A general principle of using a computer efficiently is to limit your time switching away from the keyboard. Here are some tips to accomplish this as you try to manage the scores of tabs you might have.

1. Use ctrl+tab and ctrl+shift+tab to move right and left a single tab in a window. If you don’t know these, do yourself and help out the rest of the generation waiting for you to drag your pointer across the screen.
2. Use alt+tab to switch between Chrome windows. Same sentiment as the previous one.
3. For all our tab-pinners, I found a Chrome extension that creates a shortcut for this action. I’ve set mine to ctrl+shift+x, but you can customize the keybinding.
4. I have installed another extension, Toby, to help me manage different workspaces. (Shoutout Mr. Schmit for introducing this one to me.) Think of it as Chrome Groups plus Bookmarks on steroids. This app allows me to save a set of tabs to a “collection” that I can then open later, saving me computer resources. This has been a lifesaver when doing research for colleges.

Getting into the “flow” state is both a mental and physical thing. Creating systems that reduce friction allows us to find the rhythm sooner and keeps us in step for longer.

There is a certain dissonance I feel when I’m pasting text into a document and the typeface and size of the text don’t match, at a level beyond just being considered “ugly”. Here are some two time-saving solutions to help with this found in Google solutions but also elsewhere:

When pasting information, you can paste the text to match the formatting of the existing text by using ctrl+shift+v instead.

With existing text, you can highlight and use ctrl+\ to clear the formatting.

By creating a sense of consistency within your work, you allow space for the novelties, stylistically or ideologically, to stand out.

For Windows users:

Revising essays or typing in arbitrary values into the search bar, we all can relate to those moments where we demand more than just the most recent value on our clipboard after Ctrl+C. And for this, Windows has something right for once by designing clipboard history, in which you can easily access past copies and pastes by typing Win + V.

Too many lab reports and lengthy docs in my high school career have suffered from a lack of visual hierarchy. Which titles should be bolded, underlined, italicized? What about subtitles? What about sub-subtitles? This lack of structure within the document made navigating and understanding it only that much more difficult.

In Google Docs, I’ve adopted the built-in hierarchy system of “paragraph styles” and their “Heading” formatting. To readily access these features, you can highlight your heading text and type,

ctrl+alt+num

where num is a digit 0-9. I tend to stick with 0 (for normal text), 1 (for Heading 1), and occasionally 2 (for Heading 2).

The added bonus of using Headings is that sections are automatically added in the “Document Outline”.

As often, the structuring of ideas is not just for ourselves, but for the benefit of others.

This sounds fancier than what it actually is, but can help reduce some daily friction using the internet. This hack allows you to make queries to websites straight from the search bar. For example, rather than going to https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/my-drive and then typing into the search “blog”, you can do this in one motion with custom search engines.

1. Go to chrome://settings.
2. Go to “Manage search engines”.
3. Scroll down and “Add” “Other search engines”. You should see three empty fields.
4. Give your Search engine whatever name you like.
5. Set your keyword to something quick and easy, but also something you wouldn’t type in a normal Google search. The keyword is what you will be typing before your future search bar queries.
   • For Google Drive, I have it as “dv”.
6. For the third field, paste the URL you would be at for the search. An easy way to find this is to do a query via the website and copy the URL after the results appear, and then replace the text in the URL that match your query with “%s”.
   • For example, when I make a search for documents that have the word “blog” on my Google Drive, the resulting URL is “https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/search?q=blog”. Noticing how “blog” appears after “q=”, it would then be a reasonable prediction that other queries would follow the same pattern, so I type in the third field, “https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/search?q=%s”.

Chrome does this automatically for some websites, but you can do this for other websites you frequent, as well as change the keyword for existing sites.

Note: this requires being able to navigate to chrome://settings.

 

There is a unique suffering reserved just for when you have to navigate to the top-most Google Slide or left-most Google Sheet, waiting for things to load.

Luckily, you can be automatically redirected to the “top-most” document by navigating to the url without the text from “#” and after. For example, my bookmark to Trow’s slides looks like this:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10sl0VBN38z3LapJurrtIcvy8Z-lIxpKqxN5Frh3AtIM/edit

Rather than:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10sl0VBN38z3LapJurrtIcvy8Z-lIxpKqxN5Frh3AtIM/edit#slide=id.gf029418572_0_33

For all the programming nerds, this seems similar to the function of anchor tags but with a bit more JavaScript involved here.

I stumbled across these url shortcuts a while ago to create some of the different Google Drive file types:

1. doc.new
2. slides.new
3. form.new or forms.new

By typing any of these strings into the search bar and hitting enter, a Doc, Slides, or Form is automatically created and opened in your browser tab, without having to navigate to the buttons on the Google Drive homepage. Given the particularly relatively load times for Google Drive, this might just save you a month or two off of your life. But today, we start with that one percent.