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.

One of the biggest problems I have with Gmail is the way you attach stuff. Gmail outperforms every other app with this exception, the time Outlook can save using drag and drop is totally lost with web based clients. gAttach is a lightweight application designed to change that, although as you will see, only in some cases.

The application allows you to use the “send to email” shortcuts in Windows to attach messages to Gmail messages (or Google Apps Mail). You select the files in Outlook, Windows Photo Gallery and most importantly the exporer interface (the Windows interface). It works much like Outlook, just select the files you need and click the email button, or send to email link via the right click context menu. A message will appear showing the attaching progress, you may need to log in, and the message will be saved as a draft. You can opt to access this draft immediately by launching Gmail, or to just save it as a draft without accessing it at once.

This is a huge, huge help in two cases. One is if you have a load of files to send someone, but you don’t want to zip them up. Even if you have 3-5 it may be more productive to use gAttach. This will save you the browsing and manual attaching you usually need to go through. The other case is when you want to create 5-6 drafts quickly with different attachments, or perhaps just save a backup copy for yourself on your Gmail server. In this case the fact that you do not need to access the interface all the time is a huge time bonus.

The only time I find that the app is of no use if you have 1-2 attachments to add and you want to send the email right away, which is most often the case for me. Since the files need to be attached, you may need to log in and the message is saved as a draft, Gmail is loaded in a new window so will need to load, this may take more time than actually just doing things through the Gmail interface.

Nevertheless, gAttach can save you a boatload of time if you have some serious attaching to do and I can heartily recommend it to anyone, it works like a charm, thanks to Freewaregenius for their great find.

Did you know that you can use google for much more than surfing? Apart from being able to just search websites you can get the local time anywhere, get stock quotes, use it as a simple calculator, and so much more. Here are a few tricks to make you a more productive Google user.

Caluclator

This is a feature I use a whole lot and it’s extremely simple. Just type in a simple expression and Google will solve it for you. I think the calculator goes as far as square roots, so if you need your quadratic equations solved look elsewhere. However for simple multiplication tasks or additions, just write in what you need like so:

“126+3235″
“76*12″

Currency converter

This is something I tried a few months back because I was converting currencies a lot and I thought, hey, maybe Google has this. So I wrote “420 USD in HUF” which neatly converted my $420 into Hungraian Forints. To use this you need to know the three letter abbreviation of the currency you need, but looking that up is just a few seconds. Be sure to always caps all the characters in the currency’s name though or else it won’t work. Here’s the syntax again:

“125 USD in GBP”
“300 EUR in USD”

Time finder

Finding the time anywhere is really easy with Google, all you need to do is prefix any city with “time”. The cool thing about this is that Google lists all found cities, since there are four “Plymouth’s” for example, and seeing them all listed, and their location makes finding any time a cinch, just use:

“time Plymouth”
“time Budapest”

Weather

Finding the weather in any city is exactly the same as finding the time, just prefix the city with “weather” and you’ll get forecasts for anywhere. Sadly this doesn’t work as flexibly as the time option, you won’t get all the cities listed if you just type Plymouth, but it’s still a quick and easy way to get a forecast, just type:

“weather Budapest”
“weather Los Angeles”

Unit conversion

I used to live in the US, but since I have been using meters and kilograms for 20 years, so I’m a bit out of touch with pounds and inches. In these cases unit conversion is really handy, but you usually have to visit a site for that which takes way to long. Just type it into Google! You can convert a lot of types here, just use the following syntax:

“16mi in km”
“75kg in lbs”

Spell checking

I don’t know if this is a real feature or not, but if you don’t know how to spell a word, just type it into Google, if you misspell it, Google will ask you if you meant something else. If you type recieve instead of receive, Google will say: “Did you mean receive?”. The functions here a pretty limited and in some extremely rare words may not work, but for the simple spell checking of one word it’s perfect.

Remember the Milk is one of my favorite task managers, but there are so many options that you may get overwhelmed, or not use them because they just take too much time to implement into your work flow. There are a handfull of handy shortcuts you can use to ease all these tasks and navigate the RTM interface swiftly.

Multiple editing

Multiple editing is the one mode which can save you a boatload of time. You can enter tags, places, URL’s completion information for any tasks you like at once, or you can mark them complete en masse. Just press “m” to enable multiple mode and from then on, when you select more than one task you will be editing them all at once. Handy lines to the right will enable you to visualize this better, and also to help you notice that you’re in multiple mode when you want to be in single edit mode. If you want to switch back, just press “m” again.

Editing task specifics

When creating a task you need to click on tags, then click on tag, enter it, click on location, enter it, click on time spent and so on, and while these are small additions to the time of task creation, they still amount to a considerable waste of time. There is a letter shortcut however for each task property, so when adding a task all you need to do is press “u” for url, enter it, then press enter, press “s” to change tags, enter them and press enter. While this sounds longer written down it’s actually about 30% faster initially and when you learn the shortucts it shaves at least 50% off your task creation time. Here are the shortcuts to all the properties in the order they are found in RTM, and also the shortcuts for assigning a priority on the fly.

• r - Rename
• d -Due
• f - Repeat
• g - Time estimate
• s - Tags
• l - Location
• u - URL
• p - Postpone
• y - Add a note
• 1 through 3 - Priorities

Navigation and Misc

Apart from just changing and adding tasks you can navigate easily around the interface with just letters. “a” selects all the tasks visible while “n” deselects all tasks, both logical choices and highly productive, especially the select none option. You can easily move up, down and select an item with “k”, “j” and “i” respectively. Another way to easily navigate and input details is the tab key which will save your input and move to the next field. The last keyboard shortcut I use a lot is the delete key which of course deletes the selected task(s).

If you use these shortcuts a bit you will get very used to them and your productivity will soar, shaving precious time off what you spend adding and modifying tasks which in itself is not an effective task.

When they rolled out some new features in Gmail a while back, they changed their link structure a bit. This enabled a lot of productivity short cuts, my favorite of which is the bookmarking of searches.

This week I have been working on Blogtastique orders and I have been searching for emails sent to my address, with some specifics inside. I won’t really use this all the time, so creating a label is not necessary, but this week I have performed this search about 50 times. If you have similar need, here’s a handy tip to help you save some time.

Perform the search you need, and bookmark the result page like you would any other page. Press CTR+D (for IE and Firefox) and type a description and place the bookmark. Now when you navigate to that bookmark you will automatically go to the results of that search.

What I love about it is that if you do this in the same tab as you normal Gmail interface Gmail won’t be loaded again, so the results pop up in about 2 seconds. This trick can save your minutes each day, it has saved me at least an hour this week!

If you have a domain and a webhost, you may be lucky enough to have Fantastico at your disposal. I use Bluehost with all my pages and I have it, it enables me to install applications like Wordpress, Joomla, Durpal, php Wiki and others in seconds, without any uploading and extensive customization.

You are taken through some very short steps where you can enter your username, password, and some other data which is crucial to your install. All other configurations like creating your databases are done under the hood and need no supervision. This method is great for almost any blogger, with the exception of some very advanced power-users who need extra functionality.

Fantastico for me is not really the tool for installing stuff, but for trying them out. Indeed I installed Wordpress first with Fantastico, and now I’m creating custom themes and helping people out with it through Blogtastique. There are many others to choose from though, from blogs and CRM applications, to shopping carts and discussion boards.

The backend of Fantastico is frequently updated, they lag behind release dates only a bit, about a week or so as I’ve seen in the case of Wordpress. If you want to try out some of those complicated scripts that are great for your website Fantastico could be the way to try out and implement them.