Save yourself hundreds of keystrokes per day
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If you type the same phrases multiples times then utilizing a text expansion program like AutoHotkey (Windows free) can save you hundreds of keystrokes per day. The cumulative total of those keystrokes throughout the week mean you can respond to emails quickly or type long strings of characters (think file paths) and get back to the real work you have in front of you.
After installing AutoHotkey you setup your own “hotkeys” in a text file that ends in *.ahk and the program watches for you to type any of the shortcut combinations and will expand them into whatever you want – it works like auto-correct on your phone – only AutoHotkey is more useful because it replaces the hotkeys you type with exactly what you define. The simplest hotkey replacements use double-colon symbols to replace the word between the colons with the word or phrase that comes after.
::cafe::café
You can also download *.ahk hotkey files that other people have defined, and one of the more generally useful downloads I have found is based on a list of 900 common misspellings identified on Wikipedia and MS Word – http://www.autohotkey.com/download/wikipedia_autocorrect.ahk
Once you download or make your own .ahk file you can copy it to your startup folder in Windows and then every time you login to your computer or reboot the hotkey file will automatically be running. You can also add your own text expansion or replacement hotkeys to the script, and here are some examples of hotkeys for phrases that save me time every day while I am composing emails –
::pls::Please see attached. ::ty::Thank you, ::br,::Best Regards,
For example if I type the 3 characters ‘pls’ and press SPACE in an email (or any other program) AutoHotkey will automatically replace the text with ‘Please see attached. ‘ With sending reports and attachments throughout every day I can easily save myself those 20 characters by just typing 3 letters, so if I send 10 attachments a day that’s 170 keystrokes I didn’t have to press each day.