Keyboard shortcuts can change your life
If someone came to you with a magic wand and said that they could give you an extra two - eight work days per year - what would you say?
What would you do with that extra time? Over a year, that’s an extra project or two. Fewer late nights, etc.
It could be transformative.
Here's the thing - that time is available to you - if you will invest a bit of your time now to learn a new language - the language of keyboard shortcuts.
Every single time you pick up your hand to move your mouse - you are losing seconds. For a knowledge worker, those seconds add up year after year.
Essentially all modern software applications - even lots of web-based ones - have keyboard shortcuts built in.
For the uninitiated, keyboard shortcuts are a series of keystrokes that prompt the software to do something that normally you would move the mouse to do to click a button. For example, you want to underline a cell in Excel - there's a shortcut for that. You want to select a table, and sort the data largest to smallest - keyboard shortcut.
If you watch any of the highlights of the Microsoft Excel World Championship (yes - that's a thing) - it's all keyboard shortcuts.
In my experience, most do not utilize these simple tools. They remain tethered to the mouse for a large portion of their interactions with their computers. This is to their detriment - seconds of time slipping away like grains of sand with every interaction.
Start slow and build up a mental knowledge of your most frequently used interactions.
Over time, shortcuts become muscle memory and you will be able to do them without conscious recall.
Get good enough and watch the extra time pile up