Note: The "Notes on a Disorganized Mind" series of posts is about my recent efforts to stop being such a useless procrastinating bastard.
I spend over 100% of my waking time in front of a computer monitor so any attempt to make myself more efficient at achieving stuff should probably start here. Luckily enough the internet is probably one of the only places that I'm actually organized! I thought I'd do one of the most pathetic things you'e ever seen on the internet and give you a tour of my homepage. Here it is:
clicky for big
I have numbered the interesting bits to make the description easier (oh god shoot me now my life is hollow and pointless).
1: This is the last thing that should be in a post about efficiency. Meet the stumbleupon.com toolbar. Stumble Upon is essentially a community where people select sites they like (by pressing the little thumbs up button). Then anybody pressing the "Stumble!" is taken to a random site, with a probability weighted in some way by the number of people that liked it. Each site is also categorised and you can select what sort of sites you want to browse.
All in all stumbleupon is brilliant at just finding interesting things when you're feeling a bit lost or bored. Dozens of the posts on this blog were found via stumbles.
2: Tabs. I get really frustrated watching people trying to surf the net without using tabs properly. The thing most people are missing is the keyboard shortcuts.
Additionally it is useful to remember that middle clicking (pressing the scroll wheel) on a link will open it in a new tab. The main thing I use tabs for is when I hit a page with dozens of interesting links (say a bunch of clickable thumbnail pictures in a gallery or a forum with a lot of interesting threads) just run through middle clicking everything then use ctrl-tab to look at each link without having to move another muscle.
Additionally if you find a url in text form (i.e. not as a clickable link), highlight it with the mouse, hold control and hit C T V, then enter. The link is loaded in a new tab with utterly minimal amounts of fuss.
3: Google is my homepage, you might have heard of it. Google is used to "search" the "internet"
4: Google has a wonderful customisable homepage that doesn't seem to be that widely used yet. Just sign up for a google account, hit customised home and then select the modules you want to display; there are thousands of them. Each of the blocks of text is freely draggable and there are all sorts of fun toys (including pacman and tetris), but I use my google homepage mainly to show me headlines from various news agencies. The homepage is all coded up Ajax style so when working with it, it's just as responsive as dragging windows around on your own computer. I can't help but think that my interests show through a little too strongly in the left hand column here: geek blogs (boingboing and slashdot) followed by geek news (wired, scientific american and new scientist).
My homepage is beginning to feel a lot like my actual desktop now, it's usually on my screen and I'm interacting with it all the time.
5:Same as the left hand column but a little more eclectic. We have fast wikipedia search; "How to of the day" provides a daily howto guide written by the peoples of the internet on a wiki type thing, it often has some interesting stuff; dictionary word of the day, so I can improve my "number of words known"; then more news with TIME and the BBC.
6: Say hello to Remember the milk. RTM is an online task managing kit, basically a todo list on the web. With a couple of clicks I can note that a particular job needs doing and then be reminded about it (through the google homepage widget) when I'm due to actually do it.
I have seriously found that RTM has made my life appreciably better. If I need to remember someting more than overnight it goes on the list. A daily reminder about everything that needs doing really does wonders for your work ethic. It's nice for the first time in a couple of years to have confidently scheduled every single thing I want to do and know that my weekends are free (except for paying rent and reading a list).
I spend over 100% of my waking time in front of a computer monitor so any attempt to make myself more efficient at achieving stuff should probably start here. Luckily enough the internet is probably one of the only places that I'm actually organized! I thought I'd do one of the most pathetic things you'e ever seen on the internet and give you a tour of my homepage. Here it is:
clicky for big
I have numbered the interesting bits to make the description easier (oh god shoot me now my life is hollow and pointless).
1: This is the last thing that should be in a post about efficiency. Meet the stumbleupon.com toolbar. Stumble Upon is essentially a community where people select sites they like (by pressing the little thumbs up button). Then anybody pressing the "Stumble!" is taken to a random site, with a probability weighted in some way by the number of people that liked it. Each site is also categorised and you can select what sort of sites you want to browse.
All in all stumbleupon is brilliant at just finding interesting things when you're feeling a bit lost or bored. Dozens of the posts on this blog were found via stumbles.
2: Tabs. I get really frustrated watching people trying to surf the net without using tabs properly. The thing most people are missing is the keyboard shortcuts.
- Ctrl-T -- Make a new blank tab
- Ctrl-W -- Close the current tab (middle clicking on the tab also achieves this)
- Ctrl-tab -- Move to next tab
- Ctrl-[1-9] -- Move to tab number [1-9]
Additionally it is useful to remember that middle clicking (pressing the scroll wheel) on a link will open it in a new tab. The main thing I use tabs for is when I hit a page with dozens of interesting links (say a bunch of clickable thumbnail pictures in a gallery or a forum with a lot of interesting threads) just run through middle clicking everything then use ctrl-tab to look at each link without having to move another muscle.
Additionally if you find a url in text form (i.e. not as a clickable link), highlight it with the mouse, hold control and hit C T V, then enter. The link is loaded in a new tab with utterly minimal amounts of fuss.
3: Google is my homepage, you might have heard of it. Google is used to "search" the "internet"
4: Google has a wonderful customisable homepage that doesn't seem to be that widely used yet. Just sign up for a google account, hit customised home and then select the modules you want to display; there are thousands of them. Each of the blocks of text is freely draggable and there are all sorts of fun toys (including pacman and tetris), but I use my google homepage mainly to show me headlines from various news agencies. The homepage is all coded up Ajax style so when working with it, it's just as responsive as dragging windows around on your own computer. I can't help but think that my interests show through a little too strongly in the left hand column here: geek blogs (boingboing and slashdot) followed by geek news (wired, scientific american and new scientist).
My homepage is beginning to feel a lot like my actual desktop now, it's usually on my screen and I'm interacting with it all the time.
5:Same as the left hand column but a little more eclectic. We have fast wikipedia search; "How to of the day" provides a daily howto guide written by the peoples of the internet on a wiki type thing, it often has some interesting stuff; dictionary word of the day, so I can improve my "number of words known"; then more news with TIME and the BBC.
6: Say hello to Remember the milk. RTM is an online task managing kit, basically a todo list on the web. With a couple of clicks I can note that a particular job needs doing and then be reminded about it (through the google homepage widget) when I'm due to actually do it.
I have seriously found that RTM has made my life appreciably better. If I need to remember someting more than overnight it goes on the list. A daily reminder about everything that needs doing really does wonders for your work ethic. It's nice for the first time in a couple of years to have confidently scheduled every single thing I want to do and know that my weekends are free (except for paying rent and reading a list).
