Tag: grind-skills

In our computer-driven age, quite possibly the greatest “Grind Skill” that everyone could benefit from, aside from knowing how to type, is knowing and using keyboard combinations to perform necessary functions in lieu of using your mouse!

The mouse (or touchpad in the case of laptops) is a fantastic and integral part of using a computer. It has made the computer incredibly user friendly and it’s one-size-fits-all applicability means that it is the de facto universal execution device all computer users have grown to love.

Handicapping your productivity with a little mouse

Unfortunately, near-total reliance on a mouse (As in, using it for almost every computer process except typing) will dramatically and unnecessarily handicap your computer use and waste untold hours, and ultimately days, of your time. This is because whenever you have to switch from typing mode to use a mouse, your hand (typically right) must move off of the keyboard and over to the mouse and then back again. For a very simple operation like bolding a word or copying and pasting some text, the time taken to move hands off the keyboard and back is insignificant by itself but adds up to an incredible amount of time when added up. When you consider that computers are here to stay, and for the foreseeable future, we will continue to use QWERTY keyboards and a mouse or other cursor-based hardware to navigate the virtual spaces of software, hardly any grind skill could be more important than maximizing the use of both devices. Since the keyboard is how we input data, our hands actually produce* when they are kept at the keyboard. The more time they stay on the keyboard, the more time we produce and the more efficiently we use our time.

That the problem is waste time moving hand to mouse and back is something you must first acknowledge on a very basic level, and I’m not advocating throwing away your mouse! What I am advocating is that you wake up to how a mouse is handicapping your productivity and actively choose to seek out and implement ways to use the keyboard to accomplish tasks that you normally relegate to the mouse!

If you’re new to the idea of using your keyboard instead of your mouse to “do stuff” on your computer, the idea of learning thousands of tips and tricks on the keyboard to improve your efficiency is no doubt daunting. Thankfully, no one who has mastered this grind skill was required to memorize them all at once. The beauty of this grind skill is that it can be implemented piece-wise, and the skill will build on itself over time. The key is being aware of the problem and working to improve your implementation!

For those of you who are already using your keyboard for certain tasks (I include myself in this category, obviously), be aware that you could almost certainly be using more hot keys and keyboard combinations. As with so many grind skills, mindfulness about how we spend our time on mundane tasks is the key to improving those tasks and making ourselves more efficient so that we can stay on top of the important jobs we want to complete!

Going forward, I will be writing on various hot keys and keyboard combinations to use. As there is such an enormous wealth of information involved in this uber-Grind Skill, it will take some time to get it all published. For now, I’d like to start with some basics.

Using the Ctrl or Control key**

The Ctrl key is typically used in conjunction with a letter or number to perform a “hot key” function, as in you hold both the Ctrl key down at the same time as a letter to perform the function, thus these combinations will be expressed as Ctrl+[the letter/number]. Many novice computer-users have managed to learn Ctrl based hot key functions like Ctrl+b to bold or Ctrl+c to copy or Ctrl+v to paste. The “hot key” moniker typically applies to using these [Ctrl+]-based keyboard combinations.

Try it out. Open up a text editor of your choice. Use your mouse (It’s ok!) and highlight this sentence. Press Ctrl+c. Go to the text editor and use the mouse to click into the input box: press Ctrl+v. Voila!

Using the Alt key

The Alt key is perhaps the most underutilized keyboard key in existence. Many people know a great deal of the Ctrl-based hot keys, but continue to almost universally ignore the power of the Alt key. In most all programs, the Alt key takes you to the top most menu-bar in an application. You can test this out if you open up Internet Explorer (Referenced here because most all PC users have this application). If you open IE and press Alt, you will then see that you are “up” on the menu bar and the various options on the bar have an underlined letter like File or Edit. What this means is that, once Alt has been pressed (and released!), if you then hit the “f” key, you will expand the “File” menu. From there, new functions will be have a letter underlined. Here, again, pressing the letter will either expand the sub-menu or execute a command. Unlike Ctrl-based functions, Alt-based functions are typically expressed like: Alt, [letter], [letter] whereby the comma means you release the key after each instance.

