Efficiency

EFFICIENCY has always been an interest of mine. I firmly believe that attempting to use all of one’s time in the most “efficient” manner possible is not intelligent (for instance, there is real value in sitting on a bus “doing nothing”: using the time for something else isn’t always bad, but resting and thinking can be one of the best uses of your time). However, I also believe that one should not spend more time than necessary or useful on tasks. For instance, I’m a big stickler for using keyboard shortcuts: there is no value whatsoever in choosing “Edit -> Copy” from a menu every time you need to copy something rather than pressing Ctrl-C and losing yourself several seconds.

I tackle the following subjects in Efficiency on this website:

• Anki is a program to improve your memory by bringing information for review right before it suspects you are about to forget it.
• The Dvorak keyboard layout is a scientifically-designed way to reduce the effort and motion required for typing, and if market forces were not in play, it probably would have replaced QWERTY nearly a century ago.
• Dutton Speedwords is a handy, easy-to-learn shorthand system that can abbreviate 50% of a typical text in three letters or less if you learn just 80 words.
• The blog contains numerous tips about efficiency, mostly involving shortcuts on the computer.
• I wrote a list of tips for searching Google.