Bumped into this article today How to Scale Yourself and Get More Done Than You Thought Possible. If you are looking for tips in hacking your productivity and efficiency, this is a must-not-miss article.
Conserve Your Keystrokes
Pulling a page from author and software developer Jon Udell, Hanselman encourages you to “conserve your keystrokes.” What does this mean? He explains by example:
If Brian emails me a really interesting question about ASP.net … and I send him back an exciting and long, five-paragraph with a code sample email that solves his problem, I just gave him the gift of 10,000 of my keystrokes. But there is a finite number of keystrokes left in my hands before I die, and I am never going to get those keystrokes back and I’ve just gifted them to Brian. And I don’t even know if he reads that email. So what should I do to multiply these keystrokes given that there is a finite number of those keystrokes left in my hands? I write a blog post and I mail him the link. Then after I’m dead, my keystrokes multiple—every time I get a page view that’s 5,000 keystrokes that I did not have to type.
Keep your emails to 3-4 sentences, Hanselman says. Anything longer should be on a blog or wiki or on your product’s documentation, FAQ or knowledge base. “Anywhere in the world except email because email is where you keystrokes go to die,” he says.
Best tip ever.