Keyboard to a Man's Heart

I have an unhealthy obsession with keyboard shortcuts. I get frustrated every time I have to move my hand away from the keyboard to touch the mouse. Everywhere I go, I try to teach people to love keyboard shortcuts--somehow they don't.

I used to explain the time benefit of keyboard shortcuts like this:

There is a huge fixed cost associated with using the mouse. Every time you make the move to the mouse you take several steps that waste time.

1. You move your hand to the mouse
2. You locate the cursor by moving the mouse a few times
3. You shake the mouse around because you have an old one with a ball that is dirty
4. You finally move it to where you want to go and then you click
5. Maybe you were supposed to double-click
6. Maybe now you clicked in the wrong place and are renaming a file instead of opening it
7. You have finally achieved your task

To most people that isn't a big deal, so they brush it off. These people don't understand the power of compounding. If it takes roughly 5 seconds to do all that and if you do that 100 times a day, which seems like a conservative estimate, you have wasted about 8 minutes of your workday. Think about that the next time you see your train leaving the station without you.

To me, the above was a great explanation. But then, I'm an engineer, I think in terms of cost-benefit analysis. People were less than on-board.

I have since come up with what I think is a stronger sales case for keyboard shortcuts:

Imagine that instead of using a keyboard to type out an email. You only had a mouse and the image of a keyboard on your screen.

Now people start to get it. They start to realize that they have 10 fingers, not 1.

Doug Engelbart would be proud of me, I think.

I share with you windows users the following information:
When you press the 'Alt' key, some of the letters on the screen get underlined. You can press that letter to do that command/open that menu. Do a few of those and you'll get really fast, cutting 5 seconds to nanoseconds, a nearly 100% improvement!
Here is Microsoft's Windows keyboard shortcuts page.

There are so many faster ways to do things, press some buttons, see what happens! Alt+Tab is just the beginning.