This is a quick guide on how to maximize your human-computer interaction for productivity, without needing to wait for highly expensive and dubiously useful technology.
Why?
Most technology enthusiasts who obsess about trends like brain-computer interfaces and augmented humanity are advertising the latest and greatest that computers have to offer. This can include the idea of living in a fantasy VR environment, having human-like conversations with AI, prosthetic robotics, and other theoretically-attainable-but-not-yet domains.
What they don’t see is that computers are currently fast enough to dramatically enhance a person’s activities, especially in the domains of thought and language.
Now that most computer technology has matured, buying faster computers generally does not give the greatest gains on improving your computer experience:
- In any chain, the slowest-acting component gives the greatest returns on improvement. The slowest point in the computer-human chain is the human brain’s capacity for tactile response, so even little improvements are enough to make someone dramatically faster.
- While it’s easy to throw money at faster computers, being slow with the computers has a compounding effect because the secondary tasks tied to what you’re doing (e.g., researching, break-fix) are also slower as well.
- Well-trained habits have a holistic effect, and learning how to operate a computer better will also make you a better vehicle operator and generally better at manipulating objects (including other implementations of computers, such as ATMs and tablets).
Doing Things Quicker
Meditate on the fastest way to do things.
- Watch for anything you do more than 10 times a day.
- The fastest way as a user is often not the most straightforward (e.g., right arrow many times vs. the “End” key and left arrow a few times).
- Ask online if there are any faster solutions to anything.
- Make a habit of asking questions about features you don’t know or keys you haven’t used.
- Intentionally experiment with permutations occasionally, just to see what’s faster.
Try to move all your tasks to PCs and laptops.
- Phones are conveniently portable, but can’t rival a keyboard and mouse setup.
- The touchscreen of any mobile device is a sufficient replacement for a mouse, so buying a keyboard for your mobile device (e.g., Bluetooth) can make you more efficient while traveling.
- However, the entire design of most mobile device operating systems tends to make viewing information from multiple programs at once very cumbersome.
- The primary downside about laptops is that they can’t be easily upgraded or modified, so only get them over PCs if you care for the portability.
Learn touch typing. You’ll learn it by intuition if you use computers all the time, but it helps dramatically to use a typing tutor.
Get gaming-grade input peripherals like your mouse and keyboard. It may be a tiny bit pricier, but the investment pays off the same within an office or hobby capacity as buying good-quality shoes.
If the computer is performing background tasks that don’t need your direct involvement (e.g., compiling software, downloading), use a second computer for other tasks.
- Feel free to unplug and migrate your high-quality peripherals as you go.
- If you’re swapping frequently, get a USB extension to keep the peripheral within quick access.
- If you prefer, get an input switch to alternate inputs between the two computers.
To save time and always have a backup, save every file you won’t use beyond today in cloud storage.
Input Shortcuts
The only way to learn keyboard shortcuts reliably is to commit them to muscle memory, which requires two possible approaches:
- Learn the shortcuts on your own and try to commit them to memory, which is harder but faster.
- Perform shortcuts for tasks you typically would perform the longer way, which is easy but takes more time to adapt.
Learn to stay vigilant for any task you perform on a repeat basis, since it’s almost always worth spending a little time researching to get it done faster.
- If you do a task more than 5 times in a row, it can be automated.
- If you perform any rhythmic set of tasks (e.g., open 3 programs every morning), it can be automated to one command or scheduled task.
- When you have to type a string of commands, it can be automated.
Try to reduce the distance your hands travel.
- The mouse itself is especially bad because it requires precision on top of moving about a foot from the keyboard.
- While swapping to keyboard shortcuts alone may be challenging, practice using cursor keys and the navigation block above it (Home, End, Page Up, Page Down).
- Learn to move away from the mouse with the arrow keys and standard, near-universal keyboard shortcuts.
- Next, aim for using the standard shortcuts prevalent within office suites and your web browser.
- Create additional shortcuts with macro software.
