The Time Management Series: Oh, I Know a Shortcut

Posted by Aaron aka Sir Scrapalot on Jun 10, 2010 in Scrapping Tips and Techniques, Time Management | View Comments

If you are like me, you work with Photoshop a lot.  One way I have learned to save myself a few extra minutes while I am working is to really put some Photoshop shortcuts to use.  I will admit, I don’t use all of them, and I really don’t have any need for some of them.  The ones I do use, however, make working with either layouts or designs easier and a quicker process.  I went into my bookmarks, and came up with these five resources for you to explore, in hopes that you’ll find some shortcuts to use on your own.

• 18 Exceptionally Useful Photoshop Shortcuts
• 28 More Exceptionally Useful Photoshop Shortcuts (the follow up to the previous article)
• Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet
• Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts Tips & Resources (this tutorial shows you how to change the shortcuts to better fit your work flow)
• The Daily Digi: Scrap Faster and Easier

I hope that these resources will help you find ways to make your Photoshop work flow quicker and easier.  I’ll tell you…my favorite keyboard shortcuts are these:

• Using ALT+BACKSPACE to fill a selection with the foreground color
• Using SHIFT while dragging something onto a canvas to automatically center it.

What are your favorite shortcuts?  Let me know in the comments!

Time Management Series: What Do You Mean Your Inbox is Empty?

Posted by Aaron aka Sir Scrapalot on May 31, 2010 in Time Management | View Comments

It’s no secret that I am always looking for ways to better manage my time.  I am always looking for ways to make my everyday life tasks a little bit easier, a little bit more streamlined.  Today, I want to share with you how I keep my email inbox at zero.  Yes, I said zero.  I mean it too, there are NO EMAILS in my inbox.  It’s empty, and I like it that way.  Here’s how I do it.

First off, you have to start by making folders in your email program.  I use Yahoo, so I click on “add a folder” and it does.  I have made up folders for each of the aspects of my life: School, Home/Family, Alumni (I serve on my alma mater’s Alumni Association), Invoices, Newsletter, and PDP.  I also have made up folders called Hold and Follow Up.  This list of folders is integral to the success of keeping your inbox empty.  To decide what to make for your folders, you should survey the things that you receive email about most frequently, and make folders for them.

Next, you need to sift through what is in your inbox.  I worked with a friend recently who had over 3,000 emails in their inbox, dating back to 2005.  A lot of those emails, now, are trash.  They get dumped right into the trash.  The emails that you need to keep, that you may need to reference in the future, get sorted into the folder that matches what they are for.  So, for example, if I am sifting through my emails and I find an email inviting me to a meeting from 2009, and then one detailing the notes from the meeting, I will put them invitation in the trash, and file the one detailing the notes from the meeting into my “School” folder.  This can take a long time, depending on how many emails you have, and how thorough you want to be.  For some, it’s just as easy to highlight all the emails from the previous year and hit delete.  I am WAY too obsessive to do that.  If you have a lot of emails to get through, take it a little at a time.  While you won’t empty your inbox in the first sitting, you’ll know you are working towards it.

Your inbox is empty!!  Wait, sorry…just checked, there are five more emails.  This is the most crucial time in keeping your inbox empty.  This is the make it or break it point.  It would be so easy to read the emails and leave them there, but then our purpose would be defeated.  You have to face it.  That’s where my “Follow Up” and “Hold” folders come into play.  As you go through your emails, anything you can do in less than three minutes…do now and file the email.  Anything that you can respond to right away, respond to and file the email.  Newsletters and emails from stores and such…look them over, and then delete them.  If you need to purchase something from the shop or want information from their page, bookmark it.  Emails that have you waiting on something, but you don’t need to do anything about it, go into the “Hold” folder.  This folder often holds receipts of items I am waiting to receive, or notices of shipment.  Any email that requires you to do something that will take longer than three minutes, goes into the follow up folder (and ideally, onto your to do list).  After you have done this, your email inbox SHOULD be empty.  Take a minute.  Look it over.  Isn’t it nice and clean?  It’s like a clean bathroom…it just makes you feel happy.  Just like any clean bathroom, however, your empty inbox requires daily maintenance and upkeep. Like I said earlier, in order to keep your inbox empty, you have to commit to doing these tasks with every email.  If you leave even one in your inbox, you are on the downward spiral to 3,000 emails in your inbox.  Believe me, I’ve been there too.

My system of keeping a clean inbox is inspired by the readings I have done in “Getting Things Done” by David Allen, and by THIS POST over at Lifehacker.  It’s important to remember that not every system works for everyone.  It’s important to find what works for you and go with it.

So tell me what you think?  Is an empty email inbox important to you?  How do you keep your inbox clean and working efficiently?  Let me know in the comments!

