Stay on top of your online files and emails with bookmarks

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.