Connie Bensen

… for finally valuing my time. (It’s about time, too!)

I love my friend requests & add them all. This is my system:

• friend request with no note – just add them
• friend request with reason – add & respond
• friend request with comment about my blog – add & thank them
• friend suggestion – only add if I know them personally

Periodically I have to delete all the other requests. It was SO time consuming because I only do it when they get up around 200. This morning I spent 30 min’s & then complained on Twitter about the waste of my time. @degeeked told me that there is an "Ignore All" button!!! WAY TO GO Facebok! but in true Facebook fashion it’s not easy to find.

Click on Home | other requests

Scroll to right & there is the magic button -  ‘ignore all’!

That will give you the option to happily mass delete!

And @degeeked suggested that in the future I should use the saved 45 minutes for a nap! My recommendation is that you follow @degeeked for their smashing ideas! And check out degeeked.com for oodles & oodles of ideas!

What is your favorite Facebook tip or trick?

How many times have you went looking for something on your computer & didn’t really know where to begin? …and wasted a lot of time searching for…

• an email that you know you received or sent? with the person’s name or topic?  but you have 5+ accounts)
• a document & you can’t remember if it’s an email attachment or on your hard drive?

I just don’t have the patience or time to spend looking for those types of things anymore.

So, copernic has become one of my ESSENTIAL desktop app’s. And it’s free which makes it great!

What it is:

It’s a desktop application that you download, install, and then it catalogs your hard drive. My sister was suspect of this, but she’s heard me rave about it enough that I think she may be using it. (She reads more email accounts into Thunderbird than I do).

How to use it:

Copernic installs a little search bar in the bottom right of your window

Type in your search term. In this case I’m going to look for email from Robin (from Rakscraps).

A pop up window comes up when you start typing.

The search results for Robin show 65 emails, 32 files & 3 contacts.

From here click on the "Open Main Window" & a full window opens with a bottom pane showing the details of the email or file that you choose.

The choice to Reply or Forward email from Copernic doesn’t work.

But you can open files from it, which is very handy!  This handy little app saves me a LOT of time!

Maybe it’s a result of being a librarian for almost a decade but I have a fairly low tolerance for disorganization. This isn’t to say that I never become disorganized, but I’ve learned that being highly organized is key to working efficiently! I love to multitask & my organization systems allow me to do that happily.

Everyone once in awhile the intense desire to organize strikes me! It’s not a bad thing because I know that after an hour or two of focused effort my work areas will be much greatly improved. Once I’m done it’s like a breath of fresh air for my mind!

I’m curious to hear how you stay organized? Do you have a system? or do you just leave things to fate? I have been working from home & that has affected the high level of organization & routines I had developed at the library. But here’s what I need to do:

Evernote – I absolutely LOVE this free desktop organizer! I can drag URL’s & images into this so fast & it makes them hotlinks for future reference. It’s category structure is the same as ACDSee’s & allows one to tag entries & then just click on a category to pull only those entries. The secret is to periodically go thru & tag. And I put my to-do’s in there also. Now it’s fun to go back & delete the items that are completed.

Copernic – This is fast becoming one of my most valued tools because it’s saving my life (& SO much time!). It’s a free software that catalogs your desktop files & then you can search for an abstract term & it will search all files, images & email. I’m feeding 6 addresses into Thunderbird, so it’s imperative to use this to find things quickly. I don’t have it on my ACDSee laptop yet & I’ve already felt the need!

Outlook (replacing my Palm) – I’m learning to use this. Yes! at 41 I had never used it before. It’s fairly intuitive & I know that once I engage in using the tasks functionality completely I’ll be cruising!

Thunderbird & Firefox – two more essentials! Thunderbird is just my favorite. (did I mention I’m learning Outlook? How did THAT get ahead of these two?! *shock*). I have so many Add-on’s in there (21 – I just counted). And it looks like I need to do some purging there to lighten the load!

New ACDSee laptop with Outlook. It’s pretty blank. So I need to get busy this weekend & add the above items. Evernote is cool because I can transfer the database. I’ve been working on my personal laptop for five weeks so I need to shift some doc’s over too.

Soon I will share a photo of my workspace at home. So how do you stay organized?

• How often do you stop & consciously get organized? or don’t you?
• Does disorganization bother you? a certain level motivates me to action!
• Can you accomplish more if you’re organized? or doesn’t it matter?

This weekend someone asked:

Do you have Facebook & Twitter open in different windows?

I’ll answer that question below, but first I’m going to link you to a post on how I quickly read Facebook that’s part of a series.

Routinely Visit Facebook & Turning off email from it

For me, visiting Facebook is primarily for networking, so I try to pass thru quickly.

About the question of having Facebook & Twitter open. I don’t. I close them. Bottom line is it’s too distracting. I use Twitter when I want to distract myself though. For awhile I stayed logged into the Firefox Facebook app, but seeing people’s faces pop up was just too inviting… I mean distracting!

• My Twitter routine – first thing in the morning I open Twitter, so it’s the first tab. Then as I review tweets & see links I’m interested in, I click on them & keep paging back to my last post. Then I start reviewing those tabs. It goes really quickly. I respond in Twitter to what I choose to.
• Facebook sends me email for new wall posts & messages. I give those priority depending on who it is. I turned off the ‘new friend request’ notification, because I catch those when I read my home page per the link above.

Tabbed browsing – is excellent if you want to open a number of windows each morning with your coffee. I use it to open the forums that I visit regularly.

Do you have shortcuts that save you time? I’d love to hear them.