This past week has been pretty busy with freelance copyediting projects. When I’m copyediting, I have to spend a lot of time looking up words and phrases to ensure that they’re capitalized properly and to do some light fact-checking. I also always have a Merriam-Webster tab open as well as a Chicago Manual of Style tab. After a few hours of editing, I can end up with what feels like hundreds of tabs open. If my daughter stops by my desk, she’ll shake her head and say, uh oh, mom has tabitis again.
Because I’m freelancing, I have also been updating my website, and I tend to keep my LinkedIn tab open. After a while, those email and social media tabs became too distracting. My solution? Edge tab groups. Now, you may be asking why I’m not using Chrome or Firefox. Well, I had some strange Chrome crashing issue that seemed to disappear with Edge. I’ve gotten used to Edge now, so I’m pretty happy with staying it.
The beauty of the Edge tab groups is that I can collapse them, and they stay off my radar. This is super helpful because when those groups are collapsed, they also hide all notifications, which has been a godsend. Now, when I alt tab to Edge, I have a distraction-free set of tabs and easy access to my reference tabs. You may also have noticed the Stormy Night At Dracula’s Castle YouTube tab that I have open. That one is my focus music channel -- soothing piano music with just a slight hint of rain and thunder. Perfect for an 8-hour copyediting session.
A couple of other funny (well and one irritating thing) things I discovered while working today:
Microsoft Word will offer up “patrilineality” as the correct spelling for what it views as the misspelled “matrilineality.”
I will often use the “Alt+” codes for special characters like en and em dashes. I accidentally discovered that Alt+1 is a smiley face. Fun! ☺
What tips do you have for making yourself more productive when you have to spend a lot of time in your browser?
Comments