How to Be Fast with Computers

This is a quick guide on how to be fast with computers.

Why?

Most technology enthusiasts obsess about trends like brain-computer interfaces and augmented humanity. They obsess with the latest and greatest that computers have to offer. Many of these are infeasible for your life in the next few months.

Many tech enthusiasts don’t see that computers are currently fast enough to dramatically enhance a person’s activities. There’s no reason to wait if you’re looking to improve your work with thought and language.

Your human-computer interaction can be more productive right now. You do not need to wait for highly expensive and dubiously useful technology (e.g., machine learning).

Most computer technology has matured with Moore’s Law slowing down. This means buying faster computers generally does not give the greatest gains on improving your computer experience:

1. In any chain, the slowest-acting component gives the greatest returns on improvement.
   • The slowest point in the computer-human chain is the human brain’s capacity for tactile response.
   • Even little improvements are enough to make someone dramatically faster.
2. It’s easy to throw money at faster computers, but being slow with the computers has a compounding effect.
   • This is because the secondary tasks tied to what you’re doing (e.g., researching, break-fix) are also slower as well.
3. Well-trained habits have a holistic effect, and learning to operate a computer better makes you better with all technology.
   • e.g., you’ll be better as a vehicle operator, faster with ATMs, and possibly more efficient at dancing.

Buying things

Try to move all your tasks to PCs and laptops.

• Phones are convenient and portable, but can’t rival a keyboard + mouse setup.
  • The touchscreen of any mobile device is a sufficient replacement for a mouse, so buying a keyboard for your mobile device (e.g., Bluetooth) can make you more efficient while traveling.
• However, most mobile device operating systems are lousy at viewing information from multiple programs at once.
• Laptops’ primary downside is that they’re not easy to upgrade or modify. Only get them instead of PCs if the portability is useful to you.

Get gaming-grade input peripherals (e.g., mouse, keyboard). It’s more expensive, but the investment for an office or hobby pays off as much as buying good-quality shoes.

Learn to be faster

Meditate on the fastest way to do things.

• Watch for anything you do more than 10 times a day.
• The fastest way as a user is often not the most straightforward.
  • e.g., using the right arrow key many times takes longer than the “End” key and left arrow key a few times.
• Ask online if there are any faster solutions to anything.
• Make a habit of asking questions about features you don’t know or keys you haven’t used.
• Intentionally experiment with permutations occasionally, just to see what’s faster.

Use a second computer for other work when a computer is performing background tasks (e.g., downloading, copying, compiling).

• Feel free to unplug and migrate your high-quality peripherals as you go.
• If you’re swapping frequently, get a USB extension to keep the peripheral within quick access.
• If you prefer, get an input switch to alternate inputs between the two computers.

To save time and always have a backup, save every file you won’t use beyond today in cloud storage.

Learn touch typing. You’ll learn by intuition if you use computers constantly, but a typing tutor helps dramatically.

Input shortcuts

The only way to learn keyboard shortcuts reliably is to commit them to muscle memory, which requires two possible approaches:

1. Learn the shortcuts on your own and try to commit them to memory, which is harder but faster.
2. Perform shortcuts for tasks you typically would perform the longer way, which is easy but takes more time to adapt.

Learn vigilance for any task you perform on a repeat basis. The research about doing it faster is almost always worth the web search.

• Doing something more than 5 times in a row is likely worth automating.
• One command or scheduled task can simply any rhythmic set of tasks (e.g., open 3 programs every morning).
• If there’s a string of typed commands, automate it.

Focus on using search more often than scrolling through history.

• If you remember a portion of a word, typing that in is faster than skimming through a list.
• You can usually search through your history.

Remap and supplement your standard keys:

• Caps Lock takes up a prime location next to the pinky, so swap the left CTRL key with it.
• Get a secondary keypad with mappable keys (e.g., Razer Tartarus).
• Get a mouse with mappable buttons on it.

More efficient peripherals

Try to reduce the distance your hands travel.

