In praise of keyboard shortcuts
Rumor has it that some investment banks take mice away from junior analysts so they will learn keyboard shortcuts. Late one night during my MBA, while I was fumbling my way through a valuation assignment, I watched an analyst build a Tesla DCF from scratch, flying with his keys like a hot-dang Evil Knievel. It was then that I learned the word dilettante.
But even before then I have learned to master the art of keyboard shortcuts on my Mac. This I impress upon my journey to the extent that I require new software for our company to have dedicated shortcuts, especially Command + K, preferably with interactions under 100 milliseconds. The prime example of a tool like this is Linear.
Shortcuts really do save that much time. Anything I do repetitively winds up as a Mac text replacement. The shortcut :30 creates a thirty-minute meeting link, while :60 creates, you might have guessed, a sixty-minute meeting link. I even have a shortcut for “Let me know,” :lmk, since I write that so often.
Pressing Command + Tab switches between tools and gives your left pinky arthritis. Pressing Shift + Option + Command + V pastes as plain text, removing formatting while adding the sensation that you’re Jon Batiste. Related: My favorite word to type is Presbyterian. It simply rolls off the fingers. Unfortunately, I don’t have a need to type it that often. But know that it’ll never become a shortcut.
I’ve tried everything to speed up my daily workflow, including voice-to-text platforms like Willow. My first few days felt as if a dove had descended upon my computer saying, “This is my marketer. Listen to him.” But over time I realized that I had gained speed at the expense of clarity. Our spoken vocabularies are simpler, smaller, and more repetitive than our written vocabularies, which are more comprehensive and precise. The tiny friction of clacking the keys actually creates more efficiency over the long term. Writing is thinking.
One day I envision a world in which we won’t need mice to navigate our screens. One day we’ll be wearing some kind of Apple Vision Pro and speaking our commands into existence, creatio ex nihilo, but with some kind of added clarity we have yet discovered. In the meantime we can Command + K our way toward a better world.
