Designers Time Waster
Author: Rafie

Time is precious. Sometimes we do not even realize we wasting it. In this article, five real time waster revealed to assist you identify and eliminate these time waster so you can do more with your time. Pretty simple and straight forward right? So, here they are together with the solutions:

1. E-mail

E-mail is a powerful communication tool yet it can be a time waster. When opening up the web browser, almost instantly you will remember your email. Anxious if any potential clients send you an email. And there’s no doubt you keep login into your email several times daily. It is even worse when you have multiple email accounts. If you do it more than 3 times a day, you are totally wasting your time.

Presenting the Thunderbird 2, an Open Source cross-platform email software. This smart software will trigger you for any incoming emails from all your mailboxes. What’s more? It is build-in RSS reader so you don’t have to worry if you need Google Mail together with Google Reader.

Read more about Thunderbird 2 features.

2. RSS - What is RSS?

For example, if you love to go to Just Creative Design website (almost daily) to check for updates, what happened when there is no new updates? You actually wasted your time. Subscribe to the RSS or mailing list so that when there is an update, the feed service provider will email the update right to your mailbox. Easy.

Basically just subscribe to your favourite website’s RSS, it is free anyway. It is even better if you use Thunderbird 2 as it check for any updates from the website you subscribed.

3. Assets Management

A good assets management will surely save your time. In the December 2008 issue of Digital Arts, they have discussed in a great detail the importance of managing your assets. One of them is to categorized you stock photos and rename it accordingly. Example: (Folder) Textures > (Subfolder) Fabrics. To know more, buy this issue.

Other solution is to use Adobe Bridge or Apple Aperture. With these softwares, you can tag and add more information of your images. So, next time you want to search for a particular file/images, you know where to find it.

4. Lack of skills

Efficiency is the proportion of input over output. An efficient designer will spend less time doing the same task and still produce a result. For example, to be efficient in Photoshop, you should know how to use shortcuts, save your presets, workspace and more. Without using these time saving element you are actually wasting your time doing the same thing all over again.

Apart from that, designing techniques should also be developed via tutorials and experiments. Read good design website and do not afraid to learn new techniques.

5. Mouse

Last but not the least is your mouse. Yes, the one that you are currently holding it. Spend few bucks to buy a good quality mouse for your design work. Try to see how many times you need to lift your mouse to get from one corner to another corner across your screen? Well, you might say that you can adjust the tracking speed of the mouse but it is not actually helping that much.

As an example, the ACROX Laser Mouse has 40 times more sensitivity to reflect much more details than LED optical mouse. Clearly you will feel the difference. Buy it and let see if your mouse run away from you.

Hopefully this will help you to eliminate your time waster. Be sure to practice it and spread to others as well. Happy designing. Enjoi!

*This article is written in conjunction to the Just Creative Design - Group Writing Project.