Every time you move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse, you lose about a second. That does not sound like much until you consider how many times per hour you do it. Studies on office productivity consistently find that workers who use keyboard shortcuts complete tasks 20 to 40 percent faster than those who navigate menus and toolbars with a mouse. The time savings compound across a workday, a week, and a year.
Universal Shortcuts
These work across almost every application on both Windows and Mac (substitute Cmd for Ctrl on Mac):
Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V for copy, cut, and paste. Ctrl+Z to undo. Ctrl+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Z to redo. Ctrl+A to select all. Ctrl+S to save. Ctrl+F to find. Ctrl+P to print. These eight shortcuts alone cover the most frequent actions in any workflow.
Text Navigation
Holding Ctrl while pressing arrow keys moves the cursor word by word instead of character by character. Add Shift to select text as you move. So Ctrl+Shift+Right selects the next word. Home and End keys jump to the beginning and end of a line. Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End jump to the beginning and end of a document.
Double-click selects a word. Triple-click selects a paragraph in most applications. These text selection shortcuts eliminate the tedious click-and-drag process that most people use.
Window Management
On Windows: Alt+Tab switches between open windows. Win+Left/Right snaps the current window to half the screen. Win+D shows the desktop. Win+L locks the computer.
On Mac: Cmd+Tab switches applications. Ctrl+Left/Right switches between desktops. Cmd+Q quits an application (not just closes the window).
Browser Shortcuts
Ctrl+T opens a new tab. Ctrl+W closes the current tab. Ctrl+Shift+T reopens the last closed tab (extremely useful when you accidentally close something). Ctrl+L or F6 jumps to the address bar. Ctrl+Tab cycles through open tabs. Ctrl+1 through 9 jumps to specific tab positions.
Learning Strategy
Do not try to learn all shortcuts at once. Pick three that apply to actions you perform frequently. Use them deliberately for a week until they become automatic. Then add three more. Most people reach a comfortable shortcut vocabulary of 15 to 20 combinations within a month, and that handful covers the vast majority of daily tasks.
Print a cheat sheet of your application's shortcuts and tape it to your monitor for the first few weeks. The visual reminder prompts you to use the shortcut rather than reaching for the mouse. Once muscle memory takes over, the cheat sheet becomes unnecessary.
