Only the best time saving sites — web sites, that is — get recorded here. These are time saver sites that truly have an impact on how long it takes you to get things done. If the web site can’t shave minutes, hours, or days off of work that you do repeatedly, you won’t find it here! Subscribe

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Time Saving Sites

NameChk scans all the popular social media platforms for you and tells you if a given name has been used. Granted, the name used might be yours (they don’t know that), but at least you can see which platforms still have room for your clever pseudonym.

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Find a social media name

Price Protectr [sic] to the rescue! Find a product you like from a vendor you trust and paste the link into this tool along with your email address. When the price changes, they will send you an email alert, showing you the new price. Simple! Now you can get back to your internet, uh, research.

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Price Watch in your Sleep

Situation: You want to publish your email address to provide good customer service.

Problem: Robots chew up your website hourly and harvest your email for the offshore porn and pharmaceutical spammers.

Solution: Use a site like MailToEncoder to create a link that the robots will choke on. Humans can use it just fine, but the spam bots don’t recognize it as an email address.

The site is simple to use. One click gives you code to copy and paste into your site. No registration required.

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Spam-Proof Email Address

• Works exactly like you expect it to
• Drag and drop date availability is very intuitive
• Rquires no account sign-up
• Looks great

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Group Scheduling – Fast and Friendly

Clicking to open these items, however, takes you away from the list of posts you are reading and exposes you to other content. This is a problem for me because I fall victim to “shiny object syndrome” and waste 10 minutes reading an article I didn’t know I needed.

Enter Tweetree.com to save me not only the extra clicking, but also the wasted time from following internet rabbit trails. Tweetree pulls the content of shared links right into the page where you are reading the tweets of those you follow. Presto! Clicking and rabbit trails disappear!

No new account setup is required. Just login using your Twitter credentials.

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Tweetree Saves Time and Clicks for Tweet-readers

I taught myself to type from a book, banging on an old Royal manual while stationed on San Clemente Island in the Navy. It was one of the best things I ever did for myself. In the twenty-five years I have worked with computers, it has probably saved me hundreds, if not thousands of hours.

There are some cool products you can buy and/or download to learn typing. I think we have Mavis Beacon loaded on the family PC. But if you want to try something quick and free… check out TypingWeb.

There are different levels from beginner to advanced. If you register, you get to save your progress through the course. I highly recommend learning to type as an essential career skill for anyone who is, well, breathing. People change jobs 3 to 5 times, after all and it’s hard to imagine any job these days where touch-typing would not help you sooner or later.

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Online Typing Tutor

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• Computers replace the human eye, saving time in the process

Try it once (it’s free – no sign up) and you’ll see how powerful it is.

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Garage Sales Map

Blissfully let society pass you by, while you concentrate on more important things

Social networking is close to mandatory nowadays – if you don’t check your facebook account for a couple of weeks, you’ll find your new pokes and requests met with stony silences by shunned friends … Twitter bills itself as the modern antidote to information overload, but if you fail to update your status at least daily, you’ll find your Mom, your best friend, and your supervisor all calling your phone asking what you’re up to. It’s enough to make you become a hermit mountain recluse, isn’t it?! If only I could afford a mountain retreat…

We’ve recently found a couple of new services that make the pervasion of social media a little easier to deal with – Nutshell Mail is extremely popular and well regarded, and Fuser is older, and works on the same principle but is often blocked by company firewalls as an evil, personal service.

All your social networking updates in a you-know-what

Nutshell Mail can consolidate updates and information from many popular social networking sites, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace and Twitter, and also has the capacity to consolidate mail from more email accounts than any rational person needs.

It will collect all of this information and deliver it to you at times you specify, rather than when everybody else is doing their thing on the web. Slackers.

Some of the email providers and networks from which Nutshell Mail can collect - click the pic for the full list.

You can access the service through your most commonly used inbox, which, incidentally, can be your work email address. Nutshell Mail updates are not blocked by company firewalls, and you don’t need to log into a web service to get them.

