Cool Tool

First, here's to hoping August picks up for family and friends struggling with challenges big and small. My comments on dance, by the way, were some thoughts about this too. In a sense our lives are one long dance from cradle to grave and there is flow, staccato, chaos, lyrical moments and stillness. About all that seems to be constant is that whatever the rhythm is now, it will change. Sometimes just dancing with the body tells the mind that this is something it already knows. And there are ways to understand it that don't require thought. This doesn't mean disco or salsa or even the hokey pokey, it just means letting your body express something on its own, maybe just a sentence or two in an idle moment during the day. We often find it may want to say even more, and we may even learn how to listen to what it's telling us this way. Something words and thoughts can not encompass. Some people even use it to communicate back to the universe, like a prayer.

But anyway, that dancing thread was an aside before mentioning this amazing productivity tool I finally got around to using. (And which makes me wonder how many more things are lurking out there like this?!) One reason I read lifehacks when I remember.

I'd heard about these "keyboard launcher" thingies for a while. Some systems, like Macs, have good implementations and more people seem to use them there. Yesterday, I actually installed one on my Windows XP system and man is it useful. I'm amazed I didn't discover this earlier.

Here's the before and after picture (in words.)

Before: I usually fire up a number of applications when I start work on the computer, some of these are tucked away in icons in folders or the desktop, some off the start menu. Then I open and close apps through-out the day the same way, hunting for them in these familiar places, doing a "show desktop" to clear my windows when I'm looking for another app. Closing some when I'm done. etc. Kind of time consuming and clunky in a mousey-clickly kinda way. Plus I have to remember where things are and go through lots of mouse-miles to chase everything down. I've never actually hooked a pedometer to my mouse, but trust me, it's a lot.

After: now I have a little input box on the lower right of my screen that I can toggle visible with the "Win-Q" key. Cursor is automatically positioned there. I enter a word for any app I want to start like: browser, mail, notes, music, words, journal, chat, etc. and the app launches. No hunt and point and click. I only have to enter the first few characters and it autoprompts thenI hit return and the application starts. I can also define urls so entering: amazon, blog, etc. zaps me right to the place whether the browser is already opened or not. I can chain several of these together, so in the morning when I open my browser, a couple of email clients, my encrypted drives and journal, it all opens with a simple command: morning. These magic words can be defined for whatever applications you commonly (or not so commonly) use.

This may not sound to earth-shattering, but it's amazing how much less of a hassle this is than scooting a mouse all over the place. Several freeware products out there do this, but the one I like the best is the no-frills slickrun. Give it a whirl sometime if you get tired of playing mouse.