Return of the Keyboard Shortcut: Page 2

You use keystrokes for text formatting, sorting by priority, date, etc., and other basic functions. Even more powerful are keyboard shortcuts for dates, which are abbreviations for words. For example, “tod” means “today” and “tom” means “tomorrow.” So, the full process for adding a to-do item to call Fred tomorrow is: “A Call Fred tom .” Entering in a number commands Todoist to add that day of the month, so typing “26” in the Date field will magically turn into “April 26, 2008.” There are many more powerful date-related keyboard shortcuts.

I’m just scratching the surface here with Todoist’s keyboard shortcuts and other features. The bottom line is that Todoist is a super-simple to-do list application that is powerful precisely because of its keyboard shortcut centricity.

Quick.as

Quick.as is one of those single-search-box sites that let you launch searches to a very large number of search engines and sites – 246 according to my count (compare this with the 36 searches available via the popular Sputtr site).

The difference is that Quick.as uses keyboard shortcuts. So to search for “Trojan War” in Google, you search “g trojan war” and hit enter. To run the same search in the Wikipedia, you type “w trojan war.” And so on.

The beauty of Quick.as is that once you type in a letter, a quick drop-down shows you all the options that begin with that letter. For example, when you type “w” in the search engine, the drop-down menu offers Wikipedia, Windows Live Search, White Pages, Time & Date, Weather, WebMD, Weight Convert, What is my IP Address and Whois. (The reason “Time & Date” is in the “W” category is that the keystroke is “wt” as in “what time?”) You can finish typing the keystroke, or just click on the option. Your choice.

Better still, Quick.as is customizable. You can add your own sites and associate them with your own keyboard shortcuts if you like.

Todoist and Quick.as are by far the most time-efficient tools I’ve ever found online, and they’re efficient in part because of their intelligent use of keyboard shortcuts.

Give them a try, and please tell me how they work out for you. And shoot me a note with any other keyboard shortcut-enhanced productivity sites you use: mike.elgan@elgan.com