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By DAVID POGUE
"Dear David," wrote a reader recently. "When will you share your productivity tips with us? Not everyone can write five books a year, file two columns a week, churn out a daily blog, speak 40 times a year and film a video every Thursday. What are your secrets?"
Well, I don't know how secret they are. But here goes.
* I work at home. That's two, three or four hours more work time each day that I don't spend commuting.
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* I use typing-expansion software. You can read more about the software here, but the point is that I type only the first couple letters of many common words, and the software expands the rest. Since so much of my writing is technology-related, a lot of these words come up often--and they tend to be long ones.
* I use dictation software. When I have long-form writing to do, like a book, I dictate into Dragon NaturallySpeaking. My wife once clocked me at 120 words a minute, and that's including making corrections. It's just insanely fast (providing, of course, you know what you want to say).* I know where everything is. Years ago, I started using an address-book program that's now called iData 3. It's a freeform database, meaning that the "cards" in this database don't have separate fields for Name, Street, City and so on; instead, you can type or paste whatever you want into each freeform card.
This program doesn't play well with field-based contact managers like Google's or the iPhone's, but the beauty is that it holds whatever you want: recipes, brainstorms, article fragments, driving directions, lists, Web addresses and so on. And you can find anything in a fraction of a second. (Actually, iData now lets you create field-based databases as well, but my freeform database has been growing since about 1988 and I'm not about to convert it.)
* The other database I use is my e-mail program. I'm not a believer in the "empty your Inbox every day" philosophy; in fact, my Inbox is my To Do list, which works great. When I've dealt with something, I delete or file it. When I haven't, its presence in that list reminds me that it needs doing. (I have a lot of e-mail folders. I also have a lot of "message rules" that file incoming mail automatically into appropriate folders.)
* I use macro software. I can't understand why "press a key to launch a program" features aren't standard in Mac OS X and Windows. (Yeah, I know, Windows has a limited version of this, involving shortcut icons. But I want to make up my own keyboard shortcuts, and as many as I want.)
So I use Shift-Control-W to open Microsoft Word, Shift-Control-C for my calendar program, and so on. The less I have to use the mouse, the faster I fly.
* I have a great calendar program. It's Now Up-to-Date, a very old but very brilliant networkable, cross-platform calendar program. I can edit appointments on my laptop while on a trip; when I return, my changes get merged into my wife's and kids' computers automatically.
* I don't waste time. I travel a lot for speaking engagements--so much that the $60 a month I have to pay for my tiny Sprint USB cellular modem stick seems like a bargain. It means I can be online in a car, in the X-ray line at the airport, on a plane stuck on the runway, and so on.
My 3-pound laptop is my main machine, by the way, for the same reason--so that I can be productive during any little blob of downtime.
* Finally, I enjoy two luxuries that not everyone will be able to replicate. First, I'm just the sort of person who kind of knows what he wants to say; I can't remember ever staring at the blank screen, trying to think of what to write. And I'm lucky enough that I don't spend time on bills, taxes, travel arrangements, kid-activity scheduling, and so on; my sainted wife takes care of all that administrative overhead.
There, now you know my secrets. Steal this document, with my compliments.
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