Save Time Tips

How to Shovel Snow Faster (Without the Backache)

SaveTimeTips — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 04:25:04 +0000

Shoveling snow always seems to be a pain in the butt (and back, and arms, and legs), but often a little planning can cut your shoveling time in half. Two minutes spent planning out your attack can save twenty minutes of hard labor — letting you get back to watching football in record time.

This timely tip comes from Grant’s Grunts blog. Here are the basics:

Ideally, use a nice bent-handle shovel. These save your lower back and let you move much faster through your shoveling.
Bisect your driveway by quickly shoveling out a long line that runs up the middle of your driveway.
Starting at the bottom of your driveway, stand in the middle line your just made and shovel a line perpendicular to the middle line towards one of the sides. Move one step up your driveway and repeat this step, always working from the center line outward.
Once you get to the top of your driveway, start working on the other side of the driveway. The only difference this time is that you’ll be making your way down the driveway. Again, always start each shovel load from the center line.

As Grant points out, you want to focus on not having to bend over to toss large loads of snow off the driveway, as this is slow going and can tweak your back. Bisecting the driveway lets you limit the amount of snow you’re pushing at any time.

Keep in mind that it may be best to slice wider driveways into 3 or 4 sections instead of two.

Do you have any snow shoveling tips? Share them in the comments below!

Calendarspots.com Saves Businesses Time by Letting Clients Schedule Appointments Online

SaveTimeTips — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:25:53 +0000

As high-speed Internet has become widely accessible, many business owners are starting to realize the usefulness of the web and how it can save them time. One way the Internet can save businesses time is by helping them schedule their appointments.

Managing appointments can be quite an ordeal for service-based businesses and clients can become quite aggravated when they have trouble booking an appointment via the telephone. This is where the Internet and Calendarspots.com’s web-based booking software can save your business and your clients a whole lot of time and aggravation.

You can create an account at Calendarspots.com, customize the settings to meet your needs and add a link to your website to start accepting appointments online. Customers can then visit your customer portal to select a date and time and book their appointment online. E-mail confirmations are sent out to the client and the system will even send the customer an appointment reminder via e-mail 1 day in advance.

Finally no more phone tag and busy signals when calling. Best of all, nobody is wasting time coordinating their appointments. Everything is done in real-time.

Calendarspots.com offers more than just online appointment scheduling. It also helps you manage your staff. Staff will receive e-mail confirmations when appointments are booked and/or canceled. This lets your staff know when they need to come in for work. Employees can also view and print their appointments by accessing their own personal online account.

Additional features allow you to review revenues generated within a certain period, track client payments and communicate with your clients by sending e-mail newsletters.

So why not save yourself some time and let your clients book online today.

Calendarspots.com – Online Appointment Scheduling

NotiFinder Searches Craigslist for You, Sends Email Alerts

SaveTimeTips — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:15:50 +0000

Every once in awhile, a time tool comes along that makes my efficiency-focused heart sing out with joy. NotiFinder.com is one of those tools. And if you’ve ever spent hours scouring Craigslist for a specific item, I think you’ll be inclined to agree.

What NotiFinder does is pretty simple, but it does it so well that one wonders how we used Craigslist before NotiFinder came along.

Basically, you enter the city, state, or country that you want to search, then type in what search term you’re interested in (in my case, “vintage board games”).

Simply enter your email address and how often you’d like to be alerted (ASAP, once daily, or once weekly), and NotiFinder takes over from there. Anytime a new listing matching your search term is posted within the area you selected, you’ll receive an email alerting you.

Simple? Sure. Amazing? Yes. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent clicking through different city sites on Craigslist hunting for deals, only to spot them too late or not at all. NotiFinder not only keeps you from missing listings that you’re interested in, it delivers them right to your inbox. You can even set price maximums and minimums for your search.

Want more? You can create as many search terms as you’d like, for as many cities as you’d like. This is a great way for freelancers to find work too — You can choose to search only the Jobs postings if you’d like, in as many cities as you’d like.

We love NotiFinder. Can you tell? Not since Dropbox came along have I been as excited about a time-saving tool.

