Keyboard Shortcuts as Kaizen
Kaizen focuses on small continuous improvements. Learning keyboard shortcuts is a great way to make small but significant improvements in productivity for those who spend a lot of time working at a computer.
Save Time and Increase Productivity
Using a keyboard shortcut instead of the mouse is much faster. Repeated many times this represents a great boost in productivity. Bruce Tognazzini, the founder of the Apple Human Interface Group and a renowned usability expert about using the keyboard vs. using the mouse is clear on this point:
- Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
- The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
Because not using the mouse take so much more time than using the keyboard – it should be considered Muda - wasteful
Prevent Repetitive Stress Injury
Carpal tunnel syndrom is a form of repetive stress injury that particularly afflicts computer users (more than 10% complain of carpal tunnel syndrom symptoms). According to a 2007 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, carpal tunnel syndrome was associated with the second longest average time away from work (28 days) among the major disabling diseases and illnesses – it’s an issue you should take seriously both personally and as a business. Learning to use keyboard shortcuts reduces the repetitive stress on your mouse hand. Occupational therapists recommend you use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible as possible in order to avoid repetitive stress injury. As such taking measures to promote the use of keyboard shortcuts can be seen as part of the so called 6th S – Safety of the Toyota Production System 5S framework.
Identify the programs you use the most
Identify the programs you and your team use the most. Remember the pareto principle. You’ll spend 80% of your time just using two or three programs. Focus on learning shortcuts for those programs to start with. Email is a good place to start: the average office worker spends 49 minutes managing emails each day, whilst the stats go up to 4 hours per day for senior managers. Do you spend a lot of time using a specialist application? What about Word and Excel?
Learning the shortcuts
- Print and display a nice cheat sheet of shortcuts next to every computer.
- Announce and organize an office quiz on shortcuts at the end of the month. The prize will serve as an incentive, whilst the quiz will introduce an element of fun which is important for learning and team bonding. Make this a monthly event – maybe focusing on different software each month. The quiz is also a good way of measuring and monitoring results which is an important part of Kaizen.
- Think of other ways to promote the learning of new shortcuts. For example use Tweeter to tweet a shortcut everyday to your team members. You can also display a different shortcut everyday on your intranet homepage…
Links to shortcuts cheat sheets
- General OS Shortcuts: Windows, Mac, Ubuntu
- Emailing: Outlook, Gmail
- Internet Browsers: standard browser shortcuts, IE, Firefox
- Office: Word, Excel
- Photoshop: pc, mac
- Shortcuts for geeks: gedit, aptana studio, eclipse
20 Adobe Bridge tutorials to help you organize your image files
Adobe Bridge CS4 is a powerful media manager that lets you easily organize, browse, locate, and view creative assets. It provides centralized access to project files, as well as to XMP metadata tagging and searching capabilities. It has lots of neat features such as smart collections (a kind of virtual folders). If your serious about organizing your image files and other creative assets – there’s no better tool
Investing time to master Adobe Bridge – will streamline your work flow, save you hours in time and frustration and allow you to concentrate on producing your best creative work.
Here are 20 tutorials to get you started.
- Learn Adobe Bridge CS4 - Introducing Bridge CS4
- Bridge CS4: 10 Things Designers Need to Know with: Anne-Marie Concepcion (lynda.com subscrition required)
- Adobe Bridge – Your complete guide
- 7 Steps to Understanding XMP Metadata
- Learn Adobe Bridge CS4 – Previewing and comparing images
- Learn Adobe Bridge CS4 - Preview and compare photos in Review mode
- Learn Adobe Bridge CS4 - Creating a web photo gallery
- Learn Adobe Bridge CS4 - Creating an event DVD
- Learn Adobe Bridge CS4 - Creating FLV and F4V files
- The Complete Picture—New Features in Bridge CS4, by Julieanne Kost
- Bridge updates, by Dave Cross
- Using Adobe Bridge in Photoshop CS4, by Chris Orwig
- Photoshop CS4 Getting Started—Getting photos from your camera, by Deke McClelland
- Essential Bridge preferences, by Chris Owig
- Adding file information, by Deke McClelland
- Using Review mode in Bridge CS4, by Terry White
- Using Camera Raw 5 in Bridge and Photoshop CS4 by Terry White
- New Photoshop and Bridge keyboard shortcuts, by Corey Barker
- Smart Collections (virtual folders)
- Using Lightroom with Adobe Bridge by Julieanne Kost
- Using InDesign Multiplace with Adobe Bridge
- Bridge and Version Cue CS3 Essential Training with: Ted LoCascio (lynda.com subscrition required)
- Digital Asset Management for Photographers with: Peter Krogh (lynda.com subscrition required)
12 Zen wallpapers to boost your productivity
Soft on the eyes and not overly funky, this series of beautiful desktop wallpapers will help you stay concentrated and focused. If your desktop looks messy, try having a spring clean using this Japanese method. You’ll end up with a totally Zen computer…
Garden Buddha by ileen4justice
Spring wheat by Alexander Kirichev
Hidden Falls by Digital Blasphemy
Sunset Thunderstorm by National Geographic (photo by Gary Crabbe Alamy )
Swans in Flight by National Geographic (photo by Mike McElroy)
A Day at the Beach by Chris Gin
Two and a Half Trees by Chris Gin
Monastery Garden by Kenneth Moyle
Applying the Japanese 5S Management System to IT: organising the files on your computer
Based on five Japanese words beginning with ‘S’, the 5S Philosophy focuses on effective work place organisation and standardised work procedures. It’s part of the Toyota Production System and of Kaizen – a Japanese management philosophy of continuous improvement. Today we’ll look at how 5S can help us organise the files on our computer focusing on the first S - Seiri (整理) or Sorting.