Try it out. In Internet Explorer, press Alt, a, a. This will open up the “Favorites” dialogue box in IE 7 and allow you to add this page to your Favorites! Yeah, you probably don’t want to bookmark this page, but this gives you an idea. Alternatively, you can hit Alt, f, a to bring up the “Save As” dialogue; again, this is just to demonstrate how the Alt function works.

Unlike Ctrl-based hot keys, which you essentially have to discover on your own, Alt-based keyboard combinations require no memorization. Simply pressing “Alt” will show you what letters will do what, and so on. The beauty of the Alt key is that you can learn new functions all the time simply based on the keyboard combinations you find yourself using the most. The more you need to “Save As,” the more times you’ll hit Alt, f, a. Before long, you’ll be using this keyboard combination without thinking about it and “Save As” will be as fluid a motion as typing the word “cat.”

Again, the key is awareness. The next time you need to perform a function that would require you to take the mouse to the menu bar, try Alt.

Using the Tab key

Tab is not just for indenting. Pressing the tab key will toggle the focus within a window forward to whatever the next input area is. On a website, tab will scroll you through hyperlinks. You can witness this by just holding “tab” down on this window. Combining “tab” with “shift” will do this same process in the reverse direction. Check it out.

The Alt+Tab hot key

The bain of managers everywhere and the salvation of employees is the Alt-Tab key combination. Alt+Tab brings up a window that allows you to toggle between windows open on your destktop.

Try it out. Adding “shift” as in Alt+Shift+Tab will take you through open windows in reverse.

What’s the point? For one, imagine if you are at work but not working — like on reddit.com or perezhilton.com. Your boss comes in. Without Alt+Tab, this could send your right hand scrambling for your mouse and moving for the “X” or minimize button. Comparatively, with Alt+Tab and your left hand still resting on the keyboard, you can quickly toggle back to the “work” screen of choice, like PowerPoint or Excel. Your employer will almost certainly be none the wiser!

Outside of goofing off at work, Alt+Tab is very useful when you have multiple windows open. It can also be used in concert with other hot keys to dramatically amplify your productive. Imagine copying from one program, Alt+Tabbing to another, and pasting all without leaving the keyboard.

That is the power of hot keys and keyboard combinations.

Homework

Clearly replacing mouse-reliance with hot keys and keyboard combinations takes some habit-changing effort on your part. However, you will be amazed at how adding single hot keys and keyboard combinations in a piecemeal fashion can save you truly insane amounts of time.

Going forward

There are numerous ways to use hot keys. In my day-to-day grind, I use hot keys and keyboard combinations most in Gmail, Excel, and more generally in other applications. There are a few more universal hot keys that you should know about (like Alt+Tab). Stay tuned for more!

* Exception is graphic design, and hot keys are still very important here, as well.

** I know that many people are increasingly using Macs, which have an Apple key. Many of the Windows-based hot keys translate over to Macs (as they transfer over to Linux Ubuntu). Perhaps at some point I’ll have a Mac and learn the specific intricacies of this O/S, but for now, this grind skill will be primarily focused on Windows and Windows-based software.

Grind Skills Reading

• Giving up the Mouse: Using Hot Keys
• Making the Most of Google Search
• Use a Feed Aggregator
• On Shaving, Shaving Cream and Razors
• Grind Skills: Mastering the Mundane of Everyday Life

The Importance of Search

Excepting the ability to read and write, perhaps the most important skill in our modern digital life is the ability to search the Internet. Using search engines has become an integral part of our day-to-day existence. It’s hard to remember how we got along without the ability to find the most obscure answers to our questions by merely typing a few words into google.com.

