How to increase productivity in a (key)stroke

They say we only use about 15% of our brain’s capacity but maybe that’s true with our keyboards and mouse too. One of the most effective ways to speed up your working life is to assign more functions to both of these devices. The easiest program I’ve found for doing this is AutoHotKey which adds a whole host of possibilities to them.

Creating hotkeys with this program is easy because you can record any mouse or keyboard macro you like by using a macro recorder. This works a bit like a motion recorder – you tell it what function you want it to do and then perform the actions with the keys you want to do it with. It even works with joysticks! Since I write a lot every day, one of the most useful functions I’ve found is the ability to expand abbreviations as I type. So for example, typing “sd” automatically produces “software download”.

I’ve even used it to re-configure my mouse as I’ve had problems with the custom software. My left and right clicks now perform various functions depending how many times I click them and in what order. However, although you can definitely save working time in this way it can become annoying when you accidentally activate something with your keyboard or mouse whilst working.