better.

Today we welcome guest post author Glen Stansberry. Glen writes about creative web design and web development at Web Jackalope. You can also follow him on Twitter.

It seems like nearly every day, I go to a popular website and see examples of how not to design a site. And the number one no-no that all of these highly-trafficked sites commit is that their designs have too much thoughtless clutter.

The worst case is when a seemingly clean site has a random patch of cluttery buttons in the corner somewhere. I took this screenshot yesterday of a popular dictionary site.

Apparently the makers of the site decided to cram as many social networking site buttons into the upper-right corner of the webpage, in hopes of getting attention on social sites.

Would you click on any of those buttons? I know I wouldn’t. Aside from placing those buttons in the last place they’ll be seen on the site, they just add clutter. The buttons have effectively taken attention away from the core section of the site (the definitions and dictionary look-up), and are digitally waving their hands and screaming “look at me! look at me!” in the nose-bleed section of the layout. I think it’s safe to assume that those buttons have a really, really low click-through ratio.

If I was going to use one of these buttons, I’d have to take about 20 minutes to scan through all the buttons just to find the bookmarking service I wanted. Also, the buttons feel like they were hastily added, as an afterthought. It’s as if some big-wig in the company read about social networking in the newspaper the night before, burst into the designer’s cubicle and demanded the designer increase their “social media whatchamacallit” NOW.

Would I Click This?

Every element should pass the “would I click on this?” test. When I’m laying out a design and want to add something (like a button or a link) outside of the content, I always ask myself if I would click on it as a visitor. If I won’t, then visitors probably won’t either.

Every ounce of space is precious. When you have a great minimal design like Unclutterer has, every tiny thing you add to the layout is going to be seen. Especially if the element is added thoughtfully and tastefully.

Take Unclutterer’s new “Subscribe on Twitter” link. Erin mentioned yesterday that the Unclutterer Tips Twitter account had received a ton of new followers last week, probably due to the recent addition of a simple link and button to the sidebar. Compare these two implementations and ask yourself which you would rather click on:

this

or this

When it comes to design, every bit, every piece, every ounce must be weighed and thought through. Adding even a tiny thing dilutes the rest of the design, but if added carefully and thoughtfully, can actually enhance the overall design.

If you’re not a subscriber to Fast Company magazine, I wanted to call your attention to a terrific article in this month’s issue “Six Tools to Help Tackle Overflowing Email” by Robert Scoble.

Five of the tips are exclusively for Outlook users. Since I don’t use Outlook, I haven’t been looking at tips for this system as I work my way through my 2009 new year’s resolution. However, I know that many of our readers are on Microsoft systems and could greatly benefit from Scoble’s advice:

If I were going to recommend only one tool, ClearContext (clearcontext.com; free for personal use, $90 per seat for project management) offers the most immediate productivity gains. The Outlook add-on looks at who you’re replying to and how often, then automatically prioritizes the messages. It color-codes the most pressing ones, graying out mass emails.

The article even provided some insight for us non-Outlooker users:

As much as I like these tools, the best way to improve your email experience is to follow the advice I gave those Cisco employees: Take some conversations elsewhere. If you need to write a press release or a report, and 10 other people need to modify or approve it, you’re much better off using an online word-processing tool such as Google Docs or Adobe’s Buzzword. One email invites everyone to join the collaborative workspace, then everyone can make changes or leave notes on the document itself. No revision tracking. No full inbox.

Thank you to reader Laura for first bringing this gem to our attention.

My 2009 new year’s resolution is to get e-mail under control. In the past, I’ve tried every system you’ve heard of (and probably dozens more) to manage my accounts, and none of them have worked for me over the long term. This year, I hope to find a more permanent solution for my e-mail needs.

My resolution goals for January have been to get the technical problems of my e-mail fixed. I have two devices (my laptop and my iPhone) on which I regularly check and respond to e-mail from four e-mail accounts. Up until last week, my two devices didn’t talk to each other. Every e-mail I received and read on my laptop was still unread on my iPhone, so I was handling every e-mail twice. Additionally, I was receiving in my inboxes about 400 pieces of spam every day. I would waste half an hour a day simply weeding through the spam.

These two problems had to be solved before I could even think about getting a handle on my other e-mail problems.

Multiple device communication

For more than 15 years, I have been using POP (Post Office Protocol) to download my e-mail from my server to my e-mail program. It served me well until I started using my phone as a second device for checking e-mail. Since POP doesn’t allow for multiple e-mail clients to tell each other, “hey, I already read that,” I had to handle each e-mail more than once.

To solve this problem, I changed my e-mail access protocol from POP to IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), which allows my different e-mail clients to speak to each other through my mail server. Honestly, I am very upset with myself for not doing this earlier.

If you want to make the switch, too, start by contacting your e-mail service provider to make sure that they offer IMAP. Once you determine that they do, check out your e-mail service provider’s website to see if they already have directions for how to make the switch for your particular system (Comcast, Verizon, etc.) and client (Outlook, Mail, etc.). My e-mail provider had extremely detailed directions that I could follow. If this information isn’t easily found online, call your provider’s customer support line so that they can direct you to the best instructions for your system. If you only use Gmail for your e-mail, follow the instructions on Google’s website.

Spam filtering

To help fight spam, I enabled a server-side spam filter on my mail system. I talked with my e-mail service provider and learned about how I could make the threshold more selective so that spam no longer makes it into any of my inboxes.

Check with your e-mail service provider to see if they have server-side spam blocking available. If they do, they probably have a way for you to set the threshold level for that spam filter. Additionally, many allow for you to create “white lists” that let you receive e-mail from specific addresses that might otherwise be blocked by a spam filter. For example, I buy my favorite t-shirts online from Gap. Since I know they will send me receipts after I place my order, I have gap.com as a white listed address. If I didn’t make this adjustment, my spam filter might think that it was spam and not allow the receipt e-mails to arrive.

Additionally, Gmail has a great spam filtering system and is the best that I have found in the free e-mail system market. Unfortunately, three of my four e-mail accounts are not through Gmail.