Launchy to the rescue | Digital Marketing Zen Blog & Podcast on Marketing & Social Media
Jan 14, 2009

Posted by dwells in DGWells.com, Productivity and Efficiency | View Comments

Launchy to the rescue

Launchy to the rescue
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Application Launcher to improve workflow

One of my favorite things I have ever found in personal productivity software is hands down a program called Launchy. It is a keystroke launcher application that can launch websites, programs, open folders, and even add an event to your google calendar.

How does it work?

Glad you asked. Well launchy is ridiculously easy to use. Once you download it, simply install and then launch it with ALT+Space. The launchy box will pop up and you type in what you are looking for. Launchy is a smart program and learns your shortcuts the more you use them.

For example: Alt+space f opens up the facebook homepage in firefox much quicker than manually opening your browser and opening up the bookmark or typing it in the nav bar.

For Example: Alt+Space my d , quickly launches my documents. Instead of having to mouse through the start up menu.

My Favorite Launchy Plugin

There are many different plugins you can get to make launchy even more useful! My personal favorite is the yubby plugin. The yubby plugin allows you to search numerous sites without having to go to them or clicking on the mini search nav bar on the top right corner of your browser.

For example: if I want to do a google image search without having to navigate to google and then click on image search, I can simply Alt+space (to pop-up launchy) and then another “Space gim kangaroos Enter” and launchy will open up a tab in Firefox with my search query displayed.

And this happens :

You can download the yubby plugin here. All of the Yubby shortcuts are listed here.

My Favorites include:

  • (Space) gim (search query) for google image search
  • (Space) ebay (search query) for ebay item search
  • (Space) g (search query) for google search
  • (Space) wp (search query) for wikipedia search
  • (Space) imdb (search query) for a internet movie database search

Why this program is important

This may seem like just another program that will actually decrease productivity (probably because the examples given about seem like time wasting websites) but think about how much time it take to navigate to different folders and websites. I would guestimate that at least 10 seconds are wasted each time we are searching for that god forsaken lost folder. Now multiply that 10seconds by 20 times a day when finding a file or navigating through a website you don’t have to.

Thats 200seconds a day. Well, hey doesn’t sound too bad. Unless you add up at 3.3minutes a day of wasted time and muliply it 5days a week and 44weeks a year and you are looking at 12hours of work time wasted on navigating and not actually doing what you want as an end result.

You could use a nice hour break every once and a while! So give launchy a try. I think that every company should employ this or something similar to just plain make peoples lives easier and more productive.

Additional Resources:

Screenshot tour: Tweaking Launchy

Launchy Plugins

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