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Are you working too hard?

I hope you will pardon my little step back into Australian colloquialism but I just couldn't help it. I watched a report last night that mentioned that the true Aussie bloke was a vanishing breed as metrosexuals take hold. But it seems that there are still plenty of real Australians out there and the metrosexuals are not about to replace real Australians anytime soon.

And if you don't believe me then you only have to take a look at the latest movie hit here in Australia. It's all about Dave the Portaloo Plumber - a subject that only real Australians could possibly relate too.

But I digress because what I really want to talk about today is productivity and that's not about working harder but working smarter. It's a subject I've talked about several times before but a new study that was released last week certainly makes it something that is worth looking at again.

If you've read my past ramblings on the subject of productivity you will know that both Steve and I are big fans of working with two monitors. In fact Steve is such a fan of the two-monitor setup that he has two computers on his desk and both of them are fitted with two monitors.

Some of you might think that the idea of having two monitors is just plain excessive but when you look at the savings in time and money that two monitors can give you then it makes just plain economic sense.

Apple released a survey last week that they commissioned that looked at the benefits of using one of their 30-inch monitors. The survey found that using a big monitor like that could increase productivity by as much as 65 percent. These savings came about because users could position two images or documents they were working on side-by-side and switching from one to the other was far quicker than if the user was working with just a single, relatively small, monitor.

But you can get the same effect with two monitors without going to the expense of an Apple 30-inch monitor (rrp around $2000) and some experts have suggested that users gain more productivity from working with two monitors than they would from a single 30-inch screen.

But there are other ways to increase your productivity that many of us have never considered. Just about every piece of software that we use these days comes with hot keys that we use. These are keyboard shortcuts and, once you have progressed beyond the initial learning stage, using keyboard shortcuts saves more time than using the mouse to access menus.

I hadn't thought too much about that one until just the other day when I watched Steve as he worked on a fairly repetitive job that required a series of entries, each with a new page, in a single word doc.

Ctrl S > Ctrl I > enter > enter was all it took to save what he had just written, insert a page break and be ready to start the next piece of text. The saving in time was probably around 10 seconds each time he needed to move to a new page. Now that doesn't sound like much but work on that level of savings repeated numerous times in a day spread over an entire week's worth of work and you are beginning to see some reasonably significant numbers.

You can also save time and increase productivity by having a functional work area. I know some people in this industry seem to think that they're cool because they do all of their work on a laptop on the couch but if you're serious about making money here then you need to be serious about your workspace too.

A reasonably sized desk is very important so that you not only have room for your keyboard but also for the papers etc. that you will inevitably have to refer too. If what you need to access is sitting right there on the desk beside your keyboard you won't be wasting time scratching around in the pile of junk beside you on the couch.

There are many other ways that you can increase your productivity simply by working smarter instead of harder. Steve and I will soon be migrating all our computer hardware out of the towers they currently reside in and into some neat cubes that can sit on top of one another. That will give us more space on our desks for things that we need to have there. (For Steve that's going to be a small television so he can watch the cricket while he works - sigh)

That's something that will work for us but what will work for you? It's not hard to identify productivity blocks in you work environment and taking a few hours now to do that can have big returns in the future.