I managed to catch up on my queue of podcasts this morning and one of the topics on discussion on the Ruby rogues podcast was that of sharpening your saw. I know the term from Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. What it means is the continual act of making yourself better but it can also apply to other things like the tools you use.

It made me realise that of all the applications I have I have yet to learn the basic shortcut keys that make these applications easy to access from anywhere. The first thing I did after listening to the podcast was create a note in Evernote with a list of all the shortcut keys for the applications that I use.

Over the next week I'm going to familiarise myself with a few shortcut keys at a time. This little habit is only saving a few seconds at a time, but over the course of a year, all those little seconds and keystrokes add up. I'm not trying to steal time, I'm just trying to make more efficient use of my time.