Though there are competitors to Google Search, Google is so pervasively used that you’ll often overhear someone responding to a spoken question with, “Did you google it?” There’s even a snarky website that generates queries to send to apparently clueless Internet noobs: check out “Let me google that for you.” Yahoo search comes in at a distant second place whereas Google search dominates: some 72% of U.S. searches went through Google in January 2009.

Of course, we so frequently google to find the information we need that we hardly think about how we could be doing it better. Thus, the grind skill (What are “Grind Skills?”) of the day is maximizing Google Search.

Confessing Ignorance and Requesting Help

Before I explain how I make the most use of Google search, I need to reiterate the purpose of discussing grind skills. Grind skills is about show-and-tell: by blogging what I know, you see both what I know and more importantly, what I don’t know. I blog about “grind skills” to encourage a collaborative effort of knowledge-sharing, the end goal of which is to save everyone time by spreading the best practices about the mundane tasks of everyday life.

If there is a Google search technique that you find particularly useful, please tell me about it in the comments to this post or email me at [email protected]. I’ll make updates to this post as any new google search grind skills are suggested!

How I make the most of Google Search

• Site specific searches — Perhaps one of the most useful Google search features is the ability to restrict search results to a single site or even a single folder on a site. You do this by typing your normal query and then following it with site:[the domain name here].For example, let’s say you wanted to find every post on proteinpower.com that has the words “evolution” and “carbohydrates.” You’d run this query: [ evolution carbohydrates site:proteinpower.com ]. At the present moment, that query returns about 130 results — that’s not terrible but perhaps we can do better by narrowing down our query even further.A quick scan of the top 10 results tells you that proteinpower.com can be divided up between the forums at www.proteinpower.com/forum/ and Dr. Michael Eades blog at www.proteinpower.com/drmike/. Let’s say you only want to see the results on from Dr. Mike. Just change your query to be: [ evolution carbohydrates site:proteinpower.com/drmike/ ]. Suddenly you’ve reduced the results from 130+ to only 56! Even better.Staying on the subject of nutrition, I often use site search to quickly consult my go-to health gurus — i.e. doing a mash-up site search on [ insulin sensitivity ] for [ site:proteinpower.com ], [ site:marksdailyapple.com ], and [ site:freetheanimal.com ] all at once by using the string [ insulin sensitivity site:proteinpower.com OR site:freetheanimal.com OR site:marksdailyapple.com ] (Note: “OR” needs to be capitalized!). Pretty nifty, huh?

  Google powered site specific search is incredibly useful. It is a rare day that I ever use a website’s built-in search feature instead of just doing a custom [ site: ] search through google. There are widespread applications of site search and if you have any neat tricks for using site: queries, please do tell!

• Math, conversions, and definitions — You may not realize that not only can you type in math equations into google to have them be calculated [ 25*13658945 ] = 341,473,625. You can also have google do conversions between different units: [ 170 lbs to kg ] = 77.1107029 kilograms, or up-to-date currency conversion [ 50 USD to euros ] = 38.1417347 Euros.Math and conversion can both be useful, but I use google to define words numerous times a day. To do this, just type [define: (the word) ]; for example, [ define: anthropomorphic ]. Google define can also be successfully used for phrases or idioms: [ define: penny for your thoughts ]. I like using google for word definitions because it typically consults numerous sources and lists the results in a neat, ad-less fashion.
• Who’s talking about you? — This one is mostly for folks who have their own websites. If you want to find out what other websites are linking to a particular domain, for example [ link:justinowings.com ]. Like site search, you can get granular and search for specific URL, too.
• Modifiers you should keep in the back of your mind — You can subtract words from your search by putting a minus sign directly in front of the words you don’t want in your search like [ justin owings -implode ]. Alternatively, you can use an asterisk to signify a wild card such as [ obama site:*.gov ] or use quotes or a plus sign to make sure google doesn’t search synonyms (By default, google will search for synonyms). Good to know in the off chance you’ll need them, these modifiers are all covered in the Google search basics link referenced below.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion there are other techniques I employ with Google search that I’m neglecting to enumerate here. As I think of more, I’ll be sure to update this post.