NotiFinder.com

Hipmunk.com Saves Time and Stress While Searching for Flights

SaveTimeTips — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 04:02:44 +0000

Yes, we know — Another travel site promising to take the pain out of finding flights. There’s been… oh, about 50 sites claiming the same thing in the last few years. But Hipmunk.com might finally be the revolution in travel sites we’ve been waiting for. It’s simple, usable, and most important of all, it’s fast!

Just launched this week, Hipmunk.com re-visualizes what flight searches look like. Just enter the basic info — Arrival and departure city, departure date, and (optionally) return date. Hipmunk searches travel sites for the best deals and returns them in a format that’s probably best seen rather than described:

Once you get your bearings with this layout, the ease-of-use becomes rather clear. The horizontal bars represent the duration of the flight (with times given in both the arrival and departure’s time zones), and any layovers in the trip (as well as their duration) are indicated by the tan bands in the middle of the flight.

The fun comes in when you decide to change your sorting options, given in the blue bar across the top. Sort the list by shortest flight, arrival time, price, and what the site calls “agony”, a general measure of the undesirability of the flight.

My favorite feature here is how the site automatically hides “worse” options for the same or similar flight — The same flight offered at a higher price, the same flight but a longer duration, etc. I hate trying to mentally weed these options out at other travel sites, and this really helps you cut through the clutter and find the best deals for the least amount of hassle.

The best part is that Hipmunk is promising even more features rolling out soon. My only wish is that they not detract from the beautiful simplicity and ease-of-use the site delivers.

While you’re at it, take a look at our tips on how to save time while traveling and avoid airport hassle after you’ve actually bought your tickets. Bon voyage!

Hipmunk.com – Better Flight Search

Zen Habits: Productivity Through Simplicity

SaveTimeTips — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:03:32 +0000

Sometimes the easiest way to check items off your to-do list is simply to decide those items are not worth doing. While this sounds obvious at best or counter-productive at worst, Leo Babauta at ZenHabits.com shares his Zen / minimalism insights that have helped him accomplish more and enjoy work to the fullest.

Similar in spirit to Tim Ferriss’s productivity tome, The Four Hour Work Week, Leo encourages you to examine your daily work routine with a highly critical eye. There are tasks in every work day that help us to build momentum (the term Leo uses to describe fulfilling work that begets more fulfilling work), and there are tasks that only serve to provide “friction” that works against that momentum.

By determining which facets of your work create the most “friction” rather than momentum, we can begin to streamline our day to eliminate friction tasks and accomplish more, while focusing on the parts of work that give us the most pleasure.

While Leo’s advice is primarily written for the self-employed or work-at-home types, it can (and should) be applied to anyone with any control over their workflow. Some examples:

If you do a lot of paperwork, can you require forms to be filled out digitally, perhaps online? This will eliminate a lot of work, and if the database is set up right, eliminate filing.

Also unsubscribe from newsletters and notifications and so forth, so you don’t have to spend time processing them in your inbox. Consider each email that comes in and ask yourself: “How could this be eliminated?”

Can you eliminate meetings, or at least get out of them? How can you get the info without meetings? How can projects get done without the meetings?

To read more about Leo’s ideas of productivity through simplicity, check out his post Frictionless Work: How to Clear Your Life of Non-Essential Tasks.

6 Ways to Save Time and Frustration at the Airport

SaveTimeTips — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:29:01 +0000

With summer in full swing, many of us are heading to the airport for vacations and business trips. While we may ultimately enjoy the trip once we reach our destination, it’s a rare traveler that actually enjoys their time spent in an airport or on long flights. But with a little planning and some clever tricks, you can make the most out of your time at the terminal.

To help out weary travelers, we’ve assembled a list of 6 simple, common-sense tips to help you avoid hassles and headaches, waste less time while traveling, and have a more enjoyable travel experience.

Layover is a Dirty Word

This is probably the number-one time waster in the entire airline industry. While completely unavoidable sometimes, layovers are often the curse of lower-priced airline fares. Sure, you flew from Boston to Vegas for $180, but you had to spend 6 hours of your life on a layover in Miami.

