Micromanagement in our company. A tool takes a screenshot of our system every 10 minutes and counts our mouse and keyboard clicks.

Imagine you’re reading this in a web browser with a dozen other tabs open. But, ding, you just got the important email you’ve been waiting for. You can now use your mouse or trackpad to put emails in a queue. If you look for it in your many open tabs, you might fall down a rabbit hole. For example, you might end up looking up turmeric-forward dinner recipes again, which triggers a memory that sends you to LinkedIn, where you can’t help but check again to see if your ex got that promotion.

No matter how hard it is, using a mouse is more than just a pain. Also, it requires a lot of clicking, which takes a lot of time and adds up to a lot of wasted time over the course of a year. But there’s another way to get to your email that you’ve probably used before. To open a new tab, you could use the shortcut on the keyboard instead of the mouse. Or, you could click on the one that opens a new window. Use that one instead if you want to look through your open tabs without worrying about accidentally clicking on something else. Keep your hands on the keys and your mind on the task at hand, no matter what happens.

We’re talking about keyboard shortcuts, of course. They are more than just copying and pasting. Read on to find out how typists can be more productive than clickers and how a keyboard-based email solution can help you get through your inbox quickly.

How do keyboard shortcuts work?

‘Shortcuts” on the keyboard are ways to do things on your computer without using the mouse or trackpad (named that because they get you where you need to be quicker). You’ve probably used them to italicise text in a word processor (Cmd+I for Mac, Ctrl+I for Windows). On the other hand, their real potential is limitless; there are short cuts for everything from liking tweets to buying bitcoins.

Why not use a mouse instead?

There is never a bad place or time to click. We’re not here to judge you if you’ve built a happy life without cheating. Since not everyone is a natural typist, moving your cursor may be a better way to get things done. It’s also annoying to accidentally type the wrong command and do the wrong thing, like close a document instead of saving it. Also, to get the most out of keyboard shortcuts, you need to remember them. This makes the learning curve steeper, which may be annoying at first.

How keyboard shortcuts can help

Still, learning keyboard shortcuts can be done quickly with a little bit of planning. Why does that matter?

Time is saved by using keyboards.

You’ll soon reach a point where you can’t move the mouse any faster, but once you’ve learned enough commands, you can type as fast as you want. Even the simplest case shows how much time can be saved.

You might want to copy and paste some text. You move your cursor to the text, click and drag to select it, right-click and choose “cut,” choose where you want the text to go, right-click again and choose “paste,” and the job is done.

You can also use the arrow and shift keys to select text, then use the cut and paste commands to finish (four keystrokes total).