There are a number of books and web sites that offer great ideas as to how you can get better at doing what you do best. It’s called “working smarter, not harder.” Here are some quick answers to working smarter with your Mac.
1. Invest in yourself. By this we mean that you spend some time “sharpening your workflow saw” and find more productive ways of working smarter.
2. Print out three months of iCal calendars Printing three months of your calendar out for a quick glance of your workload and events if things don’t change often. iCal even allows you to print any number of months ahead.
3. Keyboard shortcuts. Use the Macs keyboard shortcuts to move quickly to get things done. Keyboards are always faster than mice are and Mac keyboard shortcuts are more consistent that Windows. If you need to, you can change your shortcuts. Choose Apple menu > System Preferences and click Keyboard & Mouse. Then click Keyboard Shortcuts and select the action in the Description list that you want to change.
4. Prairie Dog Viewpoint. Step back and move the the 50,000 foot level. You need to see where you are going. Getting focused is one thing and burying your head in your task gets that one thing done, but not being aware of where you are in the scheme of things is like all speed and no direction, you get somewhere fast! Take a break, step back, and see where you are, then get focused again.
5. Automate or outsource. When you have sharpened your saw, you have taken the time to becoming more productive. But once you have learned something new you need to consider outsourcing or automate some of these tasks. Learning first a new workflow allows you to see the new process, then it is a matter of finding the higher frequency tasks and either automating them on your Mac or outsourcing them to someone that either can do it better or cheaper than you can.
6. Get better organized. Think of all of the things use use daily, weekly, monthly, etc and locate items that you use more frequently next to you and those that you use least farther or put away in a closet. Same goes for your Mac. Put folder, application, or document aliases on your desktop. You can also put folders onto the dock to access frequently used folders.
7. Use Spotlight more. you can do a Command + Space Bar and type in the application that you want to run rather than using a mouse to find the icon to double click on it in your applications folder. Or, you could just put an icon in your Dock.
8. Put your Mac on a New Years diet. Most people love the fact that they can customize their Mac, but this causes valuable computer (i.e. CPU) resources to be eaten up and slows your Mac down. Keep the eye candy and widgets to a minimum. Also, get rid of old files and applications that you have not used in 2008 and delete them.
9. Use Activity Monitor. Go to Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor and start it up to monitor your CPU usage and disk space, you can find that some of our applications are taking up way to much of your computer time and resources or you’ll need to delete for archive a number of your files
10. Clean up your desktop. Your desktop takes up a number of resources, place those files in your Documents folder for better system performance.
11. Visit Apple’s Genius Bar. Make an appointment with them. Getting another person to look at your computer can help get another viewpoint of the health of your Mac. It’s free!
There you have it, some ideas to take on the new year 2009.