If you have a little extra cash to spare, wouldn’t it be worth spending a little more on the flight to regain those wasted hours? By not necessarily searching for the cheapest fare on the planet, you can give yourself an extra half-day (or more) of vacation time. Isn’t that worth it?

Technology is Your Friend

It’s almost difficult to imagine how we traveled in the past without access to today’s technology and web resources. From checking up-to-the-second flight delays and cancellations, to online airport maps and guides, a little technology can save tons of time when traveling.

Hate being surprised by a delayed or cancelled flight when you arrive at the airport? Check out flightstats.com, which posts real-time flight data and information for travelers. Similar apps for your iPhone or other mobile device are plentiful. In fact, most major airlines will send you a text message to update you on flight delays or gate changes.

Avoid “Group-think”

This is probably my favorite trick, as I am always looking for faster, more efficient ways to do things.

Group-think (or what I sometimes call the “Lemming Effect”) is when we blindly follow the actions of others before us, without thinking if it’s the best course of action. Airports, full of weary travelers and stressed-out families, is often full of examples of group-think.

However, with a watchful eye, you can avoid falling into group-think traps and save yourself some serious time in the process. My favorite example comes from a recent trip to Denver International Airport.

There was an enormous line of travelers waiting to check in at the Southwest desk, some checking bags, some just traveling with carry-ons. Seeing the line, most travelers simply took their place at the end of the line, completely oblivious to the large signs promoting the new e-check-in kiosks. In fact, no one at all was using the kiosks, while the line to the desk clerks swelled. Fortunately, I spotted the kiosk, checked-in in literally seconds, and we were on our way to the gate. (I also had the immense satisfaction of seeing about a dozen travelers swarm to the kiosk after watching me use it.)

Blaze Through your To-Dos

This is one of the more obvious tips, as most of us sense an opportunity to get some work done while waiting for our flight or while en-route. However, I still witness many travelers simply sitting and staring vacantly while waiting for flights or long layovers (see tip #1!).

Whether it’s simply reading a book, doing some paperwork, or playing a game with your kids, make good use of your downtime while traveling!

A Little Planning Goes a Long Way

This tip goes hand-in-hand with using technology to speed up your travel time. However, using Internet resources and research can help you to use your time at the airport more efficiently as well.

Need to get some work done while waiting? Many airports are beginning to offer free wi-fi in the terminal, and some flights are even offering wireless Internet service while in the air (for a reasonable fee).

In addition, plan out your transportation a bit ahead of time. While I hate asking a friend to drive me long distances to an airport, if you can get local friend to drop you off at the terminal and pick you up on your flight home, you can save lots of time finding a spot for your car (along with saving on the daily parking lot fees). Just be sure to hook your buddy up with a little gas money for his or her trouble.

Get Bumped

When you arrive early for your flight, don’t forget to check about getting bumped to an earlier flight, if available. At larger airports, there will often be another flight available at an earlier time, and you may be able to fly for the same rate as the later flight. While this tip will be applicable less often, it can be an easy way to save a couple of hours.

Do you have any traveling tips that help you to save big time in the airport? Post them in the comments section below!

Determine Your “Life Wage” to Help Make Time-Saving Decisions

SaveTimeTips — Mon, 31 May 2010 23:46:33 +0000

When it comes to some tasks, we often struggle with whether we should just do it ourselves or hire someone else. Home improvement is a common example – Sure we can save cash if we do it ourselves, but those savings can quickly feel unimportant after spending a weekend on a frustrating project. With a simple thought exercise, we can put these decisions into more practical terms.

Consider the following: Imagine you’ve got a full day ahead of you of errands, work, cleaning chores, etc. This won’t sound like a very fun day to most of us, but imagine if you could somehow buy your way out of these tasks. If you could pay someone, somewhere, X dollars per hour to do the tasks so you could go and enjoy some free time, what would that dollar figure be?

