Have you ever noticed that the ‘F’ and ‘J’ buttons on your keyboard have a special groove on them? To me it was a surprise and did not know the answer until yesterday. What is the purpose of this design?

My research showed that these buttons are designed to be pressed with your index fingers. Place your index fingers there, spread your thumbs on the space bar and you will be is the starting home position for faster typing with all fingers.

I guess most of us use a two-finger typing system but putting more fingers into typing can lead to amazing results. My bet is that the learning curve is pretty steep but it is most likely worth trying.

How to teach your brain and fingers to do it? I have not figured yet out the fastest track but I started with a free online flash game. It is fun at least. The game is called Typing Speed Test. I am sure there are much better ones but I only started yesterday researching on this topic. Now, with my two-finger system, I can do 30-32 words per minute. Lets see within one month with the new one.

Any comments on this topic would be welcome.

Office hours are demanding and sometimes we lose track of all tasks we need to cover.  In order to develop reliable system to follow our tasks, we use sticky notes, handwritten reminders, mail pop-ups and etc.  Some people also use Excel spreadsheets.

The beauty of Excel spreadsheets comes with the fact that such files are easy to modify, e-mail, print and share any way the user chooses.  If you are up to try one, you can download your template file with neat and simple design, which is ready to use from Microsoft’s Office Templates Home Page.

My personal choice is To-Do List for Projects which has been already been downloaded more than 1.2 million times and applies to project management, task managers, checklist templates and others.

You can learn more on document templates reading my post:  How to Save Valuable Minutes Using Document Templates.

Can you name another popular to-do templates?

Multitasking might have advantages but singletasking is also a way of reaching productivity.  In the ultimate search for the best way to address your schedule, why not try dealing with things one by one in a straight fashion? Easier said than done, right?

Recently I have come upon one online tool, done as a to-do list,  that is freely available and out there to help you try the benefits of singletasking.  It has extremely simplified design and looks as though it cannot be simpler. The tool is available at http://nowdothis.com/ and the community behind it can be reached at http://nowdothis.tumblr.com/.

Do you know any other to-do lists that are this elegant and yet powerful?

In October 2007 Eurostat published a pocketbook Cultural statistics with focus on culture. There has not been an update on this book since then and moreover this is the first and only Eurostat edition on this subject.

Eurostat is the Statistical Office of the European Communities and among other things in their book they compare the average daily time spent on various activities by the inhabitants of eight European countries (see Chapter 3: Time spent on cultural activities).

It is a useful source of information, allowing interesting comparisons. The main categories of activities are TV and video, Freetime, Eating, Sleep, Household work and Work and study. It is interesting to notice that TV and video is outside Freetime, implying probably that these activities should not be mixed.

The mean durations of the activities across countries are similar but there are some curious differences. Lunch breaks for example are longer in the Mediterranean countries and France in particular, lowering the leisure time of the French. No wonder the French cuisine is so popular! According to the pocketbook, the people in the Mediterranean also read much less.

A short passage tells us that gender also plays a role in the usage of time and reads:

Men in every country generally have more leisure time than women and devote more of their time to television and video than to other cultural activities.

This is probably due to the fact that women traditionally are more involved in the household and this gives men a sort of time advantage.

While it is good to know the statistics it is also nice to be aware of where you stand. Questions that need to be addressed include:  Do I watch too much TV? Do I spend too much hours in the office? How much is my free time? Is the way I use time a cultural thing and how can I change it in a positive direction?

Do you think your culture affects your way of using time?

Phone conversations sometimes last longer than initially planned. Simple math shows that only 10 calls a day, lasting 5-6 minutes more than really needed, lessen our productivity by an hour.

This is true especially in a busy office where contacting people over the phone is an essential part of the business. Talking to your partners, clients and colleagues might be a great way to service them but sometimes we are much more wordy than really necessary. And this goes both ways. So people who use phones extensively need to consider how much time they dedicate to this type of communication and how this can be optimized.

