Best ways to increase productivity
 

This Tuesday or Thurday I am meeting with my boss to give him pointers about increasing his productivity on his mac. He has a VERY nice dual 2.5ghz g5 with 4GB memory, so it can handle some abuse, yet he still manages to slow it to a crawl. The problem is he never restarts, open hundreds of emails opens hundreds of powerpoints and word docs, and stores everything on the desktop.

I thought this would be a good time to start a general productivity tips thread.

Here is what I plan on telling him

1) move everything to the documents folder, icons on the desktop take alot of system resources

2)use smart folders to organize documents hassle free. I will set up a smart forlder to contain all word docs, one for all powerpoint docs, one for everythign used in the last day, one for everything used in the last week. We will set up any project based ones together, when I can get more feedback from him about exactly what would be usefull to him

3) spotlight. Use it for everything

4) switch to apple mail, which seems to take much less memory than eudora, and start using its advanced searches , so he wont need all the windows open

5)Resart every so often to give the virtual memory a break. The problem with a scheduled restart is that he will have many docs open, so it will have when one of them wants to be saved.

6) try to keep less files open. This will be the hardest , becasue it is an ingrained habit for him. I will suggest closeing and saving thisgs when he is done with them, but who knows if this will actuall happen

7)Use Camino, the smallest, fastest browser for OS X.


The first 6 are the big ones. Anything else you guys can think of?

I'd only question the last one. Sometimes productivity comes not from raw speed, but from having a full feature set. I haven't used Camino, but if it lacks some of the better features of Safari and Firefox, or fails to work on some sites, that would lower productivity more than raw speed of the browser. If a person is not a power user who can handle special cases, I do not point them outside of Safari or Firefox.

It sounds like his habits are ingrained. Good luck on the behavior modification!

you could set his mac to restart every morning at 6am... that way it will do all the cron scripts and be wide awake and ready for work every morning... best of all he wont even know it is happening! (set it up in the energy saver prefs!)

As for files on the desktop...... I just tend to put a shortcut to the documents folder on the desktop so people can drag and drop stuff into there.

As far as productivity goes.... I am getting in to Automator quite heavily..... it can do SO MUCH for you.... especially if your a Photoshop user.... see if you can save him loads of time on repetitive tasks!

As for browsers...... Camino is GREAT.... but I still use Safari.... I have switched all 26 mac users at my company from Camino back to Safari as I am trying to boost Safari's web ranking against IE and Firefox! (yes I know 26 against a squillion Windoze IE users is a drop in the ocean... but its my small effort!)

Might be worth running Disk Utility toooo.. a machine of that spec should never really slow to a crawl.. perhaps it has a few issues!?

Have a look at Activity Monitor to see what is actually causing the slowdown. It might be something that all your behaviour-modification won't change. Not likely - but possible.
"It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts"
-- Sherlock Holmes

In particular, look to see if there are a large number of page-outs in the memory section at the bottom. That would indicate RAM exhaustion due to too much stuff open at once.

And I agree with Photek that you should do a filesystem repair in case that is part of the problem.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214

photek: as I said, I forsee problems with a timed restart, because some app will ask if it should save an open doc, and stop the whole restart. If there is a way around this, perhaps to make it automatically save everything when requested to quit, I would be very interested

hayne: good advice. I have already serviced it and regained much of the lost speed, this meeting is about the stuff I need him to do. In case you are curious, I applejacked it, and the included run of fsck and repair permissions did wonders. Mostly the slowdown was due to the huge amount of virtual memory being used, which stems from all the windows he has open. I used his computer for awhile, after a fresh restart, and it ran like a dream. Activity monitor showed nothing unusual. I dont think there is anything wrong besides the behaviors of the user.

About the Camino thing: it is true speed does not equal productivity, but in this case it does. He does not use any features Camino doesnt have. Mostly just palin old browsing, and tabs of course. Safari is still there in case he wants it, I honestly think I could change the browser without telling him, and he wouldnt notice anything was different except the speed.

I wouldn't recommend using AppleJack by tech support people (like yourself). It is better used by people who don't know (can't be taught) what they are doing. It is better to run 'fsck -fy' manually to see exactly what is happening. And to repeat if anything was fixed. Similarly for permission repair.

A large amount of VM by itself does not cause any slowdown. The only slowdown would be the swapping to disk caused by an attempt to have too many things active at once. E.g. by switching between all of those hundreds of windows. If an app (or a window) is left inactive in the background, it won't cause any problem.

I'm curious as to how he manages to slow that system down. I've got a Dual 2 ghz G5 with 1 gb RAM, and it takes a lot for my system to feel slow.

Wow, exactly how many window does he have open? He must have lots of programs and windows open at once to slow that system down. I use Apple mail, as thunderbird and others aren't as fast and seem to eat system resources more.

I would question #3.

What does this person do? Because I'm a graphic designer & photographer, and I have a Dual 2.0 GHz G5 with 6.5 GB of RAM. The ONLY thing that slows down my system is Spotlight. When it tries to index large files (like video, Photoshop documents) and large groups of files (like fonts) there's a noticable impact on my computer.

So I have certain directories excluded from Spotlight, like my Fonts folder (mine are organized well; I don't need Spotlight to find things for me). I also have my entire Application Support folder exempt, to prevent any scanning of Safari's, Firefox's, or Camino's caches from being read (the theory being, since there will be continual writing to those directories as I browse, Spotlight would try to keep up; now it doesn't have to).

Now my machine only slows down at expected times, like Photoshop choking on huge documents (even though I have 6.5 GB of RAM, there's a limit to how much Photoshop can use, and on the Mac it's around 3 GB; it's somewhere around there on XP as well).

