Top 10 time saving technologies

Last week's list caused a certain amount of comment to the effect that we shouldn't be encouraging time-wasting in the office. In the interest of balance, we've decided to provide the antidote.

Technology has been superb at saving time for companies. This has had some downsides - word processing software put a generation of secretaries out of a job and the print unions were shocked to find most of their jobs were out of date - but the advantages have outweighed the losses.

This was a tough list to compile. Shaun and I had some serious disagreements but, thankfully, we maintained a professional demeanour and didn't get chucked out of our favourite local Thai restaurant. Kudos to our ever-forgiving bar manager who understands that arguments are par for the course when we work out the lists each week.

Like any list it isn't perfect so, if you have better tips, please use the comment feature at the end of this article to let us know.

Honourable mention: Wikipedia
Shaun Nichols: I had a tough sell getting Iain to agree with this one. After all, last week we put the online encyclopaedia site on our list of the 10 worst time wasters.

When used in small doses, however, Wikipedia can be a very useful tool. When looking up small bits of information such as dates, ages or definitions, Wikipedia can be a quick way to get information that would otherwise be rather tedious to track down.

That's not to say Wikipedia is an absolute authority. With the wisdom of many comes the squabbles of a few, and sometimes Wikipedia entries can contain information that is less than reliable, and occasionally outright wrong.

Still, if you're not writing a term paper or news article, Wikipedia can be a nice reference for looking up specifics.

Iain Thomson: OK, so I agreed to have Wikipedia as an honourable mention, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

I'm glad you added that last sentence otherwise I would have had to wield the pointy stick of editorial justice to remind you that Wikipedia is not fact. You have to check each snippet against an unimpeachable source before dedicating it to print.

Wikipedia is a damn good source of information but, like any source, it can't be taken on face value. You have to check and double check, and for that reason I'm still not sure it's a time saver for anything other than pub arguments.

Honourable Mention: Remote working
Iain Thomson: Personally I would have liked to see this higher on the list but, as Shaun pointed out, it's not a specific technology but an amalgam of techniques.

But a time saver it certainly is. The average commute time is around 45 minutes, so that's an hour and a half a day spent travelling. This isn't to say that commuting time is wasted - you can nap, read or listen to music - but it's still time spent doing something you don't need to do.

Now that broadband in the home is commonplace and laptops make working almost anywhere an odd reality there's little need to go into work every day. Many jobs can be performed from home and the worker needs only to pop into the office for meetings and to consult files. Of course, this doesn't work for every job, but you'd be amazed at the number of people in the service professions who can do it.

Home working doesn't only save time. Companies' biggest fixed cost is usually the building they occupy and, with fewer people in the office, the company doesn't need quite so much expensive space. Workers save on travel costs, can cook their own lunches rather than rely on the local sandwich shop and don't need heating or air-conditioning at work. All in all it saves time, space and money, so home working is a winner in my book.

Shaun Nichols: With gas prices and train fares rising steadily, telecommuting is not only a time saver, it's a money saver too. Add to that the money saved from not having to buy lunch, and dry cleaning costs for work clothes, and you've got a pretty good way to significantly reduce expenses over the long haul.

Many people claim that working from home decreases efficiency because there are so many distractions. In small doses, however, telecommuting is actually more efficient. It's easier to focus when you're relaxed, and it's hard to be any more relaxed then while at home. Additionally, you tend to be less likely to waste away the hours on many of the online vices from our previous list.

After a few days it does become a bit difficult to work from home, however. When you live and work in the same place the two can often overlap, and focusing on the job gets tough. Additionally, sitting at home alone all day can get pretty lonely. After a while you actually do start to crave the social interaction of working in an office.

10. Instant Messaging
Iain Thomson: I only agreed to have this on the list after some special pleading from Shaun. I find that IM wastes more time than it saves, but he did raise an interesting point on its occasional utility.

IM does let you have impromptu chats in a way that takes less time than finding a phone number, making a call, finding they are not there and then playing a seemingly endless round of telephone tag while you both try to talk.

The ability to see remotely that the person you want to chat to is there can be very useful. As a case in point a fellow journalist in the UK contacted me out of the blue yesterday, seeking a specific response to a question. He was up late, saw I was online and thought I might be able to help. It's that kind of time saving that gets IM (barely) on the list.

Shaun Nichols: I think it has been a while since Iain attempted to have a conversation with a person who did not have an IM client.

