As days end, and less than satisfactory tasks are accomplished, I'm reminded more and more how precious time is. It feels like days should be reckoned as < 24 hours, given sleeping, eating, communication and all the other must-dos.
Scarcity however often, as with time, implies value. I'm constantly on the lookout for more edification on time management and I've noticed a few things that free up more minutes. I find them to be little-known time hacks. Regardless of how popular they actually are, hope they prove handy.
Scarcity however often, as with time, implies value. I'm constantly on the lookout for more edification on time management and I've noticed a few things that free up more minutes. I find them to be little-known time hacks. Regardless of how popular they actually are, hope they prove handy.
Here goes:
- Make googling even speedier with Google Quick Scroll. This handy Chrome extension offers you a quick jump (or scroll really!) to the text where your search query was found, and highlights it for you. Truthfully it doesn't always work, but it’s proved quite useful in moments of API searches when I seem to forget what method I've just googled (I'm sure I’m not the only one, right?).
Screen capture from Android Message documentation, using QuickScroll - Faster video playback speed on YouTube or VLC player.Truly amazing. You can watch DIY, educational videos, interviews or just about any other video really on YouTube upto twice as fast (or slow). Make sure you have YouTube html5 option set in your browser so you can ingest more videos in less time!
If you're uncertain if you have html5 enabled in your browser, below is what YouTube video options should look like without/with html5 set. As you can see, there're no playback Speed options if html5 isn't enabled.
Screen captures from YouTube
I noticed that you can toggle the html5 video feature (from here) in both Firefox and IE, however on Chrome I can't find a toggle to turn off (not that I want to).
If you’re watching a video offline, VLC has pretty convenient speed-up/down shortcuts, the ] speeds the video by 0.1 - not sure if there’s a ceiling for this - and [ slows it down by 0.1 (tested on Windows).
Word of caution though, I've noticed that there is a slight risk to becoming a tad more impatient with speedier videos. I now seldom watch MOOCs in normal speed, and most YouTube videos are hastened, and I think it’s bound to boost my impatience - at least just a little! I try to mitigate that by setting videos to normal speed every now and then.
- Go technicolor! Color coding is a blazingly fast way to spot information. Back when I was a university student, my classes schedule was basically a grid of colors, embellished with the lecture hall/room number and instructors’ names - but no module names. For completeness, I’d have a color map below it incase I forgot. This is such a robust technique, you can also color code your tasks by category (eg. study, work, social, entertainment, etc), and highlight a paper-based to-do list or an online one that supports color categories (think trello! My current favourite). Color is so versatile, efficient and frankly plain pretty!
- Archive what you don’t need now. I’m on the learning curve (probably will forever be) on trying to manage incoming knowledge, prioritising, consuming, and - hopefully - acting upon it (I would not want to graph how often the latter finds the spotlight in my life!). I've heard a tip from Pat Flynn that was rather relieving; only consume content that aligns with your current goals, while archiving other content that you may be interested in. I’m struggling to formulate an archive orchestra at the moment. There’s a few notes on evernote, a chorus of trello lists and a bit background bookmarking chimes! If you have any better way to streamline your archivable (or to-be-read) content (and be able to return to them!), please do share!
As a side note, I think the perfect content inequality formula would be in the lines of
content produced >= content consumed >= content archived - Do one thing only at a time. Classic, but worth repeating (at least to myself!). I constantly try to juggle multiple tasks at once, listening to audio/catching-up on YouTube while practicing my italian on duolingo. It doesn’t work. It just doesn't work. Alas, really wish it would though. But realistically-speaking, if I’m going to glean anything from my lingual practice and from the content I’m listening to, I need to do them sequentially and not in parallel. Sigh.
What are your time-saving tips? Any little-known ones that have big impact on your time? Any ones I've mentioned that seem convenient? Or perhaps impractical? Feel free to comment your thoughts below!
Hope those ideas were useful for you, if so feel free to share!
Till the next post;
Noha Kareem
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