I’m ALWAYS looking at ways to increase my own productivity and the speed i work at.
On the hardware side of things i’ve made some serious changes from just a year ago when i used a laptop as my main computer…. I’ve gotten myself dual monitors, an XPS 420 desktop, large curved desk, wireless mouse and keyboard, glass mousemat, netbook with 6 hour battery life, ultra portable portable mini mouse….
All of that stuff was bought for a reason – to maximize my own productivity. And i feel it has done….
On the software side of things i’ve made tweaks to vista;
- got rid of widgets
- enabled one click and checkboxes
- installed rocketdock
- installed ultramon to help control two monitors
All of that allows me to work faster. Move on to firefox, and again i’ve made some major changes… here’s some addons i’ve installed and recommend;
- World of Trust
- Ubiquity
- UrlbarExt
- Zemanta
- TwitterBar
- Site Launcher
- Search Status
- LastPass
- Greasemonkey
- Gmarks
- Firebug
- Better GReader
Again, all of those help me ‘speed up’.
Another tip i’ve learned recently is to use ‘pipelines’ to open up multiple homepages in different tabs. For example if i want to open smemon.com, google.com and gmail.com as my homepages, i’ll do the following;
- Hit ‘CTRL’ + ‘T’ to open up two new tabs in Firefox.
- Go to gmail.com and google.com in the two new tabs.
- Now go to tools > options > main.
- In the ‘homepage’ textbox, click the ‘use current pages’ button.
I’ve become so used to working at speed that it becomes extremely frustrating when i have to use other computers or networks – everything is just so slow and set to default settings… Some things don’t even work at all!
Speed has always been, and will always be the main challenge facing IT. EVERYTHING can be done faster and it’s our job to find out how. I’m always looking for ways to save myself time – if you have any more you know about, let me know 😉
zooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom!
