Business professionals lead hectic lives, and they are always on the lookout for ways to save time and increase their productivity. If you use Windows, there are a few tips that can make life a little bit easier on you as you do your day-to-day tasks. They may not save hours, but a few minutes here and there is still helpful.
One thing that many people may already know, especially experienced administrative assistants, is that you don’t have to open a document in order to print it. If you find the document you want to print and just right-click on it, you will find the “Print” option in the drop-down box. I would call this a pseudo-timesaver because the document will open automatically before printing begins anyway. So, how much time have you really saved? If you print a lot of documents every day, those seconds could add up, but if you only print once in a while, the time saved is negligible.
There are some who believe that pinning programs to the start menu is a timesaver, but I’m partial to pinning them to the taskbar. I imagine if you have to access a lot of programs, pinning them to the start menu makes better sense. But if you only have about a dozen programs that you need to access on a regular basis pinning to the taskbar could work well for you. You can pin a program to the taskbar or the start menu by right clicking on it and selecting either “Pin to Taskbar” or “Pin to Start Menu.” This will not remove the program icon from your desktop if you happen to have it there as well. If you do decide to pin programs to the start menu, it’s a good idea to use small icons so you can fit more of them in that tight little space.
As someone who writes a lot, I find that having the Microsoft Word icon pinned to my taskbar to be a great timesaver because I only have to click on it once to launch Word. And I find that Word launches faster from the taskbar than it does from the desktop. Again, when you have to do something often, those few seconds could add up to valuable minutes of time saved.
If you’re like me, you’ve saved a document in an uncommon location because you were in a hurry and didn’t pay attention to where it was going. As long as you saved it somewhere on your computer, you should be able to find it via the “Search” tool at the bottom of your start menu.
This next timesaver is only available to people who use Microsoft Outlook. If you want to e-mail a document to someone, you don’t have to pull up your email. You can just right click on the document you want to send, click on “Send To” then click on “Mail Recipient,” and you’re ready to email your document.
Busy professionals want to spend more time actually doing their work than they spend preparing to do it. The aforementioned shortcuts may not save tremendous amounts of time, but a couple of them could slightly satisfy the all-too-human need for instant gratification.
