This is the first entry of a new series I am doing about How to save time on your PC. These are a few of the ways that I try to shave off minutes or even hours of wasted time on my computer each month.
Everyone loves to say, “Time is money,” but time is NOT money. Everyone has the same amount of time, but (if you haven’t noticed) not the same amount of money.
It is what you do with your time that determines the amount of money that you have. With any given hour we have the choice of watching TV, exercising, learning about something new, developing a skill, or anything else we can think of. I enjoy finding ways to minimize wasted time, so I can have more time for the things I love.
1. Quick Keyboard Shortcuts to save time
- You can use the Windows key +D to minimize all the open windows and quickly return to the Windows desktop. Pressing Windows +D again will restore all windows to their previous location.
- For many PC products (I use this for Excel, Word, Outlook, Internet explorer and Firefox) if you press the CTRL button and scroll your scroll wheel on your mouse, it will increase and decrease the size of what you are viewing.
- This is an oldie and a lot of people already know about it, but if you don’t you should. Anytime you have multiple windows open you can hold down ALT and press the TAB button and it will pull up a little window which will display the various windows that you have open. From here you can TAB between the various windows.
- You can quickly save a file by pressing CTRL+S.
- By pressing CTRL+C you can copy the highlighted area and place it in the clipboard, CTRL+V will then paste whatever is in the clipboard at the current location of the
- You can use CTRL+A to highlights all of the text and/or objects in a document. This is handy when you want to move or copy everything in the current document.
- Anytime you are in a document you can use CTRL+P to print it.
- CTRL+F is one of my favorites. Anytime you have a document open or are looking at a web page you can use this and it will pop up a find window, which will allow you to search the page or document for a word or phrase
2. Google Web Accelerator
There are a few factors that determine the speed with which a web page loads on your screen. The ones that I am aware of are your Internet connection speed, your processor speed on your computer, and the web page itself. I am not exactly sure what Google Web Accelerator does to speed up the process, but it does cause some web pages to load faster. 
They even have this nifty little icon that displays how many minutes or hours of your life Google has saved you buy using it. Who knows if it is accurate, but it is kind of fun to watch. 
These are a few of the quick PC Productivity Tips that I frequently use. Click below for the rest of the series.
How to save time on your PC – Part Two
How to save time on your PC – Part Three
How to save time on your PC – Part Four
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I was surprised to find Windows+D since I’ve always used Windows+M. Turns out they both work.
In Firefox (instead of IE) you can press the forward slash key ‘/‘ to do an inline text search.
In your browser to jump focus to the address bar you can press alt+d
It turns out that it takes a tiny fraction of a second for you to press a key combination and it takes 1.2 seconds for (this is from the top of my head, I used to know the exact amount of time from the study). You can save a LOT of time using keyboard shortcuts. Plus it makes you look like a pro when others are watching.
I never knew about the Windows D. Thanks for sharing. It beats having to minimize the 10-15 applications, word docs, and spreadsheets that I have open to get to the desktop.
@Randy – good tips and you are right, it is all about looking like a pro!!
According to Google’s website, this is how it speeds up your browsing:
* Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
* Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
* Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
* Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
* Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
* Compressing data before sending it to your computer.
Another shortcut I like to use at work is Windows+L. Immediately locks the computer when you’re about to leave. Save’s you the Ctrl+Alt+Delete and then clicking “Lock Computer”.