One Shell Alias That Changed My Day
I'm generally suspicious of productivity content. Most of it is written by people whose job is writing productivity content, which creates an obvious structural problem with the advice. The number of "morning routines of successful people" articles I've read without changing my morning routine is in the dozens.
So I want to be careful about how I frame this, because what I'm about to describe is small and specific and probably doesn't apply to your situation. But it applied to mine and it made a real difference.
Six months ago I added this to my .bashrc:
alias work='cd ~/dev && ls -la --color=auto'That's not quite it — mine is a bit longer, it opens a tmux session and cds into whatever I was last working on — but the concept is that: one word that drops me into the right place, ready to go, without any of the three minutes of orientation that used to happen at the start of every session.
The three minutes of orientation looked like this: open terminal, remember where I was yesterday, cd to the wrong directory once, fix it, ls to see what's there, maybe git status, maybe git log --oneline -5 to remind myself what I was doing. By the time I was actually working, I'd used up some small portion of the focus budget that is finite and doesn't refill on demand.
The alias collapsed that. The orientation still happens — the tmux session opens the directory, shows the git status, shows the five most recent commits — but it happens in half a second instead of three minutes, and more importantly it doesn't require active thought. I don't have to remember where I was. It's just there.
The thing I notice about tools that actually change my behavior, versus tools I try and abandon: the ones that stick remove friction from something I was already doing. The ones I abandon try to change what I was doing.
A new task manager that requires a whole system — new. A shortcut that gets me to my existing task list faster — sticks.
This is probably obvious. It's also something I have to relearn periodically, because the tools that require a system are the ones that get written about and reviewed and recommended. The small frictionless thing that took me twenty minutes to set up and now saves me three minutes a day doesn't have a product page.
My current .bashrc alias collection is embarrassingly long. Most of them are for git operations I type dozens of times a day: gs for git status, gl for the log with my preferred format, gd for diff. These have been there so long I don't remember life before them. I've probably saved hours — real hours, accumulated — from gs alone over fifteen years.
The new one isn't in the same league. But it has that quality of small rightness — of a thing that fits exactly where it goes and does exactly what it says. Those things are worth paying attention to when you find them, even when they're two lines in a config file.
Try it. Or don't. I'm not going to start a newsletter about it.