Every little bit counts

My junior year high school English teacher expertly seared certain moments into the class's brain. He would talk about how he had room for a finite number of friends and that no new spots were available. He would talk about how he could draw a perfect circle for the zero he would give us for papers which contained the passive voice, any conjugation of "to be" and any "thing" words.

A student skeptical of the benefits of Notehand (an abbreviated handwriting style we learned) asked Mr. Bounds how much time Notehand actually saves. "Tons," he replied.

If you have aspirations to speak to software, you will learn to interact with the command line. A handy tool of the *nix command line (though you can sort of do this in Windows) is the alias command, which allows you to define your own shorthand commands. Here are a few of the aliases I use for git:

alias g='git'
alias gs='git status'
alias gcm='git commit'
alias gch='git checkout'
alias gb='git branch'
alias gl='git log'
alias gm='git merge'
alias gr='git rebase'

With these aliases in my .zshrc file, I can spend more time examining the state of my repository on the command line and less time in the mental limbo between seeking information and accurately typing the request. Time saved: Tons.

Example 2: Google Chrome allows you to set up various "search engines" if you go to Settings > Search > Manage search engines... . This lets you do a Google search by typing into your address bar with a prefix you specify, e.g. "google" for Google, "yahoo" for Yahoo, or "bing" for Bing. Of course, it's much faster to change these from these outrageous defaults to g, y, and b respectively.

Here's another point to consider: Google Chrome can treat any URL as a "search engine." "Search engine" to Chrome just means, "here's a URL template. It's got a '%s' in there somewhere. When you type your keyword, what follows will be substituted for the %s and your browser will go to that URL." This means, for us with a company intranet, that many of the intranet pages and lookups can be greatly, greatly simplified.

As an aviation example, using "metar" for "http://aviationweather.gov/adds/metars/?station_ids=%s&std_trans=standard&chk_metars=on&hoursStr=most+recent+only&chk_tafs=on&submitmet=Submit" allows me to look up the current weather conditions at Friday Harbor by typing "metar kfhr". This isn't nearly as cool as my work examples, but has the huge benefit of containing no confidential information.

Look for other little things. Watch the time saved add up. Enjoy!

"Hello there, Miss Doesn't-find-me-sexually-attractive-anymore. I just tripled my productivity." - The Simpsons, "King Size Homer"