Steve Dotto here.
I’m glad you’re spending time with me today.
Today, the video is awesome: My 7 Secrets to Supercharging Your Productivity.
These are things that I do every single day that make me more productive and help me get
more done.
So let’s dive right into it.
My first secret to supercharging your productivity is getting rid of all of your extra screens.
Go down to a single screen.
I know you’re thinking, “What the hell are you talking about, Dotto?
I love having multiple screens.
It makes me feel so empowered and isn’t more screen real estate good?
Because I can have my spreadsheet open, I can have my web browser open, I can have my
email open, and I can have my word processor open.”
No.
There are a couple of reasons that you might want to have lots of screen real estate, if
you’re a video editor or if you’re an air traffic controller, but if you’re working
on knowledge work, if you’re primarily writing and dealing with documents and things like
that, all these extra screens just create distraction.
They do.
And distraction is a huge issue, an increasing issue in our lives, the one that I’ve identified
as a real challenge for me to overcome.
So by getting rid of all my extra screens and going down to a single screen, I find
that I concentrate on what I’m working on in front of me far more effectively, which
means I end up getting more done in the day.
But there’s the challenge.
The challenge is I have to have multiple applications open, multiple browsers open.
I don’t live in a uni-application world, do I?
I use a Mac operating system and it allows me to have multiple desktops, as does Windows.
Now they all allow multiple desktops and a variety of ways of managing them.
For my Mac, I have it set up so that I have my browsers open in different windows for
different tasks.
I have my other applications on different desktops, things like in this case, Photoshop
Elements, and I’ve got Keynote open as well at the same time.
If I just double tap on my mouse or swipe up on my track pad, I’m brought into the
manager that allows me to see and be able to orient myself in all the different desktops
I have and then rearrange things if I want them to be in a slightly different order.
So navigating between them becomes second nature.
You’re just swiping with your fingers on your mouse or on your track pad and moving
back and forth between them.
I find that I move back and forth just as effortlessly as if I had multiple screens.
Plus everything is now right in front of me.
With my current eyesight, it’s better because I can see everything here and I’m not leaning
in and leaning out and onto different monitors to see exactly what’s going on.
There’s one other advantage, too.
It’s that when you’re dealing with one screen or one desktop for one application,
you can go into the full screen mode and you can work on the applications in full screen
mode, which again completely eliminates all of the distraction around you.
So this particular case here, I’ve good HootSuite up.
It’s filling the entire screen.
Even though I have less gross real estate to deal with, I have more practical real estate
to deal with as I work on my one single project, which in this case is in HootSuite.
So single screen it.
It’s a great idea.
The next tool that I want to talk to you about is TextExpander.
We have another video on TextExpander.
It’s a tool that I love.
Now on the Mac, it costs I think $40 to buy.
It’s free on Windows, which is a heck of a bargain.
TextExpander is a keyboard macro tool that allows us to record regular keyboard strokes
that we use over and over again in paragraphs, any snippets of text, and it allows us to
assign little short codes to them so that we can quickly enter them.
If you do things like technical support, that is great because you’re going to have standard
paragraphs ready to go.
If you do a lot of web URLs that you forget and then you have to remember what they are,
it’s great.
So for example, if I’m writing a support letter to somebody about our website, and
I can never remember the exact syntax, the exact words for our log-in page, I just type
in the “#” key and then “login,” and it auto fills the URL for the login.
So that serves two purposes.
One, it reduces the number of keystrokes that you take so that saves you some time, but
the other thing is it removes the fact that you have to go up and search for the web URL
in your browser yourself to figure out what the URL is to copy it to the email that you’re
working on.
So it really works from two perspectives.
It does another thing, which is one of my biggest, most favorite things on the planet:
It corrects a lot of my typos and spelling mistakes.
Watch what happens.
I always transpose “THE” into T-E-H.
It’s just the way I type.
So watch, I’m going to do that right now.
I’m going to type in T-E and then I’m going to, in 3, 2, 1 hit H. When I hit H,
watch what happens to the word, 3, 2, 1, H. It recognizes that it’s a transposition
and it converts it back for me.
That saves me an inordinate amount of time every day in editing my own documents and
it also saves me some embarrassment, especially for things like spelling mistakes.