I call this hourly rate your “Life Wage”, and it can help you to quantify time-saving decisions in a more concrete way. Your Life Wage can be variable — it may change from day to day or hour to hour, and you even may alter it depending on the task you’re considering doing. But once you start thinking in these terms, it becomes much easier to make time-saving decisions.

For instance, you’re considering whether you should just hire a contractor to do the grout in your bathroom rather than do it yourself. You’ve thought about your Life Wage, and you decided you’d pay $15 per hour to have a fun, relaxing afternoon, doing something you enjoy — rather than be stuck at home grouting a bathroom, in this example.

Assume the contractor would charge you $20/hour in labor (plus handle selecting and delivering all of the materials for you), and could likely do the job in half the time that you could. A job that would take you 6 hours would only take him 3.

Your labor costs paid to the contractor will be $60 (3 x $20). If you were to do-it-yourself, you’d be looking at 6 hours of work. Let’s divide the potential cost of the contractor by the hours it would take you to do the job instead. $60 / 6 hours = $10 / hour.

Cool! So our Life Wage is $15 / hour, and really the contractor only costs $10 / hour. It looks like the numbers are telling us that we should just hire the contractor and go out and enjoy our day (or do something else more pressing or interesting).

Depending on the task you’re considering, your Life Wage might be higher or lower. If it’s a task you particularly hate, you’d probably be willing to pay more to get out of doing it and enjoy some free time.

For me, yard work would be a very high Life Wage task. I’d be willing to pay $30+ to get out of the hour of lawn mowing and trimming. By our logic, if I could find a landscaper that charged less than $30 an hour to to mow my lawn, I should jump on it!

This type of thinking can really boost your efficiency, and help you to start valuing your time more than your money. There’s always another dollar to be made, but each hour we spend on this planet can never be earned back. By placing a value on doing things you enjoy rather than focusing on the costs of hiring tasks out, we can not only save time but get more out of what time we have.

3 Brain Hacks to Easily Memorize New Info and Save Time While Studying

SaveTimeTips — Wed, 05 May 2010 23:51:23 +0000

We’ve all been there before — You’ve got a big exam to cram for or a crucial presentation to make, and you need a quick way to learn a lot of information quickly. Heck, maybe you just need help remembering to return a phone call when you get home from work.

This collection of brain “hacks” will come to the rescue again and again, and can save time (and Post-It notes).

1. Chunking

Chunking is generally used for remembering numbers, but can be used to remember other things as well. It’s based on the concept that a typical person can remember about 7 items in their short-term memory. This is why telephone numbers were designed to have 7 digits — beyond 7 digits, and we have a much more difficult time remember the information.

Furthermore, telephone numbers are broken down into sequences of either 3 or 4 numbers. There’s a good reason for this as well — Trying to remember the full number sequence of “4563441″ is much more difficult that memorizing “456″ along with “3441.” This is chunking in action.

By breaking down information into more manageable “chunks”, we can memorize more complex information in a shorter period of time. We can gain even more memory traction by relating the chunks to things that already mean something to us. For instance, remembering a phone number like 555-1996 will be made a lot easier if we associate “1996″ with something important to us, such as the year we graduated from college.

2. A Walk Down Memory Lane

We humans aren’t great at memorizing sequences of facts – for instance, a series of events for a history test or an instructional presentation. We are pretty good, however, at remembering other types of sequences, such as the path we take to work or school every morning.

We can utilize that knack for path memory using the method of Loci. This technique involves mentally visualizing a well-known path, like the route you take to work in the morning. At each landmark or turn in the path, mentally “place” a piece of the information you’re trying to learn. Once each point in your route has a fact associated with it, it’s very easy to recall the sequence simply by mentally “walking” down the path and remembering the facts along the way.

This method also has the benefit of working both forwards and backwards. If you need to remember the information last-to-first, simply visualize yourself walking the route backwards (as you would when you’re returning home from school or work).

3. Your Mind’s Eye (and Nose, and Ears, and Mouth)

Perhaps the most powerful memory technique involves coming to your senses — your five senses, that is.

Try to remember everyone that showed up to the last birthday party you attended. You can figure it out, but it probably took a few seconds (or minutes). Now try to remember how the birthday cake tasted, or how the candles smelled when you blew them out. That probably came to you a bit more quickly, didn’t it?

