Under an impending deadline? Feel like you’re falling behind at work? No matter what you do, it’s useful to be able to do things fast.

Let me start off by saying that it’s more important to do the right things well than to do the wrong things quickly. As your career progresses, your mechanical ability is definitely less important than your knowledge but for those of us in entry-level jobs who are relied upon to do this type of work, speed is invaluable. This article isn’t about producing better, it’s about producing more. Focus on what you need to do, and then use these tips and tricks to get it done quickly and effectively.

There are plenty of strategies for getting work done faster. You could plan your approach. You could outline. You could reuse templates or past work. Today we’re not talking about any of those. Instead, let’s nerd out and talk about the mechanics of getting it done – the keyboard. Pay attention, because this is the difference between finishing that report early and going out for a round of twilight golf and staying in the office an extra hour.

Where do I start?

This is going to be controversial to some of you, but here it is.

Stop clicking things.

Relying on the mouse is slow. Clicking things is slow. There’s endless debate on this, but let’s look at an example. You’re typing, you finish a sentence and want to save – compare these two options:

1. Take your hands off the keyboard and grab the mouse
2. Scroll to the File menu
3. Click it
4. Scroll down to the Save button
5. Click it

Or by doing it with the keyboard only:

1. Using your left hand, hit ctrl+s

There’s an old article from August 1989 that gets thrown around a lot when talking about keyboard versus mouse. The most frequently quoted part is definitely this:

 We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

• Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
• The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.

But the important thing to remember is this part:

It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.

What we can take away from this is that using keyboard commands is slower if you don’t know the keyboard commands. If you do know the commands, nobody argues that it’s faster, so learn the commands! The side benefit of using keyboard shortcuts is that your mouse hand can be more accurate and there’s less waiting time between actions.

I’m still not convinced it’s faster

It’s not an easy mental transition to move from visual, point-and-click to keyboard shortcuts, but here’s my anecdotal proof. There are people who make their living playing computer games professionally, and one common measure of “productivity” in these games is actions per minute (APM). In certain games, the best players have over 300+ clicks or button presses per minute and at least 80% of those are button presses.

Call them athletes or don’t, but these are people who make their living clicking and typing and the difference in speed can make or break a career so you’d better bet that they know the quickest way to do it.

What commands should I learn?

You DO NOT need to know every keyboard shortcut. There are cheat sheets all over the internet that show you the exhaustive list of the “900 MUST-USE shortcuts in Microsoft Excel!” but nobody really uses those. We print them out and tape them to our monitor with high hopes of using them and we never do. It’s just too large a list and it forces us to look things up (slower) instead of learning them (faster). So what should we do instead?

Write down the ten commands you use most often. For a lot of people, this is text formatting (bold, italics, underline), cell movement (enter, tab), save, print, cut, copy, paste and undo. Look those up, write only these ones down and master them. If you really want to learn it, unplug your mouse and navigate using only the keyboard for an afternoon. This is the equivalent of flying to a remote part of the world and learning the language by immersion – you’ll be amazed at how quickly this information sticks when you actually need it. Most programs today are built to allow for this experimentation and you can simply hit Alt to cycle through buttons or see the relevant hotkeys.

 

Try it yourself for an afternoon and let me know how it goes. If you’d like a less challenging way of learning, check out a little program called KeyRocket. It checks how you interact with Microsoft Office (usually the most time consuming work) and gives you a little pop-up when you’ve done something that has a good keyboard shortcut and shows when you use it correctly. There’s even a little gamification aspect and it shows you your progress towards mastering a keyboard shortcut. It’s a great piece of software and I’d highly recommend giving it a try.

My absolute favorite keyboard shortcut program has to be Launchy. You hit a command and start typing to immediately open programs, documents, folders or do calculations. Once you’ve found what you want, just hit Enter and it opens for you. Way easier than Desktop > My Folder > Documents > Project Name > Drafts > July Draft v2.docx.

I actually have a funny story about nested folders. As a kid I set up my folder on the family computer but I didn’t want my parents to go through my stuff. I made a ton of folders within folders within folders that were mostly dead-ends and put all of my stuff in one folder hidden all the way inside. Launchy would have been nice back then.

Learning this sounds tough. What’s the single best keyboard shortcut?

Alt+Tab. This key combination was probably invented for kids to quickly hide their AOL Instant Messenger conversations when their parents walked into the computer room, so you know it’s good. Holding Alt and then pressing Tab allows you to cycle through your open windows and select which one you’d like to bring into focus. Instead of scrolling, minimizing (top of the screen), searching, scrolling, maximizing (bottom of the screen) you just click Alt+Tab to switch between programs. The options are ordered by what you’ve used most recently, so it’s very easy to switch immediately between two applications.

If you’re referring back and forth between a site and a document you’re writing, just Alt+Tab between the two. No more minimizing, scrolling, clicking or maximizing necessary.

Okay fine, I’ll give it a try. What are some other useful commands?

Like I said before, the useful ones are the ones that you use most. For example, when I learned how to draw blueprints in AutoCAD I changed an extra button on my mouse to hit Enter whenever I clicked it because that was the shortcut to repeat a command. But since you asked (or I imagined you asking), here are my most used keyboard shortcuts:

• Open a new browser tab (Ctrl+T)
• Close the current browser tab (Ctrl+W)
• Reopen the last closed browser tab (Ctrl+Shift+T)
• Switch between browser tabs (Ctrl+Tab)
• Save, Print, Bold, Italics, Underline (Ctrl+S, P, B, I, U)
• Save As (F12)
• Center Text (Alt+HAC)
• Move to the end of a section of data in Excel (Ctrl+Arrow Keys)
• Select to the end of a section of data in Excel (Ctrl+Shift+Arrow Keys)
• Rename file or jump to the end of a cell in Excel (F2)

Recap

Just to summarize: when you need to get things done, it’s helpful to be able to do them more efficiently. Especially as an entry-level employee, you may get the type of work and the deadlines where being able to produce work quickly is really important. If your work happens on a computer, knowing your way around the keyboard can be a great time-saver because all of these little actions add up to you getting done earlier.