Two Minute Offense

You probably read the article about how Bill Gates works with 3 screens in front of him… And now LifeHacker is talking about increasing productivity with more screens.

Something I discovered, though - which I think Mac users figured out long ago - is that if you decrease the size (width-wise at least) of your windows… you can essentially have 1.5 screens without spending a dime.

Of course, this is a lot easier if you have a higher resolution screen (it works well for my laptop set at: 1400 x 1050). Most websites (which is where we spend most of our time anyway, right?) are configured for 1024 x 768, so if you can set your monitor to a higher resolution, you can reduce the width of your browser to about 800, and have about 300 pixels left over to look at things in the background. It may not seem like much, but trust me it helps. Especially once you get your most used applications in the right places.

Someone said in the LifeHacker comments:

For me, it simply allows me to, if nothing else, have two maximized applications going on at once, whether that be Firefox and some Office app, or doing some development work and having Word open on the other monitor for notes or something.

And sure, that’s nice if you can afford it… but I work from home sometimes, from the office sometimes… you think I want to buy 2 extra monitors so I can have an extra screen at all times? And don’t think that work will want to buy another one for me… maybe in another couple years when I’ve provided some more value.

In the mean time, I just don’t use as many maximized windows, and make more effecient use of my screen’s real estate.

Merlin has a great (or at least a decent remindering) series on how to cut down email clutter. For those who need something in their system to tinker with, there is now something else you can incessantly mess with: e-mail filters! Just when you thought you had everything perfected! Of course, if you need some more help on where to start (Merlin’s advice is somewhat high-level, you could digg into this post about how to set up your Gmail account to read newsgroups and mailing lists).

“Doing Getting Things Done stuff” should not be on your list of Next Actions. If it is, you’re doing something wrong.

Please feel free to leave comments with other things that should not be “Next Actions.”

Just check it out. I don’t have time, nor is there really a need, for more of a review than this: Clipmarks is Awesome.

Lifehacker has discovered for me, Yahoo! Open Shortcuts. Yahoo Search blog has a post about it. And here is Yahoo’s Help page for Open Shortcuts.

I’m so excited I can barely write…

From Yahoo’s page:

How do I use it?

Type an ! (exclamation point) followed by the name of the shortcut in the Yahoo! Search box.

!shortcut_name

Examples:

!my to navigate to “http://my.yahoo.com”
!wsf to search “weather san francisco” on Yahoo!

For shortcuts that search favorite sites or start an Internet application, you can also type optional term(s) after the shortcut name.

!shortcut_name term(s)

Examples:
!ebay lamps to search for “lamps” on Ebay
!mail bill@yahoo.com to send email to “bill@yahoo.com”

You can make your own shortcuts (otherwise it would be pretty worthless), but it does require you to have a Yahoo account (not all that surprising). For those people who use Firefox, LifeHacker points out that you can now hit Ctrl+K to jump to the built-in search bar, then type any of your shortcuts to navigate around the web. Less repetitive stress from mousing around everywhere! Long live keyboad navigation!

Nev n Dave are following up their tips with an example of how to categorize your feeds in BlogLines.

Since Nev showed what he was using as categories, I thought I’d post mine as well. They’re a little more creative than the “1 Priority” “2 Priority” system he’s got going on…

The Daily Dashes: These are the most important. I want to read them as soon as there is a post there.
-Daily
-Fantasy Basketball

Alphabetical: It took a little creative thinking to come up with the names so they’d sort in the right order.
A-List
Good Reads
Not That Important
Weekly

Bottom of the Heap:
Zero T (for Zero Tolerance, aka Quarantine)
Ziatus (Blogs that I might want to reinstate later, but for now, I can skip them)
Zonked (Blogs that I don’t want to read any more, but I don’t want to “forget” that I was once subscribed to them)

Basketball: I’ve also got a few basketball specific categories (like the Fantasy Basketball above).
Basketball - 01 - News (where I put all the “official” hoops news feeds)
Basketball - 02 (the basketball blogs that I enjoy reading)
Basketball - 03 (mostly everything else)
Summaries/Partials - Basketball (feeds that only provide a summary feed - aka Not Worth Looking At)

Gmail finally decided that adding Contact Groups to their contact management was an idea worth implementing.

<rant>
As a web developer, I realize that sometimes this stuff takes a while, but how long has Gmail been around? It took them that long to decide that having groups was a good idea and then make it happen? Is it me or does that not exactly sound like an agile company? This seems like something that could have been done two weeks by the guys they have at Google (because I know they’re a lot smarter than me). That amounts to about 8 hours a week for 14 weeks… Maybe that 20% time was taking up too much of the developers time.

Also, they didn’t even make an announcment or anything saying “You can making f’n groups now!”
</rant>

Here’s LifeHacker’s instructions on how to make a contact group in Gmail:

Gmail has been piling on a lot of new features lately, like the addition of contact groups. To set up a contact group:

1. Log in to your Gmail account.
2. Click Contacts along the left side of any Gmail page.
3. Open the Groups tab, and click Create Group.
4. Enter your contact group’s name in the Group name: field.
5. Type the contacts you’d like to include in the Group in the Add contacts: field. (Gmail’s auto-complete feature will suggest addresses from your Contacts list as you type.)
6. Click Create Group.

Yahoo has essentially eliminated the biggest competition for their My Web 2.0 by acquiring del.icio.us. I’m glad I switched over from del.icio.us to My Web a couple months ago. Why? Now I don’t have to deal with any weird integration going on between the two like I did with Flickr! The funniest part - at least for me - is that I have a draft post waiting here called “My Web 2.0 vs. del.icio.us” Now I guess I can delete that one…

Another post about the acquisition on TechCrunch.

Despite the fact that Yahoo’s “honchos” kind of came off as assholes in last night’s Apprentice, I have to applaud them for stepping up their game just when it seemed that Google was poised to take over the world. Nothing like rooting for the “underdog.”

10 tips that are BRILLIANT!

My favorite:

9. Add an ‘ignore’ category for blogs that you no longer read - this helps you remember your decision. If you ever come across the blog in the future and think “ooh, I’ll add that to my aggregator”, you’ll see that it’s something you decided wasn’t worth your time.

This should have been number 1 on their list! Okay maybe not… but it’s important to me since I feed I’ve already done a pretty good job of optimizing my feeds. This was one technique that I hadn’t thought of for a problem that I do have sometimes.

My second favorite:

7. Organise your categories not by topic (tech, java, games, news etc) but by importance and/or reading frequency.
Example categories:
Important/Must Read
Daily - blogs you check daily
Every monday - blogs you check every monday
Every friday
Weekly
Monthly
etc

I have so many basketball feeds that I finally ended up doing this last week with them… I haven’t gotten around to doing it with the rest of my feeds, but I may have to soon…

And the bronze medal goes to:

Add a ‘quarantine’ category for new blogs that you’re adding to your aggregator. After a week or so, decide whether you really want to keep that blog and move it to the appropriate category.

I have already implmented this one in my BlogLines. I called the folder Zero T (for Zero Tolerance). That way it appears all the way at the bottom of my feed folders, so I only get to read it when I’m done with everything else.

Now you can add events to your AirSet calendar without any page reloading! (Okay, it reloads once when you save the event, but only to refresh with the new event) I’m not sure if it’s a hidden div or what, but the Add Event dialog comes up on top of the calendar instead of going to a new page.

The same thing happens when you click on an event that’s already on the calendar… so you can view the event details without ever leaving the calendar page! Thanks AirSet!