Vivid memories, or memories that involve one or more of our senses, are much easier to recall. We can take advantage of this by including senses in our memorization. Do you want to remember to call your best friend when you get home from work? Mentally associate the cold feel of your front door’s doorknob and the smell of the juniper bush by the porch with an image of your friend’s face. Once you actually get home later in the day, you’ll recall those vivid memories much more easily than simply trying to memorize the phrase “call Steve when I get home.”

This technique can be used to enhance just about any other memory trick — that’s what makes it so powerful. Adding vivid imagery to your loci-based path memories, for instance, will help you recall the items even more easily. This type of brain “hacking” can save time and frustration by using your natural tendencies to learn more efficiently.

And finally, if you’ve got a large amount of info to go over before a test or presentation, some memory experts recommend saving time by speed reading. By reading more quickly, your brain ignores smaller details and can more easily retain the over-arching concepts of a text.

Do you have any memory tricks? Share them in the comments below!

Keep your email habit under control to save time and remain focused at work

SaveTimeTips — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:40:32 +0000

For some of us, it’s tough imagining a day without email — it’s an immediate link to colleagues, projects, and updates. However, leaving your email open all day long can often lead to dozens of distractions which interrupt your work flow and thought process. Maybe it’s time to cut the cord?

Email can be a big time-saver, but we often can’t help dropping whatever we were working on to respond to a new message. It can be difficult to resist… That little “new message” icon is certainly tempting, but each time we succumb to its siren call represents a distraction from what should be our first priority: getting things done.

Sure, each email check may only distract us for a few seconds, but adding up those distractions throughout the day can add up fast. In addition, we often waste time while trying to pick up where we left off with a task. We all know how difficult it can be to remember where we left off with a task, and that difficult often leads to wasted time and frustration.

So while we may not be able to cut out email entirely from our work day, here are some helpful tips that may help you stay on task and GTD (get things done)!

Disable your email program’s audio or visual notification that a new email has arrived

If your email program serves up an audio or visual notification when you receive a new email, try disabling it. You won’t be tempted to immediately read that new email, and you’ll naturally ration your email-checking throughout the day.

Batch your email tasks by only checking your email at specific times during your day.

99% of the email we receive DOES NOT require an immediate response. Yet, we often feel the need to stay on top of our inbox and reply to emails instantaneously.

Instead, try only opening your email twice or three times a day — for instance, at 10:30, 1:00, and 4:00. Consolidating lets us “batch” our email tasks a couple of times a day, instead of allowing email to distract us all day long.

Recognize when a simple phone call can take less time than a constant email back-and-forth

It’s hard to believe in this day and age, but sometimes email is less efficient than a phone call. No, I’m not kidding!

We’ve all had those irritatingly persistent email exchanges — one response leads to another leads to another. If we were to simply pick up the phone and call him or her, we’d be able to settle all of our questions and deliver all of our information in a fraction of the time.

Do you have any time-saving tips for managing your email? Leave them in the comments below.

Namechk.com helps you find the perfect social media username in seconds

SaveTimeTips — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:06:29 +0000

Whether you’re trying to build an online brand or just want the same clever username across all your social media sites, finding one that’s available on all of them could take hours. However, if you use Namechk.com, it could take all of about 5 seconds.

Just head to Namechk.com, fill in your potential username, and the nifty interface checks your username against about 75 of the most popular social media sites like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and much, much more for its availability. It’s extremely helpful and surprisingly fun to watch the screen fill with results from these sites.

There’s even a “search all” feature which lets you check your name against 145 (!) different sites in a few seconds. In the words of Namechk.com:

Check to see if your desired username or vanity url is still available at dozens of popular Social Networking and Social Bookmarking websites. Promote your brand consistently by registering a username that is still available on the majority of the most popular sites. Find the best username with namechk.

So, if you’re trying to decide on an online name or vanity URL to start the next new media empire, save yourself the hassle and time of logging into dozens of sites manually and just head over to Namechk.com.