Use OS X style stacks in Windows

This is by far my most popular article for some reason. Take a look inside and you will find that you can use Rocket Dock with a plugin to create stacks just like in OS X. I don’t think you get the settings and flexibility of OS X, but you get a nice way to browse files in a folder, or open some applications that look good on any desktop.

Separating work and play with user identities

This article was even covered by Lifehacker, a way I used to separate some aspects of my life so I can focus better on the matter at hand. If you work a lot at your laptop, but also use it for recreation, this is a great way to deal with distractions and whatnot.

One shortcut collection to rule them all

This post simply describes a great site I found which contains all the shortcuts you will probably ever need. Grouped by application, you will find all shortcuts for apps from Microsoft Word to Adobe Photoshop, with online apps like Gmail and Yahoo Mail included as well!

This may be somewhat of an obvious tip, but since I just thought of this for my personal use, perhaps there are others out there who are missing this productivity tip. I store some documents online, especially on Google Docs and so far I have always navigated to my docs page and then selected the document there.

However, you can link directly to the document in question, which means you can bookmark it as well. This also means that you can create a keyword which lets you jump there in an instant. I am keeping track of my expenses with a detailed sheet and when I type “exp” into the URL bar and press enter, the sheet loads in a jiffy.

In fact, with the nifty extension called Firefly extension you can use Firefox like a file manager and you can create bookmarks to specific folders on your hard drive just like you do on the web, which means you can also navigate there with keywords.

Oh, I almost forgot, you can also use the same method with emails in Gmail. Clicking on an email yields a URL which is static, so you can bookmark it and get to the email fast. I frequently get emails which I check 30 times before I don’t need them any more and this method helps me a lot and saves me a lot of time, making me more productive. One drawback is that URL’s are stored for conversations, which means that if you have a conversation consisting of 50 emails, you are probably better off with the search bar.

Browsing and file management were two things for me that somehow never really came together. However Firefly, a Firefox extension gives you the power of a file manager right inside your browser, let’s take a look if it’s any good.

Once installed you can simply type a path like “c:” to get to the root of the drive to view files. They will be shown as a list and you will be able to perform simple file management tasks via the Firefl toolbar, drag and drop, or keyboard shortcuts.

You won’t find the power of Windows Commander or XYplorer, but for everyday basic needs its great, and gives you a lot of productivity by saving you the time it takes to switch between apps. You basically just get the interface to do cutting, pasting, copying, renaming, and some more basic tasks, but that’s really all I need. One unique option is that you can switch the number of viewing pane, horizontal and vertical alike. Creating 8 views might seem like chaos, but it may save a lot of time in some cases.

What I find most useful is the way you can navigate around using Firefox and Firefly combined. Since we are in a browser, we can use the versatility of bookmarks to navigate all around our computer. If you access a remote directory often, just create a bookmark with the keyword “dir” for example and whenever you type dir into the address bar you will be swooped there. With a few of these bookmarks and the ease of use of Firefly, you will be performing file actions much more productively than before.

Firefly fills a space which is rarely catered for by the software industry and it really can make you more productive, but I will still not use it probably. I don’t really know why, I just don’t like third party file browsers, I use the simple old Windows interface, so sue me.

I have been mucking around with some social media aggregation sites and my most recent venture is FriendFeed, which I’ve seen around the web and have known about it for a while, but never really got around to trying it. Well, I managed to get there, and here’s what I found.

What’s most striking about FriendFeed is the design, and perhaps this is why I might choose it above others (plus it supports the most sites). FriendFeed has no style. I don’t mean it is distasteful, but it has no style as in it has a header and then you just get a list on a white background. This is a refreshing design, catering to the puritan needs in us. I see this as an absolute positive aspect of the site, I very much enjoy the clean form, allowing me to concentrate on content instead.

Sites supported are also wide and varied, from obvious ones like Youtube and StumbleUpon to smaller sites like Furl and Tipjoy. There is also a lot of variation, for example Library Thing is supported, which is a social Book catalog and discovery tool, but you can also add music sites like Last.fm, and many others, totaling up to 41 great services.