Are there google search techniques you love but I apparently don’t use? Do tell.

Additional reference documents on Google Search

• Google search basics as explained by Google — this is a helpful overview of how to use Google search and covers the basics of how search works. It’s a helpful refresher course though it fails to discuss some of the more advanced search techniques.
• Google Search “Quick Reference” from GoogleGuide — a nice overview of various advanced search operators you can use with Google. Some of these operators are obvious (as in googling [ weather atlanta ga ]). A few are “cool” even as there aren’t many instances where I could actually make use of them (i.e. [ justin owings intext:implode ]). Finally, I’m not sure they all work and the guide’s last update was in September 2008.

Grind Skills Reading

• Giving up the Mouse: Using Hot Keys
• Making the Most of Google Search
• Use a Feed Aggregator
• On Shaving, Shaving Cream and Razors
• Grind Skills: Mastering the Mundane of Everyday Life

The Grind

How much time do we spend on the routine grinds of everyday life? From “Nine to Five” we’re engrossed in tasks such as navigating software, Internet research or managing email. From work, we commute home to find household chores like cooking, cleaning or laundry (or kids!). Even leisure activities like catching up on favorite websites, finding a TV show to watch or finding a book to read can have unseen, tangential time-costs. Every day we spend an immense amount of time doing mundane things that, while necessary, are not necessarily enjoyable. They all amount to our grind.

We resign to performing these little duties because they must be done. Unfortunately, the day-in and day-out repetition of our grind habitualizes our inefficiency, thereby blinding us to the way we do things. Our daily grinds waste our time and we don’t even realize it.

Learning Grind Skills

Given the above obstacles, how do we go about mastering the mundane?

One way to hack our grind is by inquiring about how others do things. Of course, this approach is problematic for the same reason we fail to see our own inefficiencies — unless they have actively worked to improve their grind, our efficient friends and coworkers usually don’t realize their own efficiencies. Everyone assumes the way they do it is the way everyone else does it even as this is often not the case.

Okay, so what can you do?

Be more aware

Simply suspecting there might be a better way to do things, you’re more likely to catch an offhand comment or pick up on someone else’s behavior. From there, you can inquire further as to what they mean and/or what they are doing.

By way of example, fresh out of school, I worked in public accounting, which required hours of work navigating spreadsheets via Microsoft Excel. I knew a few of the most common “hot keys” like those for copying/pasting, saving, printing, etc. It was only when I overheard one colleague asking another how to do a particular spreadsheet task via a keyboard progression instead of using the mouse that I realized my understanding of Excel was rudimentary. Just this incremental understanding amounted to an Excel epiphany. I soon was adding more mouse-less spreadsheet mastery to my repertoire. Within a month I was amazing co-workers, people who considered themselves Excel gurus, at how quickly I could navigate and create a spreadsheet. My improvement was akin to typing 100 words per minute instead of the age-old “hunt and peck.”

Improved awareness heightens observation, thereby increasing the likelihood of accidental learning. The trick is in being aware of how you do things currently while acknowledging their might be better ways. From there, look for clues that others are accomplishing the same thing in a different manner. Be comfortable enough to inquire further, understand their methods and experiment with them on your own.

Amplify awareness through exposure

Surround yourself with competent individuals and observe how they do things. Expose yourself to people who think and act differently than you. This process can be uncomfortable if it breaks you away from your cocooned “routine.” Rather than be uncertain or fearful, look forward to the challenge of confronting the status quo. Exposure in conjunction with awareness can dramatically increase your chance of accidentally learning a revolutionary grind skill.

Practice

Mundane mastery can result from an excessive amount of experience. There’s only so much practice I plan to have folding laundry though, so this method of learning can have limited returns. However, for the tasks that you spend an enormous amount of time on, taking the time to investigate better ways to manage that grind should be a given. Learning these tried and true skills of mastery should then become your goal.

