If you find that you multi-task quite frequently, you’ve probably also noticed that switching from the mouse to the keyboard and back to the mouse can be fairly time consuming. My computer skills go back to the ‘MS-DOS’ days, so I’m quite fond of the keyboard … the mouse? Not as much. (Hence the blog on ‘Launchy’.
One little thing that I do to save time is I’ll make good use of the ‘start’ key. Usually while navigating my mouse across the screen, I’ll hit the start key and I’ll move the mouse in anticipation of this.
Going back, if you multi-task a lot, I need to mention the importance of ALT-TAB. Simply hold the ‘alt’ key down and hit the ‘tab’ key a few times. You’ll be able to cycle through whichever applications that you have open.
Similarly, if you hold ‘CTRL’ down and hit ‘tab’, you can cycle through windows of applications that you have open (like multiple tabs in Firefox for instance).
OSX for Macs have a neat little shortcut. If you hit F11 (I think?), it pushes your windows off the screen and exposes the desktop. If you’re looking for something similar on the Windows machine, hold the ‘start key’ and tap ‘d’. That will minimize everything and show your desktop.
Lastly, for those of you looking to get out of the office as soon as possible. When it comes to shutting down, Alt-F4 to close out your applications … once that is done, simply hit the ‘start key’, ‘u’, and then ‘u’ for a quick shutdown. If you have the dropdown box, ‘start key’ followed by ‘u’ and then ‘enter’ will do it.
-D