 Proven techniques for maximizing productivity at your computer In these days of artificial intelligence and robotic process automation, you might think that the best way for your computer to help you get through the day is to have it run itself, taking advantage of the latest whiz-bang software. That’s not what this article is about. First of all, see if this scenario rings true for you, because if it does, then this article is absolutely for you: You’re tasked with creating something on your computer: A single Word doc (perhaps a report) or Excel sheet or PowerPoint presentation. Or—as will be the example used throughout this article—you need to write the text (known in the advertising world as “copy”) for a website page. Yet you have multiple sources of input to consider and leverage in order to create this one document. Does that sound familiar? If so, read on. This article is for you. It’s full of tips and tricks we’ve assembled throughout the years. You may know some of them, but we guarantee you don’t know all of them. Contents
Introduction: How to “cram for the test” We often liken our assignments to “cramming for an exam.” There’s a ton to learn and master, quickly, in order to deliver one stellar performance on deadline. We might be writing something as basic as a web page, but the input we’ll have to write it will be copious. It can include:
Is this feeling familiar? And if so, is it feeling overwhelming? That’s what we’re going to tackle here. We’re going to eliminate the stress, and maximize your ability to deliver the goods, without missing a single bit of crucial input. How To Write Website Copy Step 1: Consolidate For this article, we’ll stick with the above example. But clearly, you can adapt this to your own situation easily. The common thread is that there’s a ton of input that you must cram into your head in order to create that one single deliverable. Take a look at that bulleted list above. With the exception of the layout and its Greeked-in placeholder text, everything in that list consists of words. And a lot of them are big things with just small amounts of relevant words, such as the emails, the brochure page, and the PowerPoint deck. They may total, say, dozens of pages, yet think of them in terms of word count. How many total words of input are there across those pieces of input? Answer: Not too many. This is why you’ll need to create what we call “the bin.” It’s a new Word doc you’ll create; name it something like “Web page input bin.docx.” In it, you’ll make a few bold subheads, under which you’ll copy-and-paste the actual relevant text from those original sources. So your “bin” might start looking like this: Email input [Pasted text here] Brochure text [Pasted text here] PowerPoint input [Pasted text here] Now, just like that, you can stop worrying about the emails, the brochure, and the PowerPoint. Close out those windows. You’re done with them. We just knocked that eight-item bullet list down to five. You can also add things like the “mandatories” from the creative brief to your “bin.” That’ll knock the list down to four. Ditto for the salient text from the previous/existing website. That’ll knock your list down to three. And why, by the way, are we calling this Word doc a “bin”…? How To Write Website Copy Step 2: Keep track The reason we call it a “bin” is because you’ll be pulling from it. It’s a nice scratch-pad-style Word doc that you needn’t worry about messing up; it’s solely for your purposes as you tackle this assignment. And so it’s not just a bin. It’s also a de facto checklist. Here’s what you need to do: As you use each bit of input in that “bin,” mark up that text as “strikethrough” text. That’s text with a horizontal line through it. In Word, for example, the dialog box to invoke it looks like this:  But don’t deal with menus and dialog boxes. Use a keyboard shortcut. On the Mac, the default is Command-Shift-X. Strikethrough text is really helpful. It lets you quickly see what’s been “checked off,” yet the text is still legible if you need to see what it is. This is why law firms rely on it daily. Speaking of strikethrough text, you’ll also employ it in the next doc you’ll create. Name it, say, “Web page text1 NOTES.docx.” This is where you’ll do your actual writing. We like to keep this doc at the far left side of our screen, with all of the other input arrayed to the right of it; how you proceed is up to you and your personal preferences. But what does strikethrough text have to do with your “notes” doc? Lots. Let’s say you write a paragraph that you think is pretty good, but could be better. You’d like to try revising it, but don’t want to lose the current version. The standard desktop-computer solution to this is to take your whole document and “Save as…” Version 2. While that will certainly work, it’s cumbersome. If you want to see what you did previously, you’ll need to re-open Version 1, and position it side-by-side next to Version 2. That’s a lot of time, keystrokes, and mousing around. And the problem compounds