5. Mobile applications
Shaun Nichols: Nobody wants to spend more time in the office than they have to, so anything that allows people to do more away from the desk is welcome. At least to a point.
For many of us, commuting takes up a sizeable portion of the day. And if you work in a large city such as London or San Francisco, a good portion of your commute is on some form of mass transit. While subways, buses and trains can be rather unreliable and stressful, they also offer a chance to get some work done when one is equipped with the right mobile applications. Even something as simple as checking the morning's email can save valuable time.
Earlier I mentioned that working away from the desk is only good to a point. While mobile applications allow us to get work done away from the office can save time, it can also force people to take on more work than they should Cutting down time in the office can be a good thing, but using mobile applications to extend time on the job is not. If not carefully managed, one can turn an 8 hour workday into an 11 hour one and put people into unhealthy situations.
Iain Thomson: I love mobile applications, they make life so much easier.
That said they do encourage the workaholics among us, because we can be checking things whenever we want. This is both a good and a bad thing. Companies are now getting sued because they expect staff to be available much longer thanks to mobile applications. If you want staff online 24/7 then you have to pay them for that, and some employers have yet to recognise the fact.
What makes mobile applications so seductive is that they allow for much more efficient use of time. If you're waiting for the bus you can answer a couple of emails and save yourself a few minutes at the office. Stuck for something to do on an evening? Check Twitter and see who's down the pub. A time saver certainly, but be careful what you wish for.
4. Autocomplete
Iain Thomson: Autocomplete is one of those inventions that you'd really miss if you didn't have it. Although Shaun's probably not old enough to remember a time without it I certainly do and it has saved me lots of minutes over the last few years.
Autocomplete is especially useful in browsers. I can't remember the last time I typed http:// when entering a URL and these days I don't even bother with the www. This can be highly irritating when you occasionally find a browser that doesn't have it and you face a very confused computer.
But as a writer it can also be very useful, although I have to say that I find it a little irritating sometimes too when it gets in the way. OpenOffice really needs to improve its autocomplete function if it wants to keep me as a customer.
That said, autocomplete also has other problems, particularly if you are sharing a computer. Because it can use past data to guess your intentions you can sometimes find out a little more than you wanted to know about what other people have been doing on that computer. I know of one young man who wasn't as surprised as he might have been when his parents announced they were divorcing, because he knew both of them had been searching for information on the topic for quite some time.
Shaun Nichols: As with our number three pick, autocomplete is an idea you really don't formally appreciate until you attempt to live without it. Go ahead, pop open the browser preferences and turn it off: I dare you. Most people will last all of one morning before cracking under the burden of having to type all the letters into the URL bar.
It sounds so simple in practice. The browser looks into cache and history and suggests that the site you're typing may have been one you've visited before. This isn't such a big deal when you only think about the front page for each site. But when you want to go back to a certain article buried deep within a site, the URLs can get dozens of characters long, and we don't always have the foresight to bookmark a page. In those situations, autocomplete can be a godsend.
3. Spell check
Shaun Nichols: Think spell check is a silly choice at the number three spot? Then try this little exercise. Disable spell check on your word processor and attempt to write a five hundred word document using only a dictionary to check your spelling.
We take for granted how much spell check has improved productivity sometimes, particularly those of us in the journalism world where 1500 words a day is the norm. Copy editing used to be a full-time job. Now a full story can be checked by an editor in the process of a few minutes. Those who rely on word processing for a living owe a great deal to this one overlooked feature.
Of course, it also has some unpleasant side-effects. We have become so reliant on spell-check that we get sloppy or even forget how to spell altogether. When in situations where spell-check is not used, like old fashioned hand-written letter, this can make correspondence especially painful.
Iain Thomson: I worry about spell checking; it's an evolutionary thing that makes us weaker as a species. Just as the proportion of people with eye problems (myself included) has gone up since the invention of spectacles so too has the proportion of bad spellers.
Don't get me wrong; spell checking is a massive time saver and has helped me enormously. My spelling is awful. Several people in the know have told me I'm partially dyslexic, while my mother maintains I'm just too lazy to learn the correct spelling of words. She may be right, but I know the v3.co.uk sub editors would have a much tougher time of it without spell checking technology.
Moving to America has made the problem worse. The US hates the letter u it seems when it comes to spelling. This confuses things (and we Brits invented the language dammit!) and so without a language-specific spell checker I'd be up a certain creek without a certain implement. Writing articles would take much, much longer and require a lot more references to the Oxford English Dictionary and Websters.
2. RSS Readers
Iain Thomson: As web sites have proliferated it's becoming increasingly time consuming to check each one on a regular basis, particularly as content may not have been updated.
As journalists this is particularly apt, which is why RSS readers are so helpful. Having software that checks for you and tells you when something new is happening makes life a whole lot simpler and probably saves us about an hour a day each. It also allows us to trace the flow of information as it spreads out and pinpoint the source much more quickly.
With more and more web sites coming online every day (one estimate is that 20,000 new sites go live every week) it's getting harder and harder to keep up with what is going on. You find new favourite web sites and add them to your list but that list gets longer and before you know it you're forgetting to visit them to check for new stuff. An RSS reader is a very useful tool and may soon be essential.
We decided not to push any one RSS reader because there are so many out there, but Shaun and I both use SharpReader and it does the job well.
Shaun Nichols: We were originally going to make RSS readers our top time saver, but decided that we, as journalists, were a bit biased and the larger public did not rely on them as heavily as we do.
Checking dozens of different sites every day can take up a huge chunk of time. RSS readers exponentially reduce that by taking stories from many sites and organizing them into a single list.
If you're a news hound, however, RSS readers are a godsend. You used to be able to spot reporters and editors on the street because they were the ones carrying four or five different newspapers under their arm. These days people still carry the news under their arm, but it's in the form of a laptop bag, and they're carrying hundreds of papers from all over the world.
It's not just news junkies that have fallen in love with RSS. With everyone and their mother going online and posting blogs, the RSS reader serves as a great way to keep track of what everyone is up to. Perhaps the most successful RSS platform on the web is Twitter, which combines the news feed idea with blogging and social networking, all stuffed into a single web page.
1. Bookmarks
Shaun Nichols: Use the web for more than a few months and you should find yourself managing more than a few bookmarks. Use the same workstation for more than a few years and your bookmark collection will likely be pushing triple digits. Sure, it may be a chore to manage, but imagine having to remember all the sites in your bookmark collection.
As the internet progresses and companies get even more creative with addresses and top-level domains, bookmarks could become even more important. While we're relying more on the internet, it is itself is becoming more complex, and the trusty old bookmark system has remained a staple of life on the web.
Iain Thomson: If I spent half as long organising my living space as I do ordering my bookmarks the girlfriend wouldn't get that pained look in her eye so often when she stays over.
Some might say it's anal but when I click on my bookmark button I want the pages listed right. Top of the list are the most useful, then the long, long list of sites visited every day. But as almost every surfing session ends up with a new bookmark or two and they need to be put into folders for later use then I feel it's a useful exercise. Then those folders have to be ordered so that the most used sites are at the top of the list. I think I may have a problem...
But personal failings aside bookmarks are the best time savers out there. Back in the bad old days of the internet, when I got online properly 15 years ago rather than dealing with the abomination that was the JANET network, visiting sites was an exercise in frustration, as you sought to remember incomprehensible web addresses perfectly. Hotlisting (the early name for bookmarks) changed all that and it's saved me possibly months of time ever since.
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