Mind Map Your Shortcut Keys To Work Smarter and Faster
I've been using Google’s Gmail application for a few years now, but up until a few weeks ago I didn’t realise how much time I had been wasting. Since I had started using Gmail, I had been using the mouse to shuffle emails about. Not very productive when you consider that using the shortcut keys can be much faster than fiddling about with a mouse.
In an effort to spend less time in my inbox, I decided I would learn the shortcut keys so that I could process my emails faster.
So what was I going to use to remember all these shortcut keys? Mind mapping of course!
Mind mapping your short cuts keys is a simple process. Starting out with a list of shortcut keys, mind map each of the shortcut keys based on their context.
What’s great about this exercise is that the actions that you are mind mapping tend to be only 1 or 2 words long, so it’s really easy to organise your shortcuts into branches that mostly consist of 1 keyword. Also the actions you are mind mapping can be easily annotated with images that make your mind map stand out more.
Here's my mind map for Gmail's shortcut keys:
Tips
Trying to remember shortcut keys for your favourite applications is a marathon not a sprint. Remember these tips when you're learning your shortcut keys to make it easier:
- Keep the mind map in view while your working. Having it nearby as a reference means you can quickly look up those shortcut keys you’re not familiar with.
- Review the mind map each morning and identify those shortcut keys you haven’t memorized yet. Make a point of learning those for that day. Next day test yourself on the shortcuts you used the previous day and see if you remember them.
- If your application has hundreds of shortcut keys, then try to learn only those shortcut keys that you will use on a day to day basis. I don't use the Tasks feature of Gmail so I left it out of my mind map.
I’m hoping to turn this into a habit in the next few weeks, by which point I won’t need the mind map as I will have committed everything to memory.
Being able to work smarter means learning more about the software you use on a daily basis. Each month I’m going to make a point of mind mapping a single application’s shortcut keys and start using them.
Happy mind mapping!
Comments (2)
I'm still using an A4 pad for my mind mapping. Trying to run it out before I move to bigger pad with more space!
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