Stop chasing the MOUSE

pressing a key along with another one or both simultaneously gets you where you want to be in a jiffy. It is cool, isn’t it? It makes you feel like a computer buff as you command your system flicking through tabs, clearing out the junk wherever it is on your system, chatting with your coworkers and that too without moving your hands more than an inch. Although using a mouse is generally believed to take lesser time than a keyboard, it is considered a lower-level cognitive function to reach your mouse and find where the cursor is on the screen. Switching to keyboard use come to many mouse users the hard way; they had to undergo repetitive strain injury (RSI).

Let me share something staggering here about your job if it requires you to be on your computer all day long for about 8 hours, then knowing keyboard shortcuts can save you 8 entire workdays. Wasting 2 seconds a minute (in 480 minutes a working day & 240 workdays a year) amounts to 64 wasted hours a year. Therefore, memorizing keyboard shortcuts could scale up your productivity by 3% which may look marginal to you now but it is going to save you 8 entire working days. 

For example, Ctrl+T will open a new tab in your browser for which you take the cursor to the + sign and click it using the mouse. Imagine how many times you need to open a new tab on the browser? Not only this but for many other commands if such keys can save your time considerably, what’s wrong with that?  Similarly, you will find a lot of links/sites offering these shortcuts to save you not only your precious time but the label of being “Dependent on a Mouse.” You can put them up somewhere on your workstation or any of your room walls and the repetitive glance (even with least interest) will do the job. You must have begun fanaticizing using these keys but you mustn’t stick to your mouse any longer. Trust me! You can also be desirably efficient for others and yourself too.