Learn to work with the mouse better:
- Play mouse-based games for at least a month or two (e.g., first-person shooters) to develop muscle memory for fine movements.
- Turn the DPI setting as high as it goes, then work backward from there until it’s just beyond your comfort zone.
- When you have tasks that require the mouse, try to keep the mouse immobilized in a preferred region and click on it as you go.
Focus on using search more often than scrolling through history.
- If you remember a portion of a word, typing that in is faster than skimming through a list.
- You can usually search through your history.
Remap and supplement your standard keys:
- Caps Lock takes up a prime location next to the pinky, so one of the quickest remaps is to swap the left CTRL key with it.
- Get a secondary keypad with mappable keys (e.g., Razer Tartarus).
- Get a mouse with mappable buttons on it.
Software Shortcuts
Pay attention to any quick-reference recent history within any software.
Maximize your copy-paste effectiveness:
- When you can, grab larger sets you can modulate after pasting instead of one-at-a-time smaller sets that are more accurate.
- Learn to copy-paste as text-only within the office software (which is typically all you want), or have a quick shortcut to open a generic text editor to quickly paste-and-copy again.
- When you need specific symbols, you’ll more quickly find them by web searching than consulting a character chart.
- However, if you frequently use a character, learn the keyboard code for it (e.g., on Windows ALT+0167 with 10-key produces ยง, which is constantly part of legal documentation).
- Web search for any repetitive things you’ll frequently use (e.g., standard computer code).
- If you have a Linux computer, any selected text instantly transfers to a separate clipboard cache, and is pasted with the middle-click button.
Move around and group shortcuts and icons:
- If it ever takes more than one keyboard gesture or cursor selection to access something routinely, research how to make a shortcut.
- Take the extra time to set up quick-access shortcuts or bookmarks that quickly go to where you need to go.
- Delete any shortcuts you don’t use, since they may be distracting.
- Remove any distracting items from the visual interface, which may mean changing your wallpaper or theme as well.
- If you must frequently access something within multiple layers of subfolders, try to flatten the subfolder tree to reduce typing or selecting to get where you want.
OS Tweaks
Play with accessibility and system settings:
- To spot the cursor more quickly, set the cursor size larger, with the color preferably set as either a bright color or a transparent inversion (to avoid blocking other information).
- Deactivate scroll bars from automatically hiding.
- Set the screen resolution lower or increase screen magnification if you have a hard time reading everything.
- Set the system font to a spread-out spacing you’re familiar with (which may be serif or sans serif).
- Turn the brightness settings as high as they can go.
Explore customization within your current operating system:
- Mac is, by far, the least customizable. You will need to spend a few hundred dollars in productivity-enhancing software just to get more efficient with it.
- Windows is partially customizable, and there is plenty of free software to do it. However, it has some hard limits, and later iterations of Windows have been moderately hostile to independent developers changing the interface (though PowerToys is a great Microsoft-supported improvement).
- Unix-likes are, by far, the most customizable, to the point that you can literally design your own interface if you feel inclined to. Most of the improvements will be through the bash command line.
As soon as you notice yourself doing anything more than once, consider ways to make a template of the task.
- Even without programming skills, you can still often find creative solutions to speed up your flow.
New OS
At some point, if you’re reaching maximum productivity, consider migrating to a Unix-like.
- Depending on the distro, the learning curve is steeper than Windows or Mac, but its productivity boosts are worth the effort once you get used to it.
- Even if you prefer Windows or Mac, there’s a distro built to accommodate your preferences.
At some point, if you’re involved in a very computer-intensive role (such as software development), you should learn basic scripting.
- Create makefiles to quickly spin up new information.
- Become intimately familiar with searching for text with regular expression and find-and-replace, which will likely use software like grep, sed, and awk.
If you’re creating code, maximize your IDE, which may mean changing it out for another one:
- Vim is highly portable, so setting it up means you can effectively transfer your configuration to any computer and keep it on a flash drive.
- Emacs is more involved and less portable, but it also has more you can do with it.