My dad has yet to discover IM and it's more than a bit frustrating to get emails whose entire contents are "Are we still on for dinner Tuesday?" and " okay sounds good." We all know how frustrating it is when it takes longer to set up and send the message than it actually took to type the body of the mail itself. You wouldn't think that opening and composing an email is so tedious until you've done it to conduct an exchange that would take all of 15 seconds in an IM.

And you Iain, of all people, should understand the value of an IM platform. In the course of a day we exchange multiple messages with story links, contact information, possible leads, etc. If we had to do that through email I would imagine that we'd each get an extra two dozen messages or so in our inboxes over the course of a day. Add to that the delay that occurs between sending and rec ei ving the messages over the email server and you have a significant time drain.

Yes, it becomes a pretty serious time waster when you start conducting conversations with people who have nothing to do with work, but when used properly IM can be a good way to save time.

9. The fax machine
Shaun Nichols: So it's a little dated at this point, and most fax machines in the office are collecting dust these days. But there was a time when the fax machine was a very big deal.

Consider that sending a document used to involve the postal service or, in the case of an urgent delivery, a messenger service. Then the fax machine came along and the process of sending a document anywhere in the world was as easy as making a copy.

You can argue that in the 1990s the fax machine had an impact on the workplace second only to internet-connected workstations. Email and online collaboration tools have eliminated most of the uses for a fax, but there's no denying the effect it had on the workplace in its heyday.

Iain Thomson: The fax machine was so revolutionary that at first the technology industry didn't really know what to do with it.

Xerox set up offices in major US cities, thinking that companies would come to them to send their documents and messenger boys would carry them to offices just as they had for 70 years. But the price of fax machines fell so fast that the business model crashed and before you knew it everyone had one.

And I'm sorry Shaun, but we weren't just at the mercy of the postal system back in the day, we had the telex machine, which was kind of an advanced telegraph system. But text still had to be typed in, you couldn't send original documents.

What the fax machine did that was so revolutionary was to make an exact copy of a document and send it anywhere in the world. It saved more time than you could shake a stick at, and changed the way we do business forever.

8. Object-oriented programming
Iain Thomson: We've had object-oriented programming (OOP) for around 50 years in some form or another, but it has only had a major impact in the past 20 years.

Put simply OOP is about building chunks of code for common tasks so that they can be used in a variety of applications and save the time of writing a new system for individual applications. It's a more advanced version of a technique most code hackers use as a matter of course: taking little chunks of code and reusing them.

Now OOP is a part of many coder's lives. It's an essential element of really useful programming languages like Python and later versions of Perl. Given the enormous amount of coding needed these days, it's a top class time saver.

Shaun Nichols: The first suggestion for this was that we use the term 'high level programming' languages, but felt that was a bit too generic, so we decided that OOP would be a bit better.

As Iain pointed out, being able to manage code as groups and modules is a huge time saver. Admittedly my experience in coding is limited to a summer spent messing around with REALBasic in high school, but even with my small amount of programming knowledge you can understand the value of object-oriented languages.

Given the complexity of most applications these days, OOP is pretty important. The growth of many object-oriented languages over the past 20 years reflects this.

OOP is not without its critics, however. Some within the computer science world, most notably software pioneer Richard Stallman, have criticised the idea in one form or another. Still, for the majority of developers out there, object-oriented languages have been a big advantage.

7. Videoconferencing
Shaun Nichols: This is a technology whose full use is still on the horizon, in my opinion. Videoconferencing requires a combination of high-resolution cameras and high-bandwidth connections to be at all useful. Though technology has progressed rapidly, it's still a poor excuse for being face-to-face and not much better than a conference call.

That could be changing, however. Anyone who has ever experienced high-end systems such as Cisco's telepresence up close knows that such setups offer an experience pretty close to a face-to-face. When such technology no longer requires a huge investment and infrastructure overhaul to put in place, videoconferencing could further cut down on the frequent-flyer miles many businesses still rack up.

Iain Thomson: 15 years ago I was writing articles about videoconferencing and how it could be the next best thing. I'm still waiting, but it's looking a lot better than it was.

Back then videoconferencing was the equivalent of a face-to-face meeting only if you factored a bottle of tequila into the occasion. Quaffing a bottle of Mescal would give you the same effect as those early systems; the slowmo visuals, lousy sound quality and sense of disconnection.

These days things are much better. Some of the so-called telepresence units give you the nearest thing you can get to being there in the room with the person you're speaking to. Add in the collaborative tools that are now being included, and you've got the tool that could kill the biggest waste of time for many people: travel.