• The mouse is lousy because you must precisely move your hand about a foot from the keyboard.
  • While swapping to keyboard shortcuts alone may be challenging, practice using cursor keys and the navigation block above it (Home, End, Page Up, Page Down).
• Learn to move away from the mouse with the arrow keys and standard, near-universal keyboard shortcuts.
• Next, aim for using the standard shortcuts prevalent within office suites and your web browser.
• Create additional shortcuts with macro software.

Learn to work with the mouse better:

• Play mouse-based games for at least a month or two (e.g., first-person shooters) to develop muscle memory for fine movements.
• Turn the DPI setting as high as it goes. Then, work backward from there until it’s just beyond your comfort zone.
• When your tasks require the mouse, immobilize the mouse in a preferred area, then click it with your finger.

Software shortcuts

Pay attention to any quick-reference recent history within any software.

Maximize your copy-paste effectiveness:

• When you can, grab larger sets you can modulate after pasting instead of one-at-a-time smaller sets that are more accurate.
• Practice copy-pasting as text-only within office software (which is often all you want).
  • Make a shortcut to a generic text editor to quickly paste-and-copy again.
• For specific symbols, web search them instead of consulting a character chart.
  • However, if you frequently use a character, learn the keyboard code for it (e.g., on Windows ALT+0167 with 10-key produces §, which is constantly part of legal documentation).
• Web search for any repetitive things you’ll frequently use (e.g., standard computer code).
• With a Linux computer, any selected text copies to a separate clipboard cache that pastes with the middle-click button.

Move around and group shortcuts and icons:

• If you use more than one keyboard gesture or cursor selection to routinely access something, make a shortcut.
• Take the extra time to set up quick-access shortcuts or bookmarks that quickly go to where you need to go.
• Delete any shortcuts you don’t use, since they may be distracting.
• Remove any distracting items from the visual interface, which may mean changing your wallpaper or theme as well.
• To frequently access something within multiple layers of subfolders, flatten the subfolder tree to reduce navigation.

OS tweaks

Play with accessibility and system settings:

• To spot the cursor more quickly, set the cursor size larger. Set the color as either a bright color or a transparent inversion (to avoid blocking other information).
• Deactivate scroll bars from automatically hiding.
• Set the screen resolution lower or increase screen magnification if you have a hard time reading everything.
• Set the system font to a spread-out spacing you’re familiar with (which may be serif or sans serif).
• Turn the brightness settings as high as they can go.

Explore customization within your current operating system:

1. Mac is, by far, the least customizable. You will need to spend a few hundred dollars in productivity-enhancing software just to get more efficient with it.
2. Windows is partially customizable, and there is plenty of free software to do it. It has hard limits, and later iterations of Windows are moderately hostile to interface changes. Microsoft directly supports PowerToys, though, which is amazing.
3. Unix-likes are, by far, the most customizable. If you want, you can literally design your own interface if you feel inclined to. Most of the improvements will be through learning the bash command line.

As soon as you notice yourself doing anything more than once, consider ways to make a template of the task.

• Even without programming skills, you can still often find creative solutions to speed up your flow.

New OS tweaks

At some point, if you’re reaching maximum productivity, consider migrating to a Unix-like.

• The learning curve, depending on the distro, is steeper than Windows or Mac. You’ll be grateful you did it after you’ve learned it, though.
• Even if you prefer Windows or Mac, there’s a distro built to accommodate your preferences.

At some point, in a very computer-intensive role (such as software development), learn basic scripting.

• To quickly copy new information quickly, create makefiles.
• Become intimately familiar with searching for text with regular expression and find-and-replace. You can enhance it with software like grep, sed, and awk.
• Before you realize it, your maximized speed will make you a software developer. Consider a career in it to make your budget more efficient.

If you’re creating code, maximize your IDE, which may mean changing it out for another one:

• Vim is highly portable. Setting it up means you can effectively transfer your configuration to any computer and keep it on a flash drive.
• Emacs is more involved and less portable, but it also has more you can do with it.