About laziness

Sometimes we know outright (or suspect) that there are better ways to do things but are too lazy to acquire these skills. I consider myself a lazy person, but even so, I have realized that the effort I put into learning a grind skill is a front-loaded cost that has monstrous long-term benefits. Just look at typing or even more basic — reading.

So what are some grind skills, anyway?

Stay tuned as I blog about the grind skills I’ve acquired such as staying on top of the blogosphere, email management and the aforementioned mastery of keyboard shortcuts (over reliance on a mouse) as applied to general software. If you can think of any grind skills you’d like to share, please comment or contact me.

There are more efficient ways to manage routine tasks, and if we can learn these “grind skills,” we can master the mundane and and find time where none before could be found.

Grind Skills Reading

• Giving up the Mouse: Using Hot Keys
• Making the Most of Google Search
• Use a Feed Aggregator
• On Shaving, Shaving Cream and Razors
• Grind Skills: Mastering the Mundane of Everyday Life

Note: The following is written out of personal experience; I cannot attest to the application of any of this knowledge to shaving anything other than your face. Furthermore, this post is written mainly for men and/or manly women.

Henry David Thoreau, from Walden:

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it . . .

On Shaving

To shave or not to shave? For the modern man, shaving is a necessary precursor to social interaction. Though going a day or two without shaving won’t make you a pariah, prolonged failure to trim, crop or clean-up your beard will result in any number of strange looks or even questions regarding your hygiene, employability and/or philosophical disposition.

Therefore, the question of shaving is rarely a question of whether or not to shave at all, but rather a question of how much or what to shave. Even those of us who can’t grow much facial hair (young adolescents and arguably more evolved men) must still shave or face a purgatory of scraggly-unkempted-ness.

For the rest of us, facial hair options abound: from going for the clean-shaven look to growing a full beard, goatee, mustache, or sideburns (Or any number of other options!). Experimenting with different styles is fun, even if it may annoy significant others and uptight bosses. My go-to facial hair style is a neatly trimmed beard (See ablove).

The formed presence of facial hair on a man is distinctive, can add color and character to a man’s face, is fun and a bit daring, reservedly masculine and can even help offset thinning hair and/or receding hairlines (For folks like me anyway).

Though facial hairstyles still require maintenance, trimming a beard once every week or two with clippers is still faster than shaving that same surface area every day. That’s even accounting for still having to shave daily the clean-shaven parts the face. Overall, bearded men spend less time shaving. It’s a perk.

Lest we forget, you can always go back to the babyface if you get tired of the scruff!

On Shaving Cream

Jeffrey Tucker over at Lew Rockwell wrote a life-changing article back in April 2006 titled The Shaving Cream Racket. If you’ve got the time, I suggest you read it for the humor. Here’s the gist:

[S]omeone has to say it: shaving cream is a racket. . . .

Wean yourself from it for a week, and you will find that your shaves will be closer, unbloody, and quick. Imagine a full shave in less than a minute, with no cuts, gashes, or discomfort. It is within your grasp. . . .

The problem is this. Shaving cream . . . somehow weakens the pores and makes the top layer [of skin] mushy and unresponsive. The kid comes to believe that somehow the foam is essential to the experience. Without it, surely the razor would leave a trail of blood.

But [when using shaving cream] strange things start to happen. Red lumps appear. The shaved skin comes to feel sort of strange, oddly sensitive to temperature changes and ever more vulnerable to being sliced and diced.

People think: oh I need a new razor! So they go out and buy ever more fancy brands, with multiple blades, pivoting heads, strange lubricants, and push-out tools to deposit the hair remains in the sink.

They don’t consider that it might be the shaving cream that is the source of the trouble.