Ask any professional roadwarrior and you'll get the same response to the subject of business travel. It's not glamorous, it's not fun and it's not heal thy. You get to an airport, get strapped into a fragile tube and flown aloft in an environment where everyone shares the same germs, and then arrive at a hotel room to conduct your business before moving onto the same thing again. Anything that can cut the amount of time people have to spend doing that can only be a good thing.

6. Podcasts
Iain Thomson: Podcasting is a recent phenomenon and it's a very useful thing indeed for saving time. What is does is free you from the tyranny of scheduled programming. You can listen to useful stuff whenever and wherever you are.

On my morning walk to work I can listen to the latest from the BBC, Dan Savage or even our own podcast so I can get ideas about how to make it better.

Our kids are going to be slightly amused by this generation's love of the radio. Trying to explain to them that you had to listen at a specific time and frequency to hear something, and if you were late getting to the radio you missed it, will sound like a very odd way of doing things.

Shaun Nichols: I wasn't quite sold on this idea when Iain first suggested it, but eventually he convinced me. The idea of a radio show which you can download really is a time saver. Particularly when educational and instructional lectures are offered in podcast form, those after-hours periods spent listening at the desk can instead be translated into time already spent while riding on the train or driving home.

Podcasts can also cut down on the time you have to listen to the radio. Say you just wanted to listen to a 10-minute interview with a politician or athlete. If that segment is available for download, you can cut through hours of time spent listening to commercials and all the programme filler in which you have no interest.

Perhaps the best time saver of all is when a regular weekly podcast can take the biggest stories of the week and compress them into a single, shortened format. Coincidentally, I would like to remind readers that our latest Views from the Valley podcast is now available for download. In the meantime I will be in a hot shower attempting to scrub away the guilt from that shameless plug.

5. Mobile applications
Shaun Nichols: Nobody wants to spend more time in the office than they have to, so anything that allows people to do more away from the desk is welcome. At least to a point.

For many of us, commuting takes up a sizeable portion of the day. And if you work in a large city such as London or San Francisco, a good portion of your commute is on some form of mass transit. While subways, buses and trains can be rather unreliable and stressful, they also offer a chance to get some work done when you're equipped with the right mobile applications. Even something as simple as checking the morning's email can save valuable time.

Earlier I mentioned that working away from the desk is only good to a point. While mobile applications that allow us to get work done away from the office can save time, it can also force people to take on more work than they should. Cutting down time in the office can be a good thing, but using mobile applications to extend time on the job is not. If not carefully managed, you can turn an eight-hour workday into an 11-hour one and put people into unhealthy situations.

Iain Thomson: I love mobile applications, they make life so much easier. That said, they do encourage the workaholics among us, because we can be checking things whenever we want.

This is a good and a bad thing. Companies are now getting sued because they expect staff to be available much longer thanks to mobile applications. If you want staff online 24/7 you have to pay them for it, and some employers have yet to recognise the fact.

What makes mobile applications so seductive is that they allow for much more efficient use of time. If you're waiting for the bus you can answer a couple of emails and save yourself a few minutes at the office. Stuck for something to do of an evening? Check Twitter and see who's down the pub. A time saver certainly, but be careful what you wish for.

4. Autocomplete
Iain Thomson: Autocomplete is one of those inventions that you'd really miss if you didn't have it. Although Shaun's probably not old enough to remember a time without it, I certainly do and it has saved me lots of minutes over the years.

Autocomplete is especially useful in browsers. I can't remember the last time I typed http:// when entering a URL and these days I don't even bother with the www. This can be highly irritating when you occasionally find a browser that doesn't have it and you face a very confused computer.

But as a writer it can also be very useful, although I have to say that I find it a little irritating too when it gets in the way. OpenOffice really needs to improve its autocomplete function if it wants to keep me as a customer.

That said, autocomplete also has problems, particularly if you're sharing a computer. It can use past data to guess your intentions, so you can sometimes find out a little more than you wanted to know about what other people have been doing on that computer. I know of one young man who wasn't as surprised as he might have been when his parents announced they were divorcing, because he knew both of them had been searching for information on the topic for quite some time.

Shaun Nichols: As with our number-three pick, autocomplete is an idea you really don't formally appreciate until you attempt to live without it. Go ahead, pop open the browser preferences and turn it off: I dare you. Most people will last all of one morning before cracking under the burden of having to type all the letters into the URL bar.

It sounds so simple in practice. The browser looks into cache and history and suggests that the site you're typing may have been one you've visited before. This isn't such a big deal when you only think about the front page for each site. But when you want to go back to a certain article buried deep within a site, the URLs can get dozens of characters long, and we don't always have the foresight to bookmark a page. In those situations, autocomplete can be a godsend.

