Putting a notepad into Drupal's sidebar

I co-manage this Drupal project, where the first action of my daily routine, right after logging in, is to check the list of recent logs entries for things, that require my attention. The server, hosting the website, is not the fastest one. Two clicks and scrolling down in between them in order to access the logs, results in a considerable and annoying waiting period. The problem gets even worse, with content creation, as this particular project makes heavy use of CCK node reference fields. Adding a new node usually involves also adding several auxiliary nodes as well. Again, for each node, this means two clicks and the accompanying waiting period to bring up the editing forms.

Since I don't want to waste my time on waiting more then necessary, I need some kind of a shortcut. Of course, I could just add the according links directly to the top level of the navigation menu, but for a multiuser site, where some users may not even have the permission to create all content types, let alone access administrative pages, this is not really an option.
The better idea would therefore be to add a multi-line text field to the user profiles and configure a (toggleable) block in the sidebar to display it's contents. Users can then maintain their personal list of favorite links in whichever way it pleases them, given that they know basic HTML. Here is how I implemented it:

First of all, the two modules "profiles" (part of the Drupal core) and "Views" (contributed module) must be enabled. Next, go to admin/user/profile and add a new field named "profile_notes". It should be of the "multi-line textfield" type with private access. Afterwards, visit admin/build/views/import and simply paste this view definition into the the text field. Last but not least, open admin/build/block and drag the new block into the sidebar of your choice.

Test the notepad by putting something into the according field in your profile. You may use any tags understood by your default input format.