I think TextExpander is the best $40 you can spend on a Mac and it’s the best free tool
you can get on Windows.
I absolutely love it.
The third super secret I have for productivity—I’m going to stay right here—is dictation.
I have become such a fan of dictation.
It wasn’t always the case.
Back in the day when we used to have dedicated applications like DragonDictate and stuff,
although they’ve improved a lot today, back in the day they weren’t so good.
I tried to use them and I tried and I tried and I was never any good at them.
They just didn’t work well for me.
Now it’s built in the operating system level.
Watch what happens.
I hit the function key twice because I’ve enabled it.
You have to go into it.
I’ll show you how to enable it quickly.
You go into your System Preferences if you’re on a Mac, and in Windows it will be slightly
different but they’d also have dictation capabilities.
But we go into your User Panel and there you click on Dictation and Speech and then you
have to turn on Dictation here.
It only works when you’re connected to the internet but what happens when you put your
cursor anywhere you normally type, you hit the function key twice, a little beep will
happen, and you’ll see a little microphone and it’s recording what you’re doing and
then going to convert it into text.
So let’s send a quick message.
“Hi John, comma, new paragraph.
I’m really happy that we’re going to be able to work together on this project, period.
I’m very excited about it, exclamation mark.
I hope you are too, period.”
Now that thing is you have to remember to always put in your punctuation.
Oh, there it is.
For some reason I put my cursor down at the very bottom of my screen but you see it right
here.
“I’m really happy we’re going to be able to work together on this project.
I’m very excited about it!
I hope you are too.”
It works perfectly.
Now you have to be careful of a couple of things.
The first thing you have to be careful of is you have to really proofread it carefully
before you send it because occasionally it’s going to put a different word in and because
you’ve just said it and you look at it, you sometimes see what you expect.
So you have to be careful and do a little bit more careful proofreading before you send
anything.
That’s number one.
Number two, you have to be careful when you send voicemail messages to people.
As soon as I start talking into a mike now, I start adding in punctuation.
So it’s, “Hi, I’m not here right now.
Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you” is the message that I get and then
I say “Hi, it’s Steve here, comma, I was wondering if you would be looking forward
to going out with me tonight exclamation mark.”
I’ve actually done that so I’ve got be careful of that as well.
That is dictation.
Let me go over to my slide show to remind me what I’m up to at fourth.
My fourth tool: HootSuite.
HootSuite is a social media dashboard and how does it supercharge my productivity?
In two ways, for me.
The first is I have a fair bit of social media communication that I have to do but it’s
not ad-hoc.
It’s kind of all pre-planned.
It’s communicating with viewers and listeners and people who follow us for a variety of
different reasons.
So first thing in the morning, I’m going to be tweeting out who’s on our radio show
today, or what video I’m producing and putting out, or commenting on things that are relating
to the DottoTech brand.
So I pre-populate all of those tweets so rather than having to do it all through the day,
I use HootSuite’s publish service.
So I create all of my different posts here and they don’t just appear in Twitter—this
is another place that saves us a lot of time—but I can also post into LinkedIn, into Google+,
into Facebook, into any of the other different social networks that I want to.
I can post to them all through the one interface.
But I can also use this tool called AutoSchedule, which will then pre-populate this into a schedule
through the day.
Let’s take a look.
We’re kind of approaching midday so most of my tweeting is done for the day, but here’s
ones that I wrote this morning that will now be tweeted out a little bit later today.
You can adjust the time on all of these but this feature does two things for me.
First of all, it saves me a lot of time because I’m able to compose all of my tweets and
all of my communications on social media networks first thing in the morning when I like to
do it and have it all done for the day.
So it saves me time there.
But it also helps me to be a more effective communicator in social media space.
So there is one area the HootSuite saves me a tremendous amount of time.
In research, it will also save me a lot of time because you don’t have to go into multiple
networks to find mentions or to kind of to do any research.
It will basically compile all of the different mentions or all of the different information
you’re looking at in different streams here within HootSuite.
It’s worth trying out.
It’s free for a limited number of networks.
If you have a lot of networks that you need to communicate with in your business then
you’ll pay a licensing fee but it’s free to try out and I definitely think it’s one
of the real great secret tools in my productivity tool kit, HootSuite.