32-bit apps should have 4 GB of RAM available to them, and if Photoshop is 64-bit (CS2 is) then there shouldn't be any limit. Ok, 4GB squared, but that's hardly a limit. ;)

Note that Spotlight only indexes files of certain types - mainly files known to be textual. For files that "belong" to a specific application, Spotlight expects that application to provide an importer. Presumably Safari knows that it isn't a good idea to index its cache files and so doesn't do so.

There is a tech note that describes exactly how Photoshop RAM works. The explanation is probably not what most people would have guessed since there is a dynamic interplay between Photoshop and the OS above 2GB. Worth a read.

Hi Everyone

About the question of how many windows he has open at once, i would say 40 -50 large powerpoints, 30 -40 word docs, 150-200 emails, 20 -30 finder windows, 300 or so icons on the desktop, plus 20 or 30 safari windows.

About spotlight: of all things taking up resources on his system mdimport is nto one of them , it is running light and lean with little overhead.

I have to say that I never restart my boxes unless Software Update tells me to, or unless something really screwy is going on.

(Meanwhile, in Gotham . . .)

Jesus H Christ in a chicken basket. Your boss is looney. Tell him he should expect a slow computer with FOUR HUNDRED WINDOWS OPEN. There's just absolutely no way that he's actually using all of this information at once. Not at all. As for Safari, show him tabs. Try Camino. Get him off the Internet entirely, so he can't amass all this information in the first place. Sever the ethernet wire. Set his desk on fire. Anything that will prevent him from opening four hundred windows.

Homeboy needs a course in information management.

(I really, really hope I'm not reading this right, and that he doesn't have that many windows open.)

That many icons on the desktop will bring any system to its knees. No joke here. There's a front page article on it from a month or two ago if you want to reference it for him to prove your point and get him to learn how to organize his life:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...51117154624368

Thats just mad..

Anyway I would not go down the route of forcing his docs to save just to do
a restart.

You would not have a clue of what you maybe over writing, and nor would your boss.
I think your are on the right track with getting your boss to change the way they work.

I suppose you could have a script count every so often at how many windows are open in each app thats running, if it is passed a certain number a message pops up with a warning and suggestion to close some.

The message does not need to be a normal dialogue window. it could be
a 'text opaque' and 'background transparent' type thing.

I use the SEC helper app in 'Salling' clicker to do this with new emails.
Its not very intrusive and I can also add a small image to it. and speech.

A bit more sophisticated script could be written that automatically closes any window that is not "dirty" (hasn't been modified) that has not been the frontmost window for more than n minutes.

It seems to me that the issue here is a chaotic mind and the inability to organize time in an efficient way. I also suspect that a person who has to keep that amount of stuff handy is insecure, and probably feels things are not completely under his control.

Following my assumption, I would go down a different route: rather than Mail, I would teach him ho to organize his work through Entourage projects, and to reassure him that all the documents and emails pertaining to a project are neatly stored in the project folder. That might assuage his need to feel that everything has to be accessible at once.

Other than that, I would recommend pairing him with a consultant specialized in prioritizing and organizing. I have attended courses from Franklin Covey and found them useful; I think your boss would either quit in the first 30 minutes or see some reason.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with FC in any way or fashion, do your own research.

Holy _____! :eek: I hate to say this because I think it's heavily overused in lots of IT departments, but this is user error, and in a big way. The guy definitely has issues. Maybe you can start slow with tips like this: Option-click the close box. Works on Finder windows as well as Application windows.

Rather than storing them in different folders, which he's probably going to want opened anyway, I'd teach him about Mail's Smart Folders. Since you're trying to get him to use Spotlight, their similarity to the Finder's Smart Folders may be reassuring. This may be the key. If he can be convinced that he can find everything quickly and easily, he won't need to leave it all open.

Hayne This is brilliant, but I have no idea how to implement it. Any ideas?

as for everyone elses comments, its not that he is insecure or anything, he just will open a window that he needs, go to something else, open a diffverent window, and forget about the first window. He actually is amazingly organized in his own way, he can find what he is working on even with all that crap in the way.

I think the key to getting him to change his habits will be to show him that the computer can do alot of the work he has been doing manually. Things like smart folders, and such. I really think spotlight will be great for him. It changed the way I used my computer overnight. ( That night was embarassingly long after i installed Tiger)

Smart folders in mail are a good idea.

The reason I suggest he restart his computer is the problems MAcs get with virtual memory when it has been used extensivley. I also dont restart most of my machines often, but I am usuially doing relativly modest tasks, that dont tax the V mem

Can't say I have this problem, and I kinda beat my PowerBook to death. My server seems to handle its load, well, too. OS X's VM system is pretty solid.

Seriously, remove the hundreds of icons and windows and taste the performance increase.

I know, that is the biggest change I hope wil come out of the meeting

You also might want to check out this hint posted just the other day.

This is for a way to automatically clear the desktop of icons and file them into date and project folders.

that is a great tip. The meeting went pretty well, the desktop is now automatically cleaned, The boss LOVES smart folders, and we know have four that are part of the "standard install " for the mac systems. They are: everything used in the last day, and the last week, and all MSWord Docs, and all Powerpoint docs. Lol, I heard one of Vists big innovative features are smart folders.

As a side note, I havent been able to figure out how to do or in the smart folders, eg word or powerpoint docs in one folder. I started a thread, that no one responded to. It seems like it may be impossible

I just replied to your other thread:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?p=272465
with some suggestions from the main macosxhints site.

Productivity
 

I have to ask: what is this guy using for a display?

A drive-in movie theatre, I would suppose.

The apple cinema 30inch display, It is beauty , pure and simple