They say productivity is the key to success, particular in your work. If you can do your work as effectively as others, but more quickly, over time you’ll be noticed. There are ways to make yourself more productive. You’ll be surprised how repetitive some of our actions can be – we tend to perform the same key actions, press the same buttons and only use a fragment of the options available in the software we use.

On one hand it’s like working in a factory environment, using the same options within our software every day. On the other hand, you could easily turn these actions in to a macro that you could execute and run automatically. For instance, if you use an external application to re-size and enhance your images, you could set up a macro that performed this action without you having to leave your current software. You could highlight an image and run the macro and leave the other tool to sort out your image(s).

AutoHotKey enables you to create your own key-based macros or setup a hotkey to run a particular application. You could assign your software tools to keyboard shortcuts or even setup words to expand from abbreviations that you enter when you write documentation. You could get ‘by the way’ to appear automatically when you enter ‘BTW’ in your letters.