One way to handle this time-eating situation is to use e-mails when and where possible. Electronic communication can be couple of sentences long, straight to the point and still achieve its purpose. The exchange of e-mails might also lower stress levels and help you concentrate on other tasks. In case you really need to initiate a call and would like it to be a short one, you have the option to ask for an e-mail discussion after the call, detailing the matter.

Many software providers have found a niche in helping people communicate more efficiently and as a result have developed instant messaging services. Using messaging is a great way to have several contacts on the line and deal with them all at once. Unfortunately the drawback here is that your contacts should also use the same service.

Do you think you can shorten your phone calls without damaging your work style? Other tips?

Trips of less than three to five miles will probably be quicker by bike. So it looks like it’s worth the try. And besides that bicycling to work can be part of your daily minutes of activity, so vital for your health.

You can start by riding your route on a weekend in order to find the easiest and safest way and also clock the distance. This will give you less stress in your first working morning on the bike.

Some never start because they feel they would not be able to ride in the morning and also be fit to get back at the end of the day. If you are bothered by that, try riding to work and taking mass transit home in the evening and then alternating the next day. Pack clothes with you if you need to change.

Keeping an account with a bank that can be linked to your monthly bills is extremely helpful in reducing time for payments. How to do it? Subscribe at your bank for electronic banking.

Through this service you can instruct your bank to automatically pay certain dues from your account, such as your auto loans,  insurance premiums, mortgage installments and utility bills. In case you do not like the automatic feature, you can always opt for a manual confirmation of each payment, once it is due.

One useful side effect of electronic banking might be the ease of recordkeeping. Usually banks offer easy printing and also data exporting into different file formats and even transferring data to personal financial software.

Recurring bills of course could be paid also through a third party infrastructure, not the one of your bank, as faf as you can link it to one of your bank cards/accounts.

P.S. Be cautious before you pre-authorize direct withdrawals to pay sellers or companies with whom you are unfamiliar; funds from your bank account could be withdrawn fraudulently.

Do you think electronic banking works for you? Other tips? 

In case you follow lots of sites and especially news sites and blogs, it might be a productive idea to consider some web-based software that sums them up in one place. My personal choice, among a long list of others, is Google Reader.

This particular reader pulls my sites of interest in one page and summarizes the content much like any e-mail program would do, listing senders and subjects.

Unfortunately not all sites are fit for readers. Only sites that offer free subscription to their feeds are reader eligible as the subscription feature helps your reader follow the new content for you. The subscription is often termed RSS.

The most obvious time saving feature of the reader comes as saved efforts to open and summerize visually and chronologically much content from various sites. But apart from that it can also bring you a more target focus as many sites split their content into several streams. And on top of that arethe sharing functions the program offers. Each holder of a Google Mail account can e-mail the link of any article right from the front page of its reader.

Google Reader, if used with the extension Google Gears, also allows its users to download up to 2000 items to read offline. After coming back online, Google Reader updates the feeds.

This innovative software keeps me more informed in less time. Do you use any readers and does this approach work for you?

Many of us feel they do not have time to read books and magazines. Not that they do not want to. Among the usual causes are that we are too tired or busy or prefer taking a nap or watching TV.  

Usually people prefer to dedicate themselves to reading in a quiet place and without distraction. This is luxury. Try to learn the mastery to read in a noisy environment and with various distractions. The learning curve might seem a steep one but the goal is worth it.

I personally like to read early in the morning. How is this possible? Well on my way to work, I sometimes take public transport and this gives me some 20 minutes or so to take my daily dose of not work-related reading.

Many people neglect the public transport and might be right to do so but the positive moment is that it can give you time to stay tuned to all interesting magazines that you cannot pay attention to otherwise and to finish the book that have started last summer vacation.

There is also a multitasking moment here: reading while traveling to work and back.  See more on multitasking reading my story: Several Ideas to Benefit from Multitasking.

Do you think you can leverage your reading time using public transportation? Other tips?