I’m going to call it Time Saved Per Year or TSPY. It is a measurement of the amount of time (measured in hours) that is saved in one year by using a more efficient technique to accomplish a routine task.
Using yesterday’s – Windows Key – Down Arrow – Enter shortcut to a browser, I did an experiment in the lab with users running two normal applications: Word and Outlook. One group had to reduce the two applications using the mouse and double-click the “e†on the desktop. The second group used only the keyboard shortcut. The average time savings per browser opening (ATSPBO) was four seconds.
If this activity is initiated ten times during a normal working day, the numbers look like this.
10×4=40 seconds per day
40×5=200 seconds per week
200×52=10,400 seconds per year
=173.3 minutes per year
=2.89 hours per year
Yesterday’s TSPY was 2.89 hours.
That is more than one third of a teaching day. It is time that could be used interacting with students or completing administrative tasks that would otherwise been done in the evening at home.
![iMac Back [397/1000]](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7005/6809747591_3027f3c94c_t.jpg "iMac Back [397/1000]")
Yipes! Are there really people who have to open a browser 10 times a day? Isn’t it more efficient just to keep it open all the time? My browser, email, and palm software are essentially open whenever my computer is on for fast, easy access.
I love the desktop icon – it’s the first one in my lower toolbar. It’s a quick way to minimize all the open applications.
“Steve [Jobs] was upset that the Mac took too long to boot up when you first turned it on. So he tried motivating Larry Kenyon by telling him ‘well you know how many millions of people are going to buy this machine? It’s going to be millions of people, and let’s imagine that you can make it boot five seconds faster. Well that’s five seconds times a million, every day. That’s fifty lifetimes, If you can shave five seconds off that you’re saving fifty lives.’ And so it was a nice way of thinking about it, and we did get it to go faster.”
Andy Hertzfeld
Triumph of the Nerds
Best line from Triumph of the Nerds – Steve Jobs quoting Picasso – “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” When he said this he was talking about how Bill Gates had stolen all the ideas for Windows from the Mac OS. The real irony is that Apple stole many of their original GUI ideas (and even some employees) from Xerox PARC.
Xerox invented everything.
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