If you haven’t heard of Active Words before, I suggest starting at the beginning and reading the first blogs, here.
AW has another function that I use constantly: Opening up a website that I go to regularly, without having to open another tab in my browser and then bring up my list of bookmarks with the website listed in it. With AW, all I have to do is type in the word or letter I assigned it in AW (Google, for example, has the letter “g” assigned to it) and then hit the F11 key. No matter where I’m at, no matter if my browser was open or not beforehand, I just type “g” hit F11, and there’s the Google page, ready for me to use. AC = Associated Content, CC = Constant Content, ING = My bank account with ING Bank, etc. These don’t come preprogrammed into AW–you have to add them individually, but since I don’t care about websites that other people care passionately about, this is a good thing to me. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: I’m lazy. I want things to be as easy as possible for me. AW has made that happen.
AW also allows me to assign key words or letters to documents and files. I have set up a template for all of my blog entries in Open Office, so that I always have the right margins, font, font size, etc, set to go and all I have to do is type. For some reason, I am very anal about the size of my margins, and what font I type in (I really like Georgia font.) Rather than open up a new document every time and reset those items before being able to type (yes, I cannot even start writing until everything is fixed just right–I think I have some rare form of OCD that affects my word documents :-P) I just made up a template in Open Office and open that every time. Well, because I wanted to be even lazier than that, I then assigned the word “blank” to this template, and now when I want to start a new document, I just type “blank,” hit F11, and the document is open and ready to go, even if I didn’t have Open Office open beforehand. I am getting lazier by the day, I know. I’m still trying to figure out how to train a monkey to type the documents themselves so all I would have to do is sit around and drink virgin margaritas, but thus far all the monkeys have done is eat all my bananas and torture my dogs. Soon though, soon.
If you aspire to the same level of laziness that I do, then AW will be perfect for you. I am not an affiliate, and I am not making money from writing these blogs (other than what Families is paying me) I just wanted to share a program that has made a huge difference in my productivity over the past several years. If you’re interested, I see that AW is now offering a 60-day free trial so you can see if it’s something you really want to do. Check it out–you won’t be sorry.
Hava
Who notes she counted the amount of times she used AW in this article alone, and came up with the lucky number 13. She has left the building to go buy a lottery ticket, but has left her monkeys behind to finish the blog, no fear.