However, you will have to write down those witty replies that come to mind when you read people’s status for later – you can’t reply through the service! We’d have to write about that aspect in our blog on how to waste time, for people that have too much J

Fuser was recently relaunched, and includes several new features and benefits. Fuser also aggregates all the biggies – most major email providers, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, etc. The performance of the old version was reportedly sluggish, but has been improved. The navigation for Fuser is simple (saves you time on learning the new software …!), with a logo and account name in a panel at the top left of screen.

Fuser screenshot

You can choose not to receive mail from some accounts and not others, as well as choosing the types of updates you receive for each service (for example, status updates but not comments on facebook). And for those crazy people who actually think the Gmail display is more intuitive than Outlook (I love the service, but I’d happily throttle the designer!), it retains the display features of Gmail.

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Consolidate Network Messages and Save Time on Pesky Socializing!

It’s almost become a truism that computers take up at least as much time as they save. If you’ve ever spent several minutes clicking through your Windows Explorer (or Mac) ‘filing system’, trying to get to where you want to save something, experienced the joy of a virus, spent hours comparing online shopping prices only to find that they won’t ship to your area, then you’ll be feeling that dull, throbbing pain the front of your head right now … just like me! So today we’re posting a few random tips on taking the power back from your computer, despite the fact that it’s the Machine Age.

All tuckered out by the computer ... awww!

1. Use both your hands on the computer

Many of us are mousebound, using only our right hands on the computer, with our left wasting away in a desert of isolation. Bring the poor little guy back into the fold and you can save time!

Advanced users will already know most of these, and will be able to benefit from more advanced lists like this one for all users, and this updated one for Windows 7 users. For the newbies, though:

• Ctrl + C to copy, Ctrl + V to paste.
• Ctrl Z to undo the last thing you did; this can be repeated in some programs but not in others.
• Shift + Delete – delete permanently, so you don’t have to suffer through being asked ‘Are you sure?’, by your computer a hundred times a day
• Windows button + D – return to desktop. Press this again to restore all your windows to previous positions
• Alt + F4 – close active program
• Ctrl+S saves a file in most programs
• Ctrl+F allows you to find a word in a file – this will save you scanning hundreds of webpages for the part that is relevant to you.

You can always find more keyboard shortcuts by reading the menus that you use in programs. Most list any keyboard shortcuts just to the right of the option in the drop down menu.

2. Quick Launch

Always add your frequently used programs to the Quick Launch bar, if you don’t want to clutter up your desktop. I’m not sure about your computer, but mine seems to load programs quicker from the launch bar than the desktop, anyway. You can do this by right-clicking the program in your Start Menu, and selecting ‘Add to Quick Launch’.

3. Startup Programs

On your work PC, add programs that you have open every single day to your Startup folder, so that they automatically open for you in the morning. While you’re having a debriefing, making a coffee, or tidying up paperwork, your programs will be loading themselves.

Here’s how to do it in XP, and here’s how to do it in Vista.

And here’s how to take them off again!

4. Feedreaders

Rss feeds - a blessing and a curse. The symbol of all mans duality.

Feedreaders, like most things in life, are both a blessing and a curse. If you have websites that you must get the updated content from in order to complete a task or to be productive, then use feedreaders like Google’s, or Bloglines’. I personally don’t recommend subscribing to feeds that you are juts interested in … not if you’ve ever said ‘There aren’t enough hours in the day!’, anyway .

5. Google Toolbar

Love or hate Google, they make some pretty cool free stuff. Their toolbar has been out for ages, but many of you might not know how much time it (and Google in general) can save you. There are hundreds of customizable buttons, which allow you to do things like translate, convert currencies, check webmail, add and tag bookmarks, get driving directions, look up lyrics, check craigslist … just about anything you want, all with the ease of a button right on your browser. You don’t need to hunt through bookmarks, or even open a new window or tab.

If you do anything on the net repetitively, it is worth checking if Big Brother sorry, Google, has a button for it.

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He-Man and She-ra, Masters of the Computer-verse! 5 PC Time Hacks for Beginners

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