3. Spell check
Shaun Nichols: Think spell check is a silly choice at the number-three spot? Then try this little exercise. Disable spell-check on your word processor and attempt to write a 500-word document using only a dictionary to check your spelling.

We sometimes take for granted how much spell-check has improved productivity, particularly those of us in the journalism world where 1,500 words a day is the norm. Copy editing used to be a full-time job. Now a full story can be checked by an editor in the process of a few minutes. Those who rely on word processing for a living owe a great deal to this feature.

Of course, it also has some unpleasant side-effects. We have become so reliant on spell-check that we get sloppy or even forget how to spell altogether. When in situations where spell-check is not used, like an old fashioned hand-written letter, this can make correspondence especially painful.

Iain Thomson: I worry about spell checking; it's an evolutionary thing that makes us weaker as a species. Just as the proportion of people with eye problems (myself included) has gone up since the invention of spectacles so too has the proportion of bad spellers.

Don't get me wrong; spell checking is a major time saver and has helped me enormously. My spelling is awful. Several people in the know have told me I'm partially dyslexic, while my mother maintains I'm just too lazy to learn the correct spelling of words. She may be right, but I know the V3.co.uk sub-editors would have a much tougher time of it without spell checking technology.

Moving to America has made the problem worse. The US hates the letter 'u' when it comes to spelling. This confuses things (and we Brits invented the language dammit!) and so without a language-specific spell checker I'd be up a certain creek without a certain implement. Writing articles would take much, much longer and require a lot more references to the Oxford English Dictionary and Websters.

2. RSS readers
Iain Thomson: As web sites have proliferated it's becoming increasingly time consuming to check each one on a regular basis, particularly as content may not have been updated.

As journalists this is particularly apt, which is why RSS readers are so helpful. Having software that checks for you and tells you when something new is happening makes life a whole lot simpler and probably saves us about an hour a day each. It also allows us to trace the flow of information as it spreads out and pinpoint the source much more quickly.

With more and more web sites coming online every day (one estimate is that 20,000 new sites go live every week) it's getting harder and harder to keep up with what is going on. You find new favourite web sites and add them to your list but that list gets longer and before you know it you're forgetting to visit them to check for new stuff. An RSS reader is a very useful tool and may soon be essential.

We decided not to push any one RSS reader because there are so many out there, but Shaun and I both use SharpReader and it does the job well.

Shaun Nichols: We were originally going to make RSS readers our top time saver, but decided that, as journalists, we were a bit biased and the larger public did not rely on them as heavily as we do.

Checking dozens of different sites every day can take up a huge chunk of time. RSS readers exponentially reduce that by taking stories from many sites and organising them into a single list.

If you're a news hound, however, RSS readers are a godsend. You used to be able to spot reporters and editors on the street because they were the ones carrying four or five different newspapers under their arm. These days people still carry the news under their arm, but it's in the form of a laptop, and they're carrying hundreds of papers from all over the world.

It's not just news junkies who have fallen in love with RSS. With everyone and their mother going online and posting blogs, the RSS reader serves as a great way to keep track of what everyone is up to. Perhaps the most successful RSS platform on the web is Twitter, which combines the news feed idea with blogging and social networking, all stuffed into a single web page.

1. Bookmarks
Shaun Nichols: Use the web for more than a few months and you should find yourself managing more than a few bookmarks. Use the same workstation for more than a few years and your bookmark collection will likely be pushing triple digits. Sure, it may be a chore to manage, but imagine having to remember all the sites in your bookmark collection.

As the internet progresses and companies get even more creative with addresses and top-level domains, bookmarks could become even more important. While we're relying more on the internet, it is becoming more complex, and the trusty old bookmark system has remained a staple of life on the web.

Iain Thomson: If I spent half as long organising my living space as I do ordering my bookmarks the girlfriend wouldn't get that pained look in her eye so often when she stays over.

Some might say it's anal but when I click on my bookmark button I want the pages listed right. Top of the list are the most useful, then the long, long list of sites visited every day. But as almost every surfing session ends up with a new bookmark or two and they need to be put into folders for later use, I feel it's a useful exercise. Then those folders have to be ordered so that the most used sites are at the top of the list. I think I may have a problem ...

But personal failings aside, bookmarks are the best time savers out there. Back in the bad old days of the internet, when I got online properly 15 years ago rather than dealing with the abomination that was the JANET network, visiting sites was an exercise in frustration, as you sought to remember incomprehensible web addresses. Hotlisting (the early name for bookmarks) changed all that and it's saved me possibly months of time ever since.