Bloggers will love FriendFeed because it not only allows you to add your blog, but other blogs where you write. You can specify blogs with multiple authors and only show the stories you wrote. Since I do most of my writing on other sites this is a great way for me to showcase this, previously I could only achieve this with a complicated but of php.

You can also create rooms for specific topics, groups and so on, creating and sharing content only relevant to that room. This is awesome for bloggers too to promote the topic of their blog, but also study groups, friends, and so on.

Overall I like FriendFeed a lot. I haven’t made my decision on the best one, but FriendFeed is currently at number 1. Simplicity and number of features make this service one of the easiest ones to use and with the ways you can display it on your blog, possible the most productive too.

Oh God, this is going to be a lecture isn’t it? Well, yes and no, you will see that this post is about being honest to yourself when setting up your own goals and projects, since without this you are doomed right from the beginning. Let’s take a look at a financial example which shows this in numbers.

I recently started some money management and I was faced with my credit card statemet. Now my credit card has an available balance of about $400, so I could write that I have $50 cash on me $300 in my savings account and $400 on my credit car, adding up to $750. This is technically correct, but the reality is very different, since my credit card is actually spent out, I have $400 left out of the original $1800. This means that I owe the bank $1400, and in reality my total is not $750, but -$950, a very different picure. This is a very obvious example, but small “white” lies in our every day life stop us from performing as we should because we cheat on ourselves.

If you know you’re a lazy type of guy for example that’s not a problem. The problem comes when you schedule too much work and you say “I’ll get it done somehow”, when it’s obvious you won’t because you’re a lazy type of guy. If schedule only what you can do you will be more efficient, productive and you won’t be in allthat much stress.

This is why it is vitally important to know your limits and not to lie to yourself. All you will accomplish is temporary, your problems will come back, since you are not solving them, merely hiding them. When scheduling, commiting, etc, always face the real situation and don’t hide behind numbers or half truths.

If you have trouble deciding weather an undertaking should be completed or not, a task should be defered or not, if you should be finishing your work now or tomorrow, you may be able to use a technique widely implemented in economics and company finances called cost-benefit analysis. I don’t want to get into technical details, but basically you are calculating if a project is worth doing, you are asking yourself if the benefit is worth the cost. Even if you can’t put numbers to your cost benefit analysis, taking some time to think about stuff may put you on the right track.

Basic cost-benefit analysis

If you need to make a quick decision, take 5 minutes, sit down and at least make an effort to make it a good and educated one. A crude, but effective way of creating yourself a quick cost benefit analysis is the positive vs negative list. List the positive aspects of your potential decision, but on the other side of the ledger, put down all the negative things as well. This is most productive if you try your best to create roughly equal pairs. Go from biggest benefit and largest cost downward on the scale. This may show you tht the costs grossly outweight the benefits or vice versa.

That’s basically the idea behind any personal cost benefit analysis. You can assign weights to specific items, the entry “I might make $1.000.000″ probably outweighs “I will need to make 100 photocopies”, unless you’re very, very lazy.

Advanced techniques, criteria

Life is of course not black and white, so in many cases you will want to make a decision even if costs outweight the benefits. Using the weighing method you can assign numbers to each entry. You can then add everything up, where 0 means costs equal benefits, negative numbers mean larger costs and positive numbers mean higher benefits. You can designate borders for accepting a decision even if it is costly, for example you can deem -5 to be the highest cost you will accept.

Productivity with cost benefit analysis

If you want to take this method seriously you can take it to the next step by creating steps to take, standardizing your method. If you have to make some similar decisions frequently you can draw up a table in Excel containing the frequent costs and benefits of these situations. You can then easily fill out this table and add some entries on the fly too, creating a quick CB analysis for yourself each time.

This will help you make the best out of each situation, and the whole thing really doesn’t take more than a few minutes in most cases. Do you have some similar methods you use? Please let us know in the comments!

“If you want to help out Hack Your Day and you’re looking for a hosting solution please choose Bluehost and sign up using this affiliate link. I can personally vouch for this company, apart from offering the best services - unlimited bandwidth for example - they have the best customer care ever. If you need a management solution please also consider Nozbe a great GTD based application.”