This post is blogged by me, Alex Shalman, in order to keep you entertained while John is away. This post happens to go well with Jane May’s recent post on Maximizing Your Daily Efficiency.
What do making money online, parenting, and being the president have in common? Each of these tasks requires a common skill in order to be successful – time management. It’s really easy to get off track and start doing tasks that are less urgent or important. This is why it is crucial to our productivity to take advantage of downtime and make it work for us.
Down time comes in various forms and can be taken advantage of in several ways. We’ve all heard of listening to audio tapes during our commute to and from work. This might be applicable to bloggers, if they have podcasts. However, bloggers with podcasts are currently few and far between.
What every blogger can take advantage of is printed media. By making their writing easily printable, readers can print out an article or two for later. Whether waiting for an appointment or standing in line at the grocery store, one can reach into their back pocket, pull out a couple of articles, and make use of down time.
WP Print Plugin
The WP Print Plugin written by Lester Chan, is the perfect way to bring writing from your site to your readers back pocket. It leaves out all the clutter from ads and graphics, and delivers just the meat (text) of the blog post. This is a great alternative to hitting print screen, or copy/pasting into a word processor. Try hitting print screen on a site with a dark background and light text. Surely you don’t want to waste ink on that.
This is a guest post by Alex Shalman. Alex writes about self help and personal development on at Alex Shalman dot Com.
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{ 38 comments }
This is an excellent idea, thanks for the post. Perhaps you reader doesn’t have time in front of a computer screen, and they do have time when there is no computer screen in front of them.
This plugin is great for readers and bloggers alike. I’ll be using it.
too bad i use blogger
Dont worry, soon someone will get some way to do it in blogger.
I have to try this also, looks great !!
I used that plugin but i stopped it
that’s cool alex. great idea on time management. hmmm but since you stopped using it, then it’s not that cool eh?
I still use that plugin, it would be better if it stripped out adsense though.
I also use one that lets users mail the page to themselves or a friend, thats a good one, I can see traffic coming in form online mailboxes (yahoo’s mail service for example).
Don’t think it does much for time management though, only useful for researchers IMO…
E-mails Can be very effective if worked properly. I have a site which gets 50% traffic by e-mail recommendations. Sneaky Link
Thanks for the plugin tip.
Using time wisely is something that is tough to improve upon. It is too easy to be lazy and that is the path of least resistance. I am waiting on the invention of the food replicator and I will never leave the house.
Such a swell idea.
Let me see if I can incorporate that in my blog. Of course, it will come with a back link and a quote of this post. Regards!
Time Management has always been a major issue in my daily life. This post is very useful. Thanks
OMG thanks man. I been looking for something like this. Will install tonight and try it out!
Myself also. This is a great little tool to have to keep it simple and easy to read.
Good post Alex and great tip.
I was just wondering what does John
has to say about the “…leaves out all the clutter from ads and graphics, and delivers just the meat (text) of the blog post…” part 
I definitely agree with adding a print button…I did it today actually…great post on Jonathan Ledger’s site…Think Low, Stay Low…
Anyway, it’s a good sign of value too…I mean if it’s good enough to print, it’s a good job by you (track the printing perhaps?).
Thanks for the info. I will use it once I get my blog up and going.
This type of time management really demand some extend of discipline.
How can I read 500 blogs faster?
rss and some hacks?
That’s why lists are so popular! They’re faster to read!
We all are lazy, we like to skim through content first.
I do this – actually I transfer e-books and other materials to my PDA and then get it out when I am waiting in the post office/bank/doctor’s waiting room.
It makes the wait SO much more bearable. In fact, I could sit there all day reading away (and miss my turn)!
Nothing like the good old piece of paper. I think I will make sure that when the new Apple iPhone comes to Canada I have that in the front pocket.
You mentioned a great habit to do while in the car. I hope everyone caught it.
Great post!
Personally, I use FeedDemon to read all my blogs. It’s so much quicker than visiting each site and it syncs online too so I never re-read the same article by accident.
Very useful when you follow a lot of blogs
I’ll give it a try also. There are a few sites out there that I need to print off and read and reread!
Thanks for the info. Time Management is a hard skill to come by. I have issues with procrastination too. I need to stop procrastinating and working on my time management.
-Ms.Caesi
I’m glad you guys enjoyed this post. I have more great things planned for John Chow dot Com readers!
Actually I think that is a really good plugin, I own a recipes site and I think that would be a big help.
Paper? How old fashioned!? The time it takes to print out stuff, especially the amount of stuff that you’d need to wait in a doctor’s waiting room! Wouldn’t be worth it! Even uploading files to PDA isn’t such a good way to save time!
Just learn to read faster! there are plenty of reading courses out there!
Most blog entries aren’t worth the time it takes to print out, fold up and organize! I can read most of them faster than that!
Now, printing a good journal or multi-page document. That’d be more sensible!
That’s really helpful; I absolutely hate printing the “clutter,” too. Thanks a lot for the tip, Alex.
Thanks Alex, great tips, i enjoyed reading.
Just a comment about using paper…
Paper = $
Yeah, you saw that right. Paper isn’t free. In fact, the price of paper for a small, home office is ludicrous in itself.
Jason
Good article!
I for one dont like podcasts – reading is so much quicker and so much more fun.
Great idea. I will try it out. I know how annoying it is when I try to print an article online and get a bunch of adds in the print out. This rocks.
That’s a good plugin to use! Will use it in my blog
Congrats Alex, your post is being reffered by other language blogs!
And has anyone being noticing the increased portuguese trackbacks?