Image: Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Time Management Fail: The Time Management Series, Part 4

Posted by Aaron aka Sir Scrapalot on Sep 14, 2009 in Everyday Life | View Comments

Uggghhh…I know you have been there too…you are coasting along with something, doing great at it, and then a monkey wrench…and everything spins out of control. Gone are all your well laid plans, and here is survival mode.

I have been living in survival mode for the last two weeks. With school starting and the Polka Dot Plum Grand Opening in the same week, I have barely had time to breathe. I thought for sure all the systems I had set in order over the summer would be perfect for leading me through the school year with no stress. Why wouldn’t it work, it worked all summer?

However, there are so many factors that try to derail the system that I had just put out of my mind. We get up earlier, and get home later. There is homework to do with my girls, and dinner to make. Bedtime, computer checks, and then more school work: lesson plans, correcting, paperwork. If I am lucky, I still have time to do a little chatting, and check in on things here in the digital world. Designing is a luxury. Not to mention, I really had forgotten how tiring it can be teaching all day.

I don’t say this to complain. Teaching is one of my favorite things to do in life, and I have been blessed to have wonderful coworkers, as well as the unique opportunity to be working with a class that I have had twice before. They feel like my own kids. No, I don’t want to complain. What I want to do is tell you that no matter how good the system, or how organized you are, things fall apart sometimes. We are human.

The inevitable question then is: What comes next? I have put off answering that question for the last two weeks, and I am just now firming up some ideas.

So that’s my plan, and hopefully I’ll be sticking to it. If you are interested, here are some next steps you can try:
1. Make a schedule, find one that works for you, or go back to one that has worked for you before.
2. Check out some productivity resources. Getting Things Done is just the tip of the iceberg.
There are tons, believe me.
3. Think about what makes you happy…and find time to do it. Post here what makes you happy,
and how you fit it into your schedule before midnight EST on Saturday, and I’ll reward some
people with fun prizes.

Check back tomorrow, I have a sneak of some things that I managed to get done for the store this week.

Power Scrapping Digi Style – The Results

Posted by Aaron aka Sir Scrapalot on Aug 26, 2009 in Everyday Life | View Comments

Last week, I mentioned THIS blog post over at The Daily Digi.  In the post, Katie the Scrapbook Lady talked about a method that she has used for streamlining the scrapbooking experience.  Basically, you break the task of creating a layout into managable chunks, and then work on a series of layouts assembly line style.  Immediately, this idea stuck with me.  I am constantly looking for ways to scrapbook that don’t take a hour or two to do one layout.  With the other responsiblities in my life, I just don’t have the time.  So, I decided to give this approach a shot.

I won’t go into the specifics of the “how to” (you can click and read the blog post), but I will say that this was by far the easiest way I have completed 4 layouts in I can’t tell you how long.  It took me about a half hour to identify the pictures I wanted, edit them, and pick a template that went with the photos.  The problem was, at that point, I had to leave the computer for a bit…so I had to make mental notes of the photos I wanted to use and what templates I would use with them.  Later on in the day, I came back and picked out kits for each layout.  I actually wrote down the kit names this time, no more mental pictures.  This took me about 15 minutes.  I tend to be indecisive.  I think.  Maybe I’m not really indecisive though.  I don’t know.

When I came back to the layouts later that evening, I was able to start the assembly process.  I took the time and put each layout together, and then went back to do my journaling and to save the files as jpegs.  This took me a bit more time, about 45 minutes.  When I was done, I had 4 layouts completed and had spent only about an hour and a half on them.  These are the layouts:

Click on the layouts for the credits.

As you can see, the process worked well for me. What I did have trouble with, however, is keeping track of what I was going to use for each layout. In my paper days, I would have slipped everything into a folder and put it aside until I could work on it again. I could do that on my computer, but that would mean a whole lot of moving files, or copying files which would take up precious EHD space. Writing things down kept me organized, but I am such a visual person. I must say, I wrestled with this idea for the days following, and then it hit me. ACDSee!

With ACDSee Photo Manager 2009, I can tag items with multiple tags (which you may remember from my post about how I organize all my scrapbooking stuff). So what I could do is create a tag for each layout, and then tag the photos, the template, and the kit that I wanted to use. When it came time to work on the layout, I could hit the tag in ACDSee and everything would pop back up. I am trying this strategy out on a new set of layouts I am power scrapping.

Another issue I ran into while power scrapping, is editing photos. I will admit, I am bad with keeping up with my photo editing. As I have said before, since taking the Jessica Sprague photo editing class, I love editing photos…but I can’t seem to keep up with it. The biggest issue, I don’t edit as soon as I upload. If I could force myself to do that every time, I would be in a much better place. So this speedbump, totally my fault.

All in all, power scrapping worked really well for me. I was able to get four layouts done in a short amount of time, and was able to break that time up into chunks that worked for me. Right now, I am using power scrapping to work on our photos from Disney World last summer. I can’t wait to show you those!