itself with each paragraph you decide to rewrite. Instead, copy the paragraph in question. Next, mark it as strikethrough. Then paste the exact same paragraph right below it. Now you can edit away at it as you see fit, without the fear of messing up the original. Think your edited version could be improved? Repeat the process. Copy, strikethrough, paste, and edit. As you go, you’ll see stacks of strikethrough paragraphs piling up above the part of the doc where you’re working. This is fine. In fact, it’s great. It shows you just how many “takes” you’ve made, and it preserves a record of all those previous versions, in case you want to revert to them or any portion thereof. Spoiler alert: When you’re done writing, that’s when you’ll do your “Save as…”. But instead of going from “Web page text1 NOTES.docx” to “Web page text1 NOTES2.docx,” you’ll go from “Web page text1 NOTES.docx.” to simply “Web page text1.docx”—no more “notes” in the filename. That’s the doc you’ll submit to your client. All you need to do is delete all of that strikethrough text. The thing will slim down to size in mere seconds, before your eyes, with nothing left but your most-polished work. How To Write Website Copy Step 3: Divide and conquer A big part of this entire exercise, as mundane as it may sound, is windows management. You’ve only got so much screen real estate. Ostensibly, you’ve started this assignment with way more than you could ever park before your eyes at once. But we’re going to surmount that problem. The goal here—and it’s achievable, we do it all the time—is to have every bit of input you need in front of you, on one screen, all at once. Now it’s time for a little prioritizing/triage. A few items on our original bullet list jump out at us:
For the competitor’s website, you just need to review it enough, quickly, to get a general feel for it in your head. From there, you can close or minimize that window (or, on a Mac, send that window to the Dock). Ditto for the sample copy with the approved voice. It doesn’t go into your “bin”; it’s only there to help inspire you. Read it. In fact, read it a couple times. Get it in your head. Then minimize or Dock that window, too. The layout isn’t so obvious. Sure, it’s only filled with illegible text. But it’s what you’re writing to. It’s got images that will inspire you. You could minimize that window and get it off your screen. But we prefer a different route. We like to simply re-size that window so it’s super tiny—maybe 1/64thof your screen, with the entire layout filling that window. Then we like to park it up high in a corner of the screen. This way, you’ll always be able to glance at it as you work. You don’t need to read it (there’s nothing there to read, anyway), so it needn’t be big enough for its text to be legible. How To Write Website Copy Step 4: Duplicate, duplicate, duplicate At this point, your workspace should be a lot more manageable than it seemed it could be when you started: You’ve got your notes on the left side of the screen, and the windows of your various bits of input—such as your “bin” and your layout—arrayed to the right of it. “Wait!” you say. “That ‘bin’ doc seemed like a good idea at first, but now the thing is five pages long! I can’t see the whole thing at once! What do I do?” This is an incredibly valid point. That “bin” doc is your bible. You need to see the whole thing—all its input, and all the sections you’ll eventually mark up with strikethrough text—to keep track of what you have, and haven’t done. This is where some old-school tricks will come to your rescue. First, use your Word’s “Zoom” slider to zoom out, and make the text as small as you can comfortably read it. This will make the column of actual text look “taller and skinnier” on screen. “Taller” is great, because, whereas, a minute ago, you could only accommodate, say, 50 lines of text without scrolling, now you can see about 25 percent more (or more, depending on your eyesight, screen size, and pixel resolution). “Skinnier” is great, too. Because now you can simply re-size that window, making it as narrow as you can while still showing all of the text at full width. What you want to do is to eliminate any white space on the right and left. Now it’s time for an old-school Word trick that you may not even know existed. It’s the “New Window” command. If you’re not familiar with it, try it. Go to the Window menu, and select “New Window.” And voilà: A new duplicate window will appear on screen, based on the same doc you’ve already got open. Up in its title bar, Word will append its name, so in our case, it will show up as “Web page input bin.docx: 2.” The original window will be beside it, as “…docx: 1.” Your next steps are simple. Position the two windows side-by-side. Look to see the last readable text at the bottom of Window 1. Then select Window 2, and scroll so that it picks up, at the top, where Window 1 left off. Now you can see literally twice as much, at once glance. Often, this will be all you need to do; you’ll be able to see your entire