Designer's Toolchest

This'll be a full-fledged presentation in the upcoming days, but for now, to boost your productivity, consider developing expertise/familiarity in/with the following :

Perl, the swiss-army knife of scripting languages. Once you have savoured perl, you will see that you must know your data. And, when you internalize the fact that you must know your data, you will be more organized and start spotting patterns and solutions much faster.

perlTK - rapid fire GUI development for a better user experience. This is for those once-a-year times when your project will go much faster if you just had a better way of doing something. User experience is king. You must enjoy what you do if you do a lot of it.

AutoHotKey, the shortcut to Windows scripting. For all the hype about Linux, it has failed to deliver a method of scripting routine interactions.

HTML/Word/Powerpoint - when you have to sell yourself. Most things you'll want to do to make yourself look better only take a few minutes and most of the answers are already online.

Excel - Dashboard your way to success. We are all drivers or pilots all the time. Having access to the data that matters to you is the key to your success.

Cadence - The IC design suite with a user interface that could stand to lose a few pounds.

People skills - get the ball running faster and smoother. Politics is a fact of life. Get with the program. Be upbeat. You can make anyone's day with an uplifting remark or a joke or a witty observation.

Mindset : Think innovation, think victory, think initiative, tenacity, proactivity. Look for worthwhile things to do and do them without being told. Make things happen - where there's a will, there's a way - look online, participate in forums, make a nuisance of yourself till you've found the solution. Use paper - write down the possible outcomes and get to the future first!

ALT-ESC - The third dimension in productivity. It's amazing how many people (including my nice IT support guy) don't know about this trick in Windows (you can set your keyboard shortcut on Linux to do the same thing). How many times have you seen poor people click on the title bar and move the window to see what's beneath it? All you need to do is hit ALT-ESC and lower your window. Save yourself time, energy, money, hair, seed, etc.

Enjoy!