Learn two shortcuts a day

The lowest-effort compounding habit available to you. Forty a month, permanently.

Every mouse movement you make is a small tax on your attention, because moving a hand to a mouse and back interrupts whatever your brain was doing. Individually trivial. Across a fourteen-hour day, considerable.

So learn two new shortcuts a day. Not twenty in one heroic afternoon, which never sticks. Two, deliberately used until they are automatic.

Why two? Well, one would be easy, no? And I have seen many do one, so by doing two you will skyrocket in no time.

How to pick them: notice what you do repeatedly and look up whether there is a keystroke for it. That is almost always the fastest route to the shortcuts that matter for your actual work, rather than the ones on a generic list.

Three that pay back immediately if you do not have them yet:

•  Alt+Tab: Switch quickly through open windows. Keep pressing tab until you have reached the window you need. Add Shift to switch direction. In no time you will have memorised your order and switch quicker than you think

•  Alt+Shift+arrow up or arrow down: Move a bullet or paragraph up or down in text or text boxes. No need to select the full thing. Just click in and move. Saves all the copy pasting.

•  Shift+F5: Start your Powerpoint in presentation mode on the current slide.

And one rule that makes the habit stick: when you catch yourself reaching for the mouse to do something you have done three times already today, stop and look up the shortcut right then. The friction of looking it up in the moment is what fixes it in memory.

Two a day is forty a month. Nobody notices the first week, but everybody notices the first year.