Seiri (整理) Sorting: Keeping only essential items. Everything else is stored or discarded.
Red Tagging
Chances are your current file system is a complete mess, so we’ll start with a radical step inspired by the 5S practice of red tagging (a process whereby a red tag is placed on all items not required to complete your job).
Red tagged items are moved to a holding area for evaluation. Occasionally used items are then moved to organised storage outside of the work area while unneeded items are discarded. Get an EMPTY external hard drive. If you don’t have one – buy one. These are two good models from Amazon: Freecom 500GB External Hard Drive and Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 1TB. Now move ALL of your files to your external hard drive. Delete all the files on your computer. But be careful not to delete your Documents, Pictures and Videos folders. Just leave them empty. In effect we’ve just ‘red tagged‘ all your files.
What are you working on?
Copy the folders corresponding to the projects you are currently working on back to your computer.
Be careful if you have a folder named clientA, containing sub-folders project1, project2, and project3 and you are currently working on project3. You’ll want to archive folder ClientA and sub-folders project1 and project2 (see step 3 below) and only move back the project3 subfolder back to your computer.
What else do you need to do your work?
In addition to project folders, I have a folder for accounting sub-divided into months and a folder of reference material containing pdf books about programming sub-divided into folders by programming language: php, python, ruby. I also have a library directory containing frequently used snippets of code and folders for photoshop brushes and patterns. Think about what you need and only keep what you really use.
Personal files and Music
I’ll write about how to organise your personal files such as your photos, and music in a future post. In the meantime copy them to a USB stick /drive. You wouldn’t leave your family’s old photo albums and your cd collection strewed round your office. Just can’t leave without music? Take this as an opportunity to discover new tunes and stream music from sites such as last.fm or the bbc iplayer, while we organise your music collection.
Archive Old Projects
Archive all the files and folders relating to old projects. Beforehand, do a quick sweep to make things more coherent. For example move folders with names like projectA_images to the projectA folder and gather up files that are not in their project folders. Apply the 80/20 principle here. These are your old projects and you don’t even know if you’ll ever look at them again. Use a compression tool such as winzip if appropriate and burn everything to DVD. Once the DVDs are burnt, make sure they are clearly labelled and move them to a storage cupboard. Delete the original files and folders on the hard drive as you go along.
Bin the Rest
If you are a Zen master – delete all the remaining files on the hard drive. If not, burn them to a DVD and label it with your name, the date and the title “Red Tagged”. Now put this DVD in your long term storage – and smile knowing you’ll never use it.
Shitsuke
Get your calendar and book a morning in three to six months time to repeat this exercise. Remember the 5th S - Shitsuke (躾) meaning ’sustaining the discipline’.
Liked this article? Check out how 5S can help you maintain a clean computer desktop.
Applying the Japanese 5S Management System to IT: clean computer desktop
Based on five Japanese words that begin with ‘S’, the 5S Philosophy focuses on effective work place organization and standardized work procedures. It’s part of the Toyota Production System and of Kaizen – a Japanese management philosophy of continuous improvement. Over the next few weeks, I’ll explore how the concepts of 5S can be applied to the world of IT.
Seisō (清掃) Sweeping or Shining or Cleanliness: Systematic Cleaning or the need to keep the workplace clean as well as neat.
It’s easy for your computer desktop to quickly become very messy especially if your work involves downloading and working with a lot of files. It can quickly end up looking similar to this:
It’s frustrating… You waste time looking for ‘lost’ files whose name you can’t quite recall or locate.
The solution is to have a clean desk routine for your desktop, which you carry out at the end of every working day.
Here are the steps to my clean-up routine:
- Delete all unnecessary / duplicate files.
- Rename files according to a file naming policy. In a couple of days, let alone a couple of weeks – you just won’t remember what files named things like ‘budget 3.doc‘ or ‘episode24.mp3‘ are about. If you don’t have a specific file-naming policy at your company, start by thinking about what you might type into a search box to find the file. Avoid spaces and apostrophes - use an underscore instead. Add dates and version numbers at the end of file names.
- Move all the files that obviously belong in an existing folder in your file system to where they belong.
- Create folders for group of files that belong together -such as a series of image files - that are a subtle variation of the same graphic.
- Move these folders to the correct project folders / sub-folders in your file system.
- Think whether you’ll be using the files your moving in the near future and whether its worth compressing them into a zip or tar files? Can any files be burnt to a disk / moved to an external drive for long term archiving? Remember the idea of keeping only essential items implied in Seiri (整理)- the first S.
- Transfer music files and podcasts to your Ipod or portable mp3 player to listen to them on the go…
- Turn your computer off. Use an air duster can to remove any dust, hairs, and crumbs. Use a screen wipe to make sure your screen is clean.
- Your backups and antivirus should be automated. If not now is a good time to backup your days work and to scan your computer with your anti-virus software.
Tips and tricks:
- Right Click on your destop and use ‘Sort Files by‘ to order the files by type or by name as your cleaning
- If your using a mac, your might want to use CleanDesk a nifty little apple script that automatically puts the files on your desktop into folders for different file extensions (.doc, .xls, .jpg …)
- Use a batch renaming tool to rename groups of file such as Ant Renamer 2 or use this trick from Yahoo! Tech to rename multiple files with one click.
- Get a beautiful wallpaper to inspire you to keep your destop clean.
Shitsuke (躾) – the 5th S refers to ’sustaining the discipline’. This means that now that you have a clean desktop you need to have the discipline to do this everyday. Do not allow a gradual decline back to your old ways and don’t slip back to having a messy desktop. You should aim to keep your desktop clean and Zen.
