Voices In Man's Head Make Great Point About Time Management

[yesthattom]

Voices In Man's Head Make Great Point About Time Management (fake news in The Onion)

Yes, yes, thank you to all the people that have sent me the link.

However, I've already seen it. Why? Because of the following time management tip. (Note: this tip only works with web browsers that support tabbed browsing such as Mozilla Firefox and Mac Safari.)

Most tabbed web browsers let you bookmark a folder full of links and then "open all in tabs". That is, if your folder contains 5 links, simultaneously open 5 tabs and open one bookmarked link in each of those tabs.

With Firefox you can start the process by opening, say, 3 tabs and load each with a web page that you read every day. Then click "Bookmarks >> Bookmark All Tabs". Name the folder "Daily". You will now see a bookmark folder called "Daily". You can add other bookmarks to that folder.

In my "Daily" folder first I have about 25 daily comic strips that I like to read. Then I have The Onion, then Slashdot. There are a few more blogs after that too.

On days that I have for "entertainment" reading, I click on "Open in Tabs" selection that appears on the bottom of that bookmark folder. Suddenly all 25 comic strips and 5-6 blogs open up before me.

As I read each one, I press CTRL-W (actually CMD-W on my Mac) to close that tab. When I'm out of tabs, I'm done!

You can read Live Journal easier this way too. I made a bookmark folder called "LJ". The links inside it are "http://yesthattom.livejournal.com/friends then http://yesthattom.livejournal.com/friends?skip=50 (which is one click of the "Previous" button), then http://yesthattom.livejournal.com/friends?skip=75 (which is two clicks of the "Previous" button), etc. I do this until I have about 12 entries in the folder. Now I can click on "Open in Tabs" and start reading the first page of entries. By the time I'm done, the others are usually loaded. I can whip through LJ entries much faster this way. Warning: You might have your LJ set to show a different number of entries per page, don't copy my links exactly.)

Some other tips:

• I recently re-ordered the comic strips so that all the ones from www.comics.com are together. Now for those 10-15 strips the image is in the same place on the page. My eyes have to do less work.
• I find its easier to read LJ if I have fewer long pages rather than a lot of short pages. You can set the number of items per page here, scroll to "Change Individual Settings", then click on the "Edit Customizations" button.)

Comments

[ted-badger.livejournal.com]

"Why? Because of the following time management tip."

Heeheehee... such cleverness!

Love it!

[airshipjones.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip. The voices in my head say I have to implement this today.

[lillilah]

That's so funny. It just occurred to me yesterday that I could do this with Firefox. I implemented it this morning.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Opera, too.

[rowan-redbeard.livejournal.com]

I do something similar on LJ, except I use friends filters instead of skips. So I can have http://username.livejournal.com/friends/foo and http://username.livejournal.com/friends/bar in the bookmark folder. That works for me, since in any given friends filter collects new posts slowly enough that I rarely have to skip back.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

At least in Safari, if you command-click on the bookmarks collection folder in the bookmarks bar, it will open them all in tabs, without having to resort to the time-wasting scrolling to the bottom of the menu thing. I don't know if Firefox also has this capability. (Also, in Safari, Command-[numeral] will open up the same numbered regular bookmark in the bookmarks bar. So, for my bookmarks bar, if I do command-1 (one), it opens up my bank's login page.)

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Even better... in Safari you can go into "Bookmars -> Show All Bookmarks" and turn a folder into a button. Then you can just click the button. (Assuming the folder is in the button bar.)

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

That's true, but sometimes I want the menu to pop up. A command-click is very easy on a PowerBook.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Go to Preferences -> Tabs and then make sure that "enable tabbed browsing" is enabled.