The QWERTY keyboard and mouse are hammer, wrench and screwdriver to many of today’s workers – the vital tools that allow us to interface with the worlds that we are building. It’s likely you sit at the computer for eight, ten, twelve hours or more each day, and even if you get to work on a variety of projects, the physical action of what you do is repetitive and – after a while – instinctual. But if these instincts include the frequent navigation of menus and submenus with your mouse to find the options you need, you are wasting serious time.
A few seconds mousing around here and there soon add up over the hours, days and weeks, yet you can shave a lot of time off the process by learning a few keyboard shortcuts for the functions you use most frequently. All of our most frequently used applications – Microsoft’s Office suite, Google’s Chrome browser and Gmail service, and so on – come with a long list of shortcuts to help you navigate in a fraction of the time it takes with a mouse. You can even change them or add new ones, usually by accessing a panel such as ‘Customize Keyboard’ or ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’ through a program’s Preferences or Tools menu.
But if you’re looking to speed up your most common commands, you’ll love this new infographic, which gathers all the popular ones into a single, easy-to-reference resource. Save it you desktop and Command-tab (on a Mac) or Control-tab (on a PC) through your apps to it every time you need to remember a shortcut, and you’ll soon find they become second nature and your pace of work increases substantially. It takes a little while to learn, but with the knowledge that you have a ‘cheat sheet’ with clearly visualized instructions should give you the confidence to switch from time-consuming mouse-clicks to graceful keyboard shortcuts ASAP!
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