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Why The Humble Bookmark Can Be Your Greatest Productivity Tool
In a survey conducted by SearchYourCloud, 1/3 of us spend 5-25 minutes searching for a document every time we need one. To make that worse, only one in five “searches” is correct the first time.
Part of it has to do with the way you organize data on your own computer, but not always. Today, some of that data is distributed across several places online. That’s why I love the humble tool that sits in front of us all day, everyday — the grandaddy of Internet tools… The Browser Bookmark.
Most people think that bookmarks are a way to help us remember sites we want to return to. A better way to use bookmarks is to think of them as shortcuts to your online workspaces. One of the best way to illustrate this is on Facebook. We are so used to seeing Facebook as an app, even on our desktops that we forget it’s really just a website. Therefore, everything on Facebook is a URL.
Until I grasped this fundamental fact, getting productive on Facebook was elusive, but no more. Instead of going to Facebook.com and then looking for what you want to do, bookmark these instead:
Ads Manager
https://www.facebook.com/ads/ manage/campaigns/
This puts you in the ad manager for your account. If you manage multiple accounts, switch to the right account in the manager. Then, bookmark that page. Create a bookmark for each account if you need to.
Pages or Apps You Manage
If you don’t manage a lot of pages, you can simply visit each page you manage to bookmark them. Another spot you can bookmark is:
https://www.facebook.com/ bookmarks/pages
This is where you get a list of all Pages you manage and could be a quick place to go to get where you want to go.
Groups You Manage or Want to Engage in
Do the same as Pages. Visit each group you manage, or want to be involved in, and bookmark them.
Just like Pages, you can also save this URL. It’s like a master list of your groups:
https://www.facebook.com/ groups/?category=membership
Messages
I do a lot of business right inside Facebook Messages. And so, this is a URL to bookmark:
https://www.facebook.com/ messages/
An alternative to that URL is www. messenger.com. On a desktop this will give you your Facebook messages in a neat app-like interface. It won’t work on mobile. It will take you to the list of messages and default to the last conversation you had. If you always communicate with a few key people, click on their name in the messages screen, and bookmark that instead. This will put you in that conversation without having to sort through and waste time looking through other messages.
Beyond Facebook
Some other things you can bookmark are:
Your WordPress Dashboards, or any area in WordPress where you do most of your work.
Twitter searches. I do a lot of research on what people are asking about WordPress. So I simply bookmark hashtags and searches to quickly pull them up later.
Google searches. Same thing with Twitter or site like a forum. Works great for finding content ideas.
Gmail labels. Basically, you do a search for a label in Gmail, then bookmark that.
I have a label named “Team.” When I need to check if I have emails from them, I visit my bookmark and I can immediately see if there’s something the team needs from me. If I’m done, I exit without even getting distracted with the other emails in the inbox.
The whole idea is to bypass time suckers like the inbox, or Facebook news feeds.
This reduces the chances of getting sidetracked by other conversations. Also, you spend less time searching again and again. By building your own bookmark list, you control where you go, what you want to see, helping you reclaim your time and jump-start your productivity.
