I’m not a natural runner, but I’ve gotten in the habit of jogging 2-3 miles around the track three times a week. It keeps me healthy and — once I got over the initial pain — it has become addictive.

Still, I’m no Ironman (no, not the superhero).

After a mile or two, my body wants to call it quits. I start shuffling my legs instead of taking long, efficient strides. My head sags. My feet begin flailing outward. My breathing becomes irregular and my back hunches up.

No, I’m not having a stroke — I’m just tired.

When my body is exhausted, I’ve found that I need to pay special attention to my form. Too easily, my tired body becomes a clumsy body. Clumsy movements are inefficient, and only tire me out more quickly.

So, down the stretch, I begin focusing on my running posture and breathing.

I keep my head upright and make sure to relax my shoulders and arms. I ensure my legs are compact, making efficient strides. I begin to slow my breathing, inhaling and exhaling in a deep, intentional rhythm.

Concentrating on my form doesn’t guarantee I’ll be in the Boston Marathon next year, but it gives me the best chance to complete my goal for the day and finish the run feeling strong.

I’ve found that a similar strategy works well when solving a design problem.

Say you’re designing a new web site. If you’re a competent designer, the fundamentals come naturally, and you begin the project as you should: articulating the goals of the project, letting form follow function, adhering to basic design principles like unity, balance, contrast and dominance.

But as a project drags on, even the best of us can succumb to exhaustion. You’re tired of staring at the same site over and over. You’re annoyed by your client’s barrage of uniformed suggestions. You just want to be done so you can move on to the next, more exciting project.

When you’re tired, your form slips.

With design, you know you’re getting tired when you resort to trial-and-error, or when you start creating elements without a goal in mind, or when you build something that any 8th grade art student could improve.

It’s time to double your focus on form. Stop, regroup, consider the fundamentals and let your natural talent take over.

Like a runner, designers should be in a state of constant self-assessment: How am I feeling? Am I doing my best work? What needs to change to give myself the greatest chance to succeed? How is my pace? My form?

Your attitude at the beginning of a project is often different than during those final laps. Pay attention to these changes and adjust as necessary.

When the project is finished, you’ll know you ran a good race.

It’s a minor feature, but now I wonder how I lived without it.

Yesterday, I came across a few more useful Firefox features that I’ve already incorporated into my day-to-day repertoire. These tips center on getting more out of the aptly named Awesome Bar – a much-hyped feature of Firefox 3+.

1. Location bar search

All the documentation I’ve found claims that simply typing a keyword into the Awesome Bar (a.k.a Location bar) will, by default, search for that term via Google. This has never worked for me.

When I type Andrew Bird into the Location bar, I get re-directed to a OpenDNS page with a few awkward links. Certainly not the robust search I was hoping for.

Mozilla support says they use Google’s Browse by Name service for Awesome Bar searches, but the Google toolbar support page says “This feature is only available for Toolbar for Internet Explorer.”

Weird. I’m not really sure what this means…all I know is that it doesn’t work for me.

For the time being, I’ve simply altered Firefox’s keyword service to use Bing instead. Here’s how:

• Type about:config in the Firefox Location bar
• Click through the “This might void your warranty!” warning page
• Search for keyword.URL
• Click the URL entered under Value (probably says something like http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q)
• Replace this with the URL for the search engine of your choice, for example:
• Yahoo – http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=
• Bing – http://www.bing.com/search?q=

Now, just type a search term directly into the Awesome Bar and you should get search results from the selected search engine.

(You can also follow Mozilla’s directions for changing your keyword service)

2. Smart keywords

I use the built-in search (the search toolbar in the upper right corner of Firefox) hundreds of times a day. It’s an incredibly convenient to quickly search using Google, Thesaurus.com, or Wikipedia all in one place.

Still, I’m lazy and sometimes I get annoyed by having to switch search engines using the drop down list. Enter Smart Keywords.

Using Smart Keywords, you can assign a keyword to each search engine. For example, you can assign Wikipedia to the keyword wiki. Then simply type the keyword followed by your search term directly into the Location bar.

Simply entering something like wiki korngold will instantly bring up the Wikipedia entry on Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

To add Smart Keywords:

• Go to the search engine drop down list and select Manage Search Engines…
• Click on an existing search engine and hit Edit Keyword…
• Type in the keyword you want to use for that search engine and hit OK

That’s it! Don’t forget to add keywords for my personal favorites: Thesaurus.com and IMDB.

3. Bookmark keywords

The Awesome Bar relies heavily on your bookmarks and history to provide relevant site suggestions. For even faster access to your bookmarks, set up bookmark keywords.

Here’s how to associate the keyword alist with one of your bookmarked sites, A List Apart.

• Open your Library by going to Bookmarks > Organize bookmarks…
• Navigate to the proper bookmark and select it
• In the bottom pane (where it says Name, Location, Tags) click the More down arrow
• Type in alist as the value for Keyword

Voilà! Now just type alist into your Location bar and you’ll be taken directly to the fantastic design articles on A List Apart.

Of course, you can also improve Bookmark searches by adding tags to each bookmark (but I’m generally too lazy for that).

Have fun with your new-found productivity and Happy Thanksgiving!

WhenIsGood.net compiled a random sample of over 100,000 responses to meeting invitations and found that event invitations are most likely to be accepted on Tuesday at 3pm.

Groups have been using WhenIsGood.net since 2007 to find meeting times that work for everyone. The meeting coordinator simply starts an event, suggests a range of times and dates, then circulates an invitation link via email. Participants indicate the best time for them, so the coordinator can make an informed scheduling decision.

In addition to confirming the optimal meeting time on Tuesdays, WhenIsGood.net anonymously sampled user data and found that the afternoon is generally freer than the morning (especially first thing in the morning).

Interestingly, they didn’t find much variation between days of the week. People are just as available on Wednesday as they are on Friday or Monday.

Funny thing is…we used to always reserve Tuesday at 3pm as our flexible meeting time, to meet about a specific subject if necessary. Of course, now we’re juggling the daily schedules of full-time students, hourly workers and distributed employees, and Tuesday at 3pm doesn’t quite cut it anymore.

What about you? Has your group found a meeting time that tends to work for everyone?

Here’s the full report from WhenIsGood.net.

The truth is, until yesterday, I’d never bothered to use the left shift lever, effectively taking the front derailleur entirely out of the equation and using only a third of my bike’s gears. Most of the time, when the road slopes only slightly, the middle seven gears are sufficient. So, that’s all I used. Even when I encountered more abrupt hills, I apparently decided it wasn’t worth twisting my left hand a quarter of an inch to switch the font gears.

It’s unfortunate because, as I discovered last night, it is waaay easier to climb a hill when you downshift to 4th gear. It got me thinking about other tools I’m not using to their full potential. Are there aspects of my work that can be made easier simply by more completely utilizing the tools available to me?

The first thing I thought of is the way I design logos. In the past year, I’ve tried to freshen up the logos for our products and created a new logo for the company. I do all my graphics work in Gimp, which produces bitmap images. Normally fine, but lately I’ve been thinking that our logos should be vector images. Logos tend to be used all over the place in a variety of placements, and it would be ideal if we could scale them up or down quickly without losing quality. Currently, it can be tedious creating a newly-sized logo, and we can pretty much only make them smaller without losing quality.

I’ve got a great open source vector graphics editor on my machine; just haven’t bothered to learn it yet. Maybe it’s about time I learned how to use all 21 speeds.