Productivity Part 1

Spending most of my days in front of computer screens I have manged to compile a list of tools (some of which I may have mentioned previously) that assist in my productivity.  Many of these may only shave seconds off a task but if I was to add up all those seconds I believe I would have saved myself at least an hour a week. That may not sound a lot but is at least 52 hours a year which is (or at least should be) more than 1 working week.  While in no way has this been scientifically measured, I am fairly certain about how these tools help me.

So I begin, with the first part of an unknown number of posts about the tools that increase my productivity when in front of my computer screens.

You may or may not have noticed that my last paragraph ended with the plural of screen.  This was not a mistake, I have 2 per machine (1 at home and 1 in the office). I cannot equate in time the amount of effort this saves me in a day. I liken it to spreading out over a physically wider work area, allowing me to have more organised and smaller "piles" for my work. 

Take a program like Photoshop.  Not something I use often (not being a big designer or photographer) however it has all these floating palettes and tool bars that while aiding usability, simply take screen real estate away from what I am working on - the photograph. With my 2 monitors I can fill one whole screen with my photograph and have the palettes and toolbars on the other, giving me more room to work on the image itself. This also is reflected in my work as a Software and Web developer.Much of this requires a minimum of 2 windows open - the development environment (in which I write my code) and maybe 2 or 3 browser windows for web work.  On 1 screen I would be constantly flicking between windows and it doesn't help me at all.  On 2 I can have a quick glance at how my work is going without too much effort.

However, as a Windows user multiple monitors although well supported are less easy to manage.   The task bar does not stretch over and you still get the piles of open windows stacked high there. Moving the windows between the 2 monitors is also a pain, they need to be resized smaller than maximum the dragged across the screen.  

Ultramon sorts all of this out. It adds a task bar to the other monitors making it much easier to use. It adds buttons to the window for switching program windows between monitors.  Alternatively there are the keyboard commands to do the same and also to move the mouse cursor form one monitor to the other. 

I cannot stress how these two simple things increase my productivity massively, so together they come top of my list!