Productivity hacks for daily work — Part 1

In this post, I will tell you how to achieve better efficiency and do more work in the same amount of time, if you use a computer for your daily work. I will (try to) keep it for the general audience.

The key to achieving better productivity is to use more keyboard and less mouse. This comes as an experience of programming for more than 8 years! It takes some time to get used to, but once you are comfortable with the shortcuts, you would cringe if you have to use the mouse!

The task is as simple as learning a few keyboard shortcuts and making conscious efforts to use them instead of taking the longer path. If you find yourself going for the touchpad/mouse for a task, stop and think if you can do it using your keyboard. This will reduce your productivity at first but believe me, it will sky-rocket once you get the hang of it!

First things first, learn to use your keyboard efficiently.

For God’s sake, use at least 3 fingers and the thumb from both hands on the keyboard.

I have seen people use only their index fingers to traverse the whole keyboard. I cannot imagine a less efficient use of the 8 fingers and 2 thumbs that were given to us. I have never tried the professional ASDF JKL; typing, my brain has just learnt the position of the keys and my fingers automatically place themselves for the next word accordingly!

Some simple tips:

• Keep your thumbs near the spacebar.
• Keep your index fingers near the middle of the keyboard.
• Place your pinky finger of the right hand around the Enter key.

Browsers

While using browsers, try using very simple shortcuts to make your life easier:

• Ctrl+Tab: Go to the next tab.
• Ctrl+Shift+Tab: Go to the previous tab.
• If you have less than 10 tabs, use Ctrl+<tab number> to go directly to the tab. Ctrl+9 takes you to the last tab. If you have more tabs than that, do Ctrl+8 followed by Ctrl+Tabs to go to your desired tab. (If Ctrl+<tab> is not working, try doing that with the Alt key)
• Ctrl+T: Open a new tab.
• Ctrl+Shift+T: Reopen last closed tab.
• If you want to open a link in a new tab, instead of Right Click -> Open in a new tab, try Ctrl+Left Click.

These shortcuts must be known to most of the people. However, one shortcut I recently discovered was F6. It selects the address bar.
If you are on any webpage and want to go to another one, simply press F6 and type the address and press Enter. Voila!

Typing

Apart from the finger placement tips above, there are other things which can improve your typing. Few of them are:

• When you want to delete all the text in a box, don’t press Backspace a hundred times! Simply press Ctrl+A followed by delete.
• When you want to delete a few words before or after the cursor, try using Ctrl+Shift+<Left/Right> to select a complete word. Select multiple words easily and press delete. This one works in most cases. See this:

GIF made using byzanz-record tool for Ubuntu

• If you want your cursor a few words behind or ahead the current position, try Ctrl+<Left/Right> to quickly traverse the sentence.
• Similarly, if you want to delete a word or two, try Ctrl+Backspace to quickly delete a whole word.

VLC

Did you know that you can be productive (read lazy) while watching a movie or your favourite TV series as well? I’m talking about VLC Media Player. There are a lot of shortcuts which can make your viewing experience much simpler and lazier!

• F for fullscreen. Duh.
• Spacebar to pause/play. Double Duh.
• Don’t like the subtitles? Press V to toggle them on and off.
• Watching a movie in full screen mode and want to see the progress? Press T.
• The movie doesn’t fit the screen because of resolution issues? Press A repeatedly till it does.
• Watching something nasty (I mean something like GOT) and someone walks in the room? Press S to stop the video and turn the screen black!
• Audio and Video don’t seem to sync with each other? Press J and K to change the audio delay over the video.
• Subtitles out of sync? Press G and H to sync them.
• Want to change the speed of the playback? Press the [ or ] (besides the P key) keys to change the speed.

That’s all for now folks. I will post such hacks for more day-to-day utilities. And I will soon be writing a post for Software Developers to help them write code much faster.

Any suggestions are welcome. Please leave them in the comments! :)