Mmmm....
Since you’re surfing it anyway, surf it with a purpose instead of wasting time looking for Paris Hilton’s latest antics (we miss you Paris!). Use that time to check up on your personal and business status. Check bank account balances and sales figures. If you’re a software developer, do a pass through yesterday and last night’s commits.
A really cool way to make this easy is to set up Firefox (or any other tabbed browser) to automatically open all the web pages necessary for due diligence through a single bookmark, or even better, make the morning due diligence your home page.
Here are the pages that my “Home” page launches in Firefox:
- Gmail (of course)
- clicktime.com for time tracking.
- The Trac website for my main project. This is where I read through the latest subversion commits.
- My personal PBWiki.
- The BaseCamp page for the project above. This allows me to check up on overall progress of the project.
- Bank account page. I do most of my banking with one, large (and nameless) bank, which has an excellent web interface (making up for lack of customer service).
As I mentioned, all of these links open as a set of tabs as my browser “Home” page. It’s very convenient, and I highly recommend this to anyone who is going to be drinking their coffee first thing in the morning in front of the computer come hell or high water.
There’s more!
As it turns out, I have more than one project going. For each of these projects, I have a set of tabbed browser pages that are invoked by a single bookmark. For example, my other coding project is invoked with these tabs:
Other projects include a writing project and Collab21. Having everything necessary collected in one set of browser tabs is incredibly useful, and really allows me to leverage my time. I find it a structure that is conducive to creativity, without imposing a large burden of overhead. Note also that these are mostly web applications as well. Very convenient!
Lastly, I ask myself: “Have I communicated with customers today?”
How are you spending your morning? Is this productivity technique useful to you? Why or why not?
Note: Originally published as is: Feb 2, 2009 @ 14:21
