Vic was a superb boss — his response time on email was under 5 minutes …

Exit interview: Jaiku's Jyri Engeström - (37signals)

Five minutes! That's definitely impressive, if your job is to be responsive to email.

Vic may very well be a superb boss, but responding to email quickly is an incredibly poor way to gauge your boss's performance. The boss should be providing a vision, communicating strategy to the team, making sure that everyone is working towards shared goals. Sure, they might also be dealing with discontent or malcontents, putting out fires, or keeping an eye on the stock price, but if they're sitting around waiting for your email to come in so they can respond to it quickly, they're probably not doing the important stuff.

One of the most raved about features of TextMate is snippet expansion. Felix Ingram has written a Vim plugin that emulates this behaviour, SnippetEmu. I haven't had much of a play with it yet, but it looks like a real time saver. You need Vim 7, and make sure you have the following in your vimrc:
filetype on filetype plugin on

I hate using a mouse. I much prefer to work with the keyboard. I also do a lot of work in a browser. One of the most useful keyboard shortcuts I've come across in Firefox is the apostrophe. If you want to go to a link, simply type ' and start typing the link text. For example, gootodo doesn't have any keyboard shortcuts, but I can create a new todo by typing 'new and hitting enter. That's quicker than moving my hand to the mouse and moving to the link.

You can also go to the detail of a particular todo by typing the todo (if you have the 'Find text as you type' option selected), pressing tab to get to the detail link and hitting enter.