I love the tips and tricks that people are emailing me. Please keep them coming! frankman777(at)gmail.com. Today we have a no-brainer from Richard Bird, who we’ll be hearing more from in future posts.
Richard Bird is an application engineer for a transportation company where he builds custom scripts and applications to automate user processes… and he drives a Ford Mustang.
Richard tells me:
I started using this latest tip by accident. I have this odd habit of typing “??” in sentences where I didn’t know what else to write at the moment or where I needed more info. LIGHTBULB… why not just search for “??” to find all of the places where I left the reader hanging? Super simple, no frills. Just works. After a while I had a ton of them in there. Now I am slowly working my way through tidying them up. So it is kind of like a mini todo list. You know like …Define this, what is this?, get this info, etc.
Below is a snippet from my current outline that has the “??” hack. Any time I need to go back and define what a term means, or leave better notes on a subject, I type “??” with a brief note on what I intend to replace it with. Then later I can go back and make the proper changes by simply searching for “??”:
I went ahead and tried out Richard’s tip by typing “??” into my search box and found all of those entries with 2 or more question marks – which returned an interesting mix of head-scratchers that had either automatically been solved over time… or were even still valid items that needed my attention. I’ve got a feeling that this might be a similar case for many of you. The more question marks you add to your search, the deeper you delve into your past (and present) confoundedness.
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