input in just two windows. But if you can’t, you can repeat this process. You can create Window 3, even Window 4, if you like. Just pack them in closely together on your screen, with no “gutter” space between them. Also, turn off all rulers and toolbars; they just waste vertical space. By the way, if there’s another window you need to see—such as a good graph in one of those PowerPoint slides—you can use similar windows-management tricks. Zoom out to make the image as small as you can handle. Then re-size the window to crop out all extraneous information. The more urgent the input is, the closer you should park it to your “notes” doc. The less urgent, the farther. How To Write Website Copy Step 5: Advanced tricks What we’ve described above, albeit in detail, is just the basics. You can build upon them. For example: Use color. We use it all the time. It’s especially helpful with text: You can actually zoom out so far, and make text so tiny as to be illegible, but the colors will still read. This can help you keep track as you go; for example, you might want to set all of the text pertaining to “financial benefits” in green (for “money”), or all your script input about the bad guy in red (for “danger”). Zooming out beyond legibility will let you quickly keep track of the balance and flow. Bonus: Combine this with your strikethrough trick, and you’ll see what you’ve got left, in color, without having to read it. Pretty neat. The splitter bar. Word lets you do more than create a duplicate window. You can split a single window in half; just summon the “Split” command in the Window menu. This will create a horizontal bar across your window, with some of the document above it, and some below it. You’ll find a set of scroll bars for each half, so you can navigate to any part of a long document within either side of the split. You can also move the splitter bar, up or down, as you like, to set off a portion of the text as needed. A tip: Keep “early” material in the top half, and “later” material in the bottom half. This will help you avoid confusion as you work. The split-window command is helpful for keeping an eye on earlier text that you’d like to reference as you work. In fact, we used that exact trick as we wrote this article. Once we created that initial bullet list of input, we had to keep track of it, refer to it, and copy-and-paste from it a few times. So we split the window in half, sized the top half around it, and kept working. It looked like this:  If you look carefully at that screen grab, you’ll notice a couple of things. First, we sized our window so that there’s virtually no white space on either side of the text; this buys us back screen real-estate for other windows as needed, just as we’d described above. Also, you can see that we purposely zoomed out on the bullet-list text above the splitter bar, to make it rather tiny. That’s one trick you might not think of: You can set the zoom independently on either side of the splitter bar. Here, we were fine with its being small; we just wanted to be able to glance at it as a reminder, not read it in detail.
Mac keyboard, trackpad, and gesture tricks. If you’re on a Mac, you’ve got some cool additional tools at your disposal. They go by names like Mission Control and App Exposé. They let you quickly see all, or selected, windows with just a quick swipe of your fingers. You can also set up multiple desktops (Apple calls them “Spaces”), with multiple backgrounds. We use this all the time. Let’s say the web page in our example is all about “finance.” We’ll pick a desktop background image of, say, cash. Something that “reads” instantly. And we may have, say, eight windows open on that desktop. At the same time, we may be working on another web page, for another client, except that, in this instance, it’s dealing with agriculture. So we’ll open up a new desktop for that assignment and create, say, eight new windows for it, and assign a new desktop background image (say, of a farm field) to make it easily recognizable when viewing all our desktops at once when we need to switch between them. This is invaluable when you’re working on Project A and the phone rings, and it’s Client B. You can instantly switch to Client B’s desktop—with all their windows neatly arranged—while keeping all your windows of Project A intact. Make it work for you The original graphical-user-interface revolution in personal computing ingeniously employed a metaphor that everyone could relate to, and still does: The desktop. Over the years, various tools have appeared to help you manage clutter. Some are ridiculously simple, such as re-sizing a window. The trick is to combine all of these techniques in a way that lets you wrap your head around a single project that’s based on multiple sources of input. Need assistance with that next big assignment? We’d love to help, using many of the tricks we’d described in this article. Contact us today to get all that work off of your plate, and onto ours.
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