I’m a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts. If you’ve never taken the time to explore the keyboard shortcuts in your most used apps, I can’t recommend doing so enough. The amount of time you’ll save yourself is more than you’d think.

{Tip: If you’re looking for an easy way to discover keyboard shortcuts in a Mac application, check out CheatSheet. Once it’s installed, just hold ⌘ for a second or two and you’ll get a list of all the keyboard shortcuts in the app you’re using.}

As amazing as keyboard shortcuts are though, many of the things I do on my computer regularly don’t have shortcuts. The Request Tracker (RT) ticketing system I use at work, for example, has some shortcuts, but they don’t actually work once you get inside a ticket where I actually do most of my work.

 

 

Thankfully, there’s the ever useful Keyboard Maestro. With Keyboard Maestro, you can easily set up a keyboard shortcut (or hotkey) to trigger just about any action on a website.I reply to, comment on, and transfer tickets hundreds of times a day, so having keyboard shortcuts for these tasks is incredibly helpful. Below is an example of my shortcut to reply to a ticket. I could have easily just had the shortcut open up the reply screen, but why stop there? Adding an action to select a Safari field also puts the cursor in the correct place for me, so all I need to do is start typing my reply. It may seem trivial to set this up just to save a few clicks, but when you perform the same action over and over, those clicks add up.

Below is an example of my shortcut to reply to a ticket. I could have easily just had the shortcut open up the reply screen, but why stop there? Adding an action to select a Safari field can also put the cursor in the correct place for me so can immediately start typing the reply.

 

 

It may seem trivