This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Jess Pomfret (b|t) and the topic is “Life hacks to make your day easier.”

A Little Background

For those of you who don’t know, T-SQL Tuesday is the brainchild of SQL Server Guru Adam Machancic (t). It is a monthly blog party where a person is chosen to be the blog “host” for the month, chooses a topic (can be technical or non-technical), and charges IT professionals to write about the topic on their respective blogs, then link back to the host blog.

Once the month has concluded, the host makes a roundup post comprised of links to each participant’s post. It’s a great way for people to learn a lot about a topic from incredibly knowledgeable people, and it’s wonderful for the participants as they get to contribute to the community and the greater good.

This 123rd T-SQL Tuesday is particularly special to me because it’s the first one I’ve participated in.

Life Hack

A life hack I learned about relatively recently is the Apple “Speak Screen” option on iPhones. This feature, which has apparently been around since the iOS 6 days, allows iPhones to speak the contents of web pages to you. How did I not know this existed?

When I first used this feature, I was blown away. My backlog of websites, blogs, and articles to read had been growing, and it seemed I would never make my way through all of the material. Now, when I’m in the shower, in the car, heck–even when I’m cleaning the house I can bring up a page I’ve been wanting to read and simply have Siri dictate it to me.

Here’s how to turn it on:

Settings –>Accessibility–>Spoken Content–>Toggle “Speak Screen” On

Or, just go to a web page ask Siri to “Speak Screen.” If it’s not enabled, it’ll give you the option to go to the aforementioned settings area and enable it; if it is enabled, it’ll speak the page to you.

There are several other related options you can set in this area, like whether text gets highlighted as it’s spoken, the rate at which text is spoken, etc.

As we all know, time is one of the few resources we simply cannot make more of, so our next best option is to be as efficient as we can with the time that we have available to us. “Speak Screen” has allowed me to significantly improve my efficiency and overall productivity. I highly recommend exploring this to see if it can help you too. If you want to do more reading on it, head over to Apple.