Up next, LastPass, my password manager.
Now this saves me time and it also makes me safer.
It protects me from people hacking and accessing my accounts.
So LastPass is a mostly free password manager that is uber encrypted.
It allows you to create super complicated passwords to really protect your identity,
to really protect you online.
It installs in your web browser and you have to have a really good password to access it.
It stores all of the regular log-in information for the sites that you visit and even ones
that you only visit occasionally.
That’s where it really starts to show its strength.
This is actually a site that I do log-in to a lot.
It’s my Podbean site, which is where I host my podcast.
I can either click here in the fields themselves, you click on LastPass in the taskbar here,
or you see we have a dropdown here that allows me to auto-fill the forms that are here.
I just use that auto-fill and it automatically fills in both the username and the password
because you often forget your username at sites you don’t visit regularly.
A lot of us store our passwords in text files or in Evernote or sometimes just in an open
document on our desktop.
We store our usernames, sometimes our usernames and passwords, which is incredibly insecure,
or we use the same one for everything.
Here this allows you to have unique usernames, unique passwords, far more secure, and it
will autopopulate them so you can easily log in and you just save it.
Every time you enter a new site, every time you have to set up a new account, LastPass
will you ask you, “Do you want me to save the password and username?”
and you say yes.
It will even ask you, “Do you want me to create a better password for you that’s
really hard to crack?” and you can say yes to that as well.
A password you would never remember, LastPass will remember for you.
It saves you time and it could also save your bacon.
It saves you time because you don’t go looking for passwords.
You don’t have to go to password retrievals as we often have to do for sites we don’t
visit on a regular basis and that time adds up over time really nicely.
Bringing us to the stretch run, Evernote WebClipper, one of my favorite tools.
Do I love my Evernote WebClipper ever so much!
It installs in the Menu bar of your browser and it allows you to clip anything out of
the pages that you’re working on, on your browser.
You can clip the text, you can clip graphics, you can clip bookmarks, you can take screenshots
of it, and then store that information in Evernote.
You can tag it so that you can find it again in Evernote.
I use the Evernote WebClipper every single day for doing research and for saving little
bits of digital data that I don’t want to be storing in my brain or trying to remember
in bookmark files.
It is just an indispensable productivity tool, definitely one of my top seven time-saving
tips.
The last one I’m going to show you is kind of cute.
It’s called Clyppan and there are a variety of different utilities that you can install
that are multi-clip clipboards.
What this means is when you’re working on a document and maybe you’re copying a little
piece of text here, then you go and you paste it, and maybe you need to copy another piece
of text and then go back, and then the same first piece of text again so you’re always
moving back and forth copying and pasting.
Clyppan allows you to store all of your different clips and it remembers them.
So all you have to do clip a new piece of text is go back into Clyppan and say you know
what?
Three copies ago was when I had this in my clipboard.
That’s what I want to paste right now.
Then you could choose that and just choose to paste that.
You can also save it as favorites.
So there’s a little bit of crossover here with what we have with TextExpander but it’s
for more temporary stuff, the kind of stuff that you don’t need to keep long term.
The way I look at it is everything in TextExpander are long term things that you’re going to
want to keep for a very long time.
I use Clyppan here for really short term clipping and pasting documents as I put them together.
And again when I need it, it does end up saving me a tremendous amount of time.
So those are my seven supercharge productivity tips.
Use one screen.
Use TextExpander.
Dictation really saves you time and energy.
Pulling all of your different social media assets together in HootSuite is a massive
times saver.
LastPass not only can save you time, it could also save you a tremendous amount of grief.
Evernote WebClipper, just love it.
And finally a multi-clipboard, which really saves you time on those small little projects
when you’re clipping multiple pieces of text.
I hope you found this little video useful, if you have, please give us a Like.
Hey, don’t forget.
I’ve got a productivity workshop coming up, a course, actually an eight-part course
that goes way deeper than anything we talked about here.
We get right into the nitty-gritty of your productivity tools so take a look at that.
The link is just above me right now.
Thanks so much for your time.
I’m Steve Dotto.
[End of Audio: 7 Secrets to Supercharge Your Productivity]