Copy & Paste File – A Quick Tip To Save Time

Do you ever find yourself doing repetitive typing tasks? Perhaps its an email response or some other snippet of data that you have to type on a regular basis.

I have quite a few of these, myself. Even with great documentation and an FAQ file posted publicly, you may find yourself repeating some of your personal responses when communicating with clients or customers.

Or perhaps you have multiple signatures that you swap out, snippets of code you use on a regular basis, or something similar.

I know you can set up macros for this type of thing, but I havent looked into that myself. Having a “copy & paste file” that is easily accessible does work really well for me though.

To start your copy & paste file, just open Notepad. This is the best program because you might be pasting code and so you want to use a text file – not a word processor or other program that might mess up your code.

Start at the beginning of your workday, and as you run into repetitive typing tasks, simply copy and paste the data into your file. You might separate each entry with a line or several spaces. Save it as you go, of course.

You can keep this file open in the background and use your taskbar to toggle between programs anytime you need to copy something from the file (versus looking for it elsewhere, or typing it all over again).

You can also save it to your desktop for easy access. But what I like to do is save it to my desktop, and then drag it down to the QuickLaunch section of my taskbar. If you dont have that section on your taskbar, right click your taskbar and select Toolbars, then click QuickLaunch.

To put shortcut buttons in the QuickLaunch section of your taskbar, you simply drag and drop the files to that section and a shortcut icon will appear:

The added benefit to keeping a copy & paste file is that you can easily expand on this document and turn it into a cheat sheet or training guide for an assistant, or someone that you hire to do administrative work for you.

Even if you arent in a position to hire help now, you’ll be glad you were prepared when the time comes to outsource some of your daily tasks. In the meantime, it will make your work day go much smoother!

Best,

P.S. I just received an email from a friend of mine that I wanted to share with you:

I saw your blog post on copy and pasting files, and I think you might be interested in Notepad++. It’s a free drop-in replacement for Notepad, but it has many of the extra goodies in it that a lot of people find useful, such as multiple document tabs, macro recording, and syntax highlighting for literally hundreds of different file types.

I use it myself on my Windows XP laptop to work on code since it is flexible enough to do line numbering and code folding also.

Here’s the link for it:

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Thanks, Devin!

Tags: copy and paste, shortcuts, quicklaunch, time management

Category: Work at Home