By Peter Bell

In Praise of Little Efficiencies

Posted At : January 9, 2008 3:56 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: Efficiency, Misc
Most knowledge workers spend a lot of time dealing with text and while I'm not nearly as efficient as I'd like to be I try to take a little time each week to learn small improvements in document handling that'll allow me to knock a few seconds off of common tasks.

I was just munging some data from Excel into a web page to document a data structure. Started by cutting and pasting into Textmate and replacing tabs with the HTML I wanted to show there using find and replace. Then I wanted to add a break to the end of each line. A couple of seconds Googling came up with this. Anyone with textmate should give it a try - it's very cool to see your keystrokes being replicated over fifty lines - brought the sorcerers apprentice to mind (maybe I'm just too easily amused)!

What else do you do to improve your general efficiency? I'm thinking I really owe it to myself to make more use of grep and similar Unix tools, to learn RegEx's properly for everyday text search and replacements and to check out the Automator capabilities on a Mac (lots of scripts available. What are the little productivity tweaks you've made that add up to useful savings over the months and the years?

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Thanks Peter - you've just given me something else to add to my 43 Things - learn RegEx properly. I always find RegEx useful, but often avoid using them because I have a tendency to forget the syntax!

Something I've found extremely helpful is the RegEx cheat sheet available at:
<a href="http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/cheat-sheets/regul...">http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/cheat-sheets/regul...</a>

I've got it laminated and stuck on the wall by my desk.
# Posted By James Marshall | 1/9/08 5:15 AM
Regex replace is great if it's wort the effort. I use it when editing big config files with lots of similar lines. Like an AS localization class with properties declaration at top and then defaults init followed by the update at language change. The only other genial idea I've managed to come up with is having a clipboard.txt notepad where I paste stuff that maybe I'll use later and doing a save before closing it :)
But I don't work that much with text other then coding...
# Posted By cosmin | 1/9/08 5:18 AM
The extended find-and-replace in Homesite+ is pretty handy for doing that sort of thing, even without its regex capabilities.

One thing I rarely find mentioned, but I consider a big productivity boost, is the ability to touch-type. Taught myself how to do it years ago, and I'm sure it helps decrease the actual time spent typing by a significant factor.
# Posted By duncan | 1/9/08 6:28 AM
The extended find-and-replace in Homesite+ is pretty handy for doing that sort of thing, even without its regex capabilities.

One thing I rarely find mentioned, but I consider a big productivity boost, is the ability to touch-type. Taught myself how to do it years ago, and I'm sure it helps decrease the actual time spent typing by a significant factor.
# Posted By duncan | 1/9/08 6:41 AM
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