Why don’t people imagine this possibility? Because shaving cream seems so frothy and innocent, the glorious barrier that stands as a guard or shield between your skin and the sharp blade. The cream is our valiant protector, so surely that is not the source of the problem!

In fact, it is not our protector. Shaving cream is destroying your skin, turning it into a whining, pathetic, dependent, beaten, insipid layer of pasty pulp.

What is the alternative to shaving cream? Water. Yep, that cheap stuff that comes out of your faucet. After you shower, towel off, hop out, grab your razor, wet it at your sink and start shaving. It is that simple. Your shaving time and experience will both improve drastically.

I’ve not used shaving cream or gel now for over two years. I rarely ever cut myself shaving. As for razor burn, rashy bumps, etc.? They never happen anymore. After you read the next section on razors, my testimony may seem even more amazing.

The majority of time wasted shaving is in the application and management of shaving cream or gel. You’re better off without this pointless junk. Reclaim the time, save money, and save your skin. Afterwards, spread the news: shaving cream is a racket!

On Razors

Everyone has a razor preference. One of the pivotal questions is disposable or electric. Within each of those categories, there are all types of sub-categories still; for example, there are the cheap one-blade razors and the more expensive multi-blade varieties. For this discussion, the razor in question is the Gillette Fusion (Though I used the Mach 3 prior to the Fusion with similar results).

The Fusion has five blades that do the bulk of the shaving. There is a sixth blade reverse to the main five that is intended for trim work which I’ve found somewhat useful. I like the Fusion even as it is absurdly expensive and the Mach 3, which it replaced, was doing a plenty fine job.

Since you’ve now determined to give up shaving cream, I’m going to let you in on another secret that Gillette and other disposable-razor makers don’t want you to know: minerals in your water will degrade the razor blade (make it dull) over time! How does this work? After you rinse your razor blade, the water that is left on the blade will evaporate and leave trace minerals behind on the blade. Over time, these mineral deposits build up and effectively dull the blade.

An easy fix? Simply dry your razor blade on a towel after you rinse it. For me, I make a single with-the-grain swipe of the razor against my bath towel, which is usually around my waist at the time. It takes a full second to do this and it will absolutely prolong the use of your razor blades.

Skeptical? I’ve been using the same Gillette Fusion razor head for a year now. Yes, a year on a single “disposable” razor blade. True, most of that year I’ve had some level of bearded-ness, which has cut the shaving-surface area on my face down a good bit; however, as noted above, I don’t use any creams or gels and the areas I do shave daily tend to be the more sensitive parts of the face — as in, my neck. Even having used the same blade for more than a year, lubricating my face with only water, I still don’t get razor burn, cuts or bumps. Lo and behold, there have been studies that show drying your razor increases its life. It would seem that my results with blade drying have been replicated by others:

If water causes rusting, and rusting is the main culprit of blade dullness, then, presumably, drying your razor blades could increase the life of blades. A high-profile test of this happened when consumer-advocate radio host Clark Howard of Atlanta used a 17-cent disposable razor for an entire year. He said he extended blade life by blotting his razor dry with a towel after use.

Howard’s report intrigued Atlanta resident Brian Cohn, who then tried it himself. Cohn said his results weren’t quite as good but still amazing. Instead of blades lasting the usual 10 days to two weeks, his blades lasted five to six months.

Save money. Dry your disposable razor blades after use.

Put it all together and what do you get?

• Maintaining some amount of facial hair will result in less shaving/facial hair to maintain,
• Shaving creams and gels are a waste of both time and money and seem to do more harm than good for your skin, and
• Drying your disposable razors after rinsing them will make them last much longer.

All of the above will save you money, too. Let me know how these tips work for you.

Further reading:

• Study: Do Women Like Stubble on Men?

Grind Skills Reading

• Giving up the Mouse: Using Hot Keys
• Making the Most of Google Search
• Use a Feed Aggregator
• On Shaving, Shaving Cream and Razors
• Grind Skills: Mastering the Mundane of Everyday Life