How to Get Work Done: Beware of Tips!

Stephen Manes

Here's a tip: Handle tips with care. True, this special issue of the magazine is chock-full of 'em. Like you, I particularly enjoyed reading it and learning how anyone can eke 20 minutes' extra life out of a notebook battery by employing a handkerchief, a ping-pong ball, and any dairy goat that happens to be around--but you do have to be sure to observe the safety caveats. I am also wildly fond of the tip that lets you harness the blazing laser power of your CD-ROM drive to slice prosciutto di Parma thinner and more accurately than you ever imagined--but you must remember eye protection.

Tips can not only slice your ham, they can save your bacon. The best ones rescue you from disaster or floundering; unfortunately, you never see those until it's too late. A couple of days ago, I would have killed for a tip on why two networked Windows XP machines refused to see each other. But finding that kind of tip requires either a photographic memory (you read everything and never forget it), a lucky Google session, or--as happened in my case--a friend who's been through the same situation.

And in two decades of computer frustration, I've learned the hard way that you can develop a feckless addiction for tips that hurt more than they help. In my youth, I was a fool for macro programs that would type my name and address when I pressed Alt-S, and for clever DOS tweaks that let me copy files between two machines with a single serial cable. But buying, installing, and tinkering with the macro programs took hours more than I ever saved in key presses, and moving files was easier and faster with a sneakernet and floppies.

So here are three questions to ask when deciding whether taking a tip will be worthwhile for you:

>>TIP How much will it help? Remember that tips have thresholds of usefulness that differ with each user. If you send lots of mass mailings, mail-merge tricks are likely to be of great interest. If you send little more than an annual Christmas newsletter about the family, you're better off scrawling a greeting at the top of each note. I can't begin to count the number of hours I've wasted carefully refining computer processes that would have taken far less time if I'd used simple brute force.

>>TIP How long will it take? Always consider the reward/time ratio before proceeding. I've seen all sorts of suggestions about the very best ways to scan business cards into your online address book. My solution: Don't bother unless you're a salesperson, and maybe not even then. With any card-scanning technique, you put in a ton of tedious up-front effort to make things easier for the one-in-a-million moment when you can't find somebody you're looking for via Web searches.

>>TIP How long will it last? Think twice and then think again before bothering with tips that are likely to have a short life span. True, amazingly arcane WordStar and WordPerfect tips lived on for years before they finally got put out to pasture. But many once-cool Windows 3.1 tips are now consigned to the dustbin of history. Things such as the extremely useful msconfig command in Windows 98 vanished in Windows 2000, then mysteriously reappeared in Windows XP. And if you spent much time exploring the ins and outs of Microsoft's once highly touted Active Desktop, your efforts will never, ever be rewarded in this lifetime or any other.

If a tip still looks good after you ponder these three questions, it just might be worth pursuing. But learn from my mistakes, and first cast a skeptical eye toward any tip that isn't proffered in cash.

Stephen Manes

Contributing Editor Stephen Manes, a cohost of the public television series Digital Duo, has written about PCs for nearly two decades.