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 become 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.
There are many ways of launching application on a Mac. I’ve ditched the Dock for most functions. I launch application in one of four ways:
- Some apps are automatically loaded at start-up; Firefox, Mail, etc.
- Commonly used apps I invoke using a hot key (there are many ways of organizing this)
- When focused on a file, I invoke the app for it using the right mouse button and the pop-up menu
- For uncommon applications, that I don’t remember the name of, I have a drop down menu that lists them all (I’ll explain how to organize that in another posting.
You have to launch applications to do anything and you can dither trying to work out what and how. It’s best to automate it.
The principle here is: Try to organize your application usage in a task-based way.
It pays big dividends.
File Organization
Losing files wastes masses of unproductive time. So organize them all. I use Journler as my organized file store. It’s my repository and my reference resource. It works well in that role. There may be other choices. I use the desktop as the place to save all new files. In a recent posting I explained how I’ve set up two folders on the desktop for documents and images. Read it if you want the nitty-gritty details.
The point is that I know where all the files I care about are, so I rarely waste any time searching for them. You shouldn’t need to search for files, but if I need to, then I use Spotlight or the Journler Search capability.
Sometimes I delete files in error. That’s fine because I rarely empty the trash and I look through it before I do. I also have Time Machine running, so losing files is hard to achieve, even if I’ve deleted them.
File organization is probably more important than you think it is. If you know where all your files are, you have a stunningly useful reference resource.
The overall principle here is: A place for everything and everything in its place.
Browsing
You probably use the browser a great deal, so it makes sense to use it well. I’ll discuss browser choices in depth in another posting. The point to understand here is that you can surf the Internet well or badly. You need to make sensible use of bookmarks. In particular you need to have grouping of bookmarks for every web site you actively use.
Many capabilities are opening up in the cloud, so sites like Google Docs or Google Search or Zoho, plus my Internet bank and PayPal are actually applications, not web sites. In contrast, NetVibes, Google News and many other sites I return to are just information destinations. I recommend that you reflect this fact, in your organization of bookmarks. Group application websites separately.
Also if you find a web page useful, save it somewhere immediately. I save mine in Journler (I can drag and drop URLs from the browser into the Journler folder on my desktop. That’s very fast. You can use your website history to find useful sites you’ve visited, but it’s really hard to find what you’re looking for in among months of history.
The overall principle here is: The browser is just another desktop. Use it in an organized way.
The Mac Interface
We can be Mac-specific in some areas. The following actually work well on a Mac:
- Drag and drop. You can even highlight a sentence in any application, including the browser and drag it to the desktop where it forms a file. You can drag diagrams from one application to another and it works. Try dragging anything and see what happens.
- Spaces. Brilliant idea and it works (see this posting for more details)
- Snapshots (of the screen). I use this all the time. It’s best to get an improved capability rather than the one that comes with the Mac
- Hotkeys. You can organize them and most applications abide by the informal Mac standards.
- Fonts. You can organize them effectively
- Apps. Most Mac apps are written in “the Mac way”. They therefore do what you expect them to. There are exceptions, particularly apps from Microsoft and Adobe. I use alternatives when I can but there’s no alternative to PhotoShop.
- Windows. You can make them behave with most applications. Start the app, set the window size and position where you want it and then close the app. With most Mac apps, when you start the app again the window will be where you put it at the size you made it. This is really neat but not widely known.
What doesn’t work well:
- The Dashboard. It was dumb idea, but Microsoft copied it slavishly anyway. My recommendation is never use it. Whatever you can put in the dashboard that’s useful, you can find on the web anyway.
- The Dock. Unless you’re a casual user, you need a better launcher than this.
The point here is: The Mac damn well works. Take advantage of this.
System Management
You don’t need to worry about much on the Mac, because it is largely self managing. Disk defragmentation, for example, is not required. The activity monitor gives you an easy-to-understand picture of what’s going on on your machine and provides the wonderful ability to kill an application stone dead. The Mac rarely dies. The Mac Desk Pro I’m using right now has “blue-screened” only once. (Actually the Mac gives you a black screen and a message saying that you just have to switch off). It “blue-screened” when I unplugged the keyboard. That’s it. My laptop has done it more often. It blue-screens if it overheats. Better than catching fire, I guess. I’ve had no experience ever of the Mac dying because an app died.
You do need to do a little housekeeping from time to time. There are log files and caches that can be cleaned and freeware utilities that do it for you. If you run out of disk space it’s best to buy more.
The principle here is: The Mac is mainly self-managing, which is a good thing.
In conversations with PC users I’ve come across those who will tell you for most of the above that “you can do that on a PC too.” When you follow it up, you discover that yes, technically, that’s true. But there’s a huge difference in the ease with which things can be done. So when you follow it up, you also discover that while the PC expert says it can be done, mostly, the PC expert hasn’t implemented it.
Well you can use what I’m writing about here. It’s not hard. If you don’t follow it up and do it, why did you waste your time reading this?
Click on this link: PDQ Mac to see a list of other postings on Apple Mac productivity.
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