20/20 hindsight is a marvellous thing. One of the biggest mistakes in my life, in retrospect, was taking Latin instead of typing at school. I didn’t see the Internet coming.

I may well remember that all Gaul is divided into three parts (Mr Thompson, I salute you!), but it takes me a long, long time to tell anyone else about it in an email or document.

Luckily TextExpander saves my bacon hundreds of times a day. After Quicksilver and MailTags, it is the third biggest time- and finger-saving app on my Mac.

With just a few keystrokes, I can (at lightning speed) dump my mail signatures, frequently-needed URLs, often-typed chunks of HTML code, torturously long institutional titles and much more into almost anything I am typing in Mail.app and elsewhere. (Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame has some actual examples to hand.)

The PR department at SmileOnMyMac kindly emails to tell me about a new ready-made collection of HTML snippets.

When you have imported them, typing “,a” will automatically expand to <a href=""></a>. As you can imagine, this kind of thing saves bucketloads of time every day.

You can get hold of these 60 snippets either by themselves or rolled into an earlier collection of 100+ common typos that TextExpander can recognise and correct on the fly.

TextExpander is not the only way to do this nor the cheapest (shareware — USD 29.95) but for ease of use — res ipsa loquitur!textexpander, textpander, productivity, snippets, saving time, text, HTML, mail.app, apple mail

Jonathan Nathan has updated his menubar access utility for Address Book, JABMenu.

The newest version (1.2) adds more options for international map services, the ability to compose an email to a group of contacts found through its look-up hotkey, the ability to add contact info into the foremost application (i.e. quickly insert contact details into a mail.app message—very handy!) and more.

Since I don’t have many friends in Desmoines, Iowa or Martha’s Vinyard, the increased number of international mapping options is very welcome.

People can now benefit from a much wider range of country-specific Google Maps services and mapping providers.

It works well too.

Clicking on the postal address of everyone’s favourite company (or at least its Australian outpost) pops up the right result (plus a slightly scary suggestion):

The new group email option is also useful, allowing you to select multiple contacts from a look-up search:

You can read the full changelog on Jonathan’s web site , where you can also download the updated version. It’s shareware (USD 10).address book, menubar, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, maps, saving time, google

The Exchange/Outlook Product Manager for the UK, Allister Frost, has posted the “Best Outlook tip in the world” on his blog.

It’s not what you are thinking. He doesn’t recommend switching to Ubuntu.

Instead, he offers a long post in praise of the delete key, which works as well in Apple Mail as it does in Outlook.

His post shows you how to power through your Inbox, featuring,

1. The Three Ds – Do, Defer, Delete, two
2. Two questions – Is this email important to my objectives? Is it actionable?
3. One result – more time for the things that matter.

He spices the whole mix with an anecdote that will strike fear into the hearts of email hoarders:

Back in the early 1990′s my boss would return to the office after a holiday and ceremoniously empty his (at this time paper-filled) in-tray into the bin. He was so right when he said “If it’s important, they’ll let me know.”

By deleting extraneous information and concentrating only on what is important to you and your personal objectives you can regain control over the email monster and achieve a happier and more fulfilling work-life balance.

You will be amazed, he says, how much of your email you can delete when you put your mind to it.email, productivity, the delete key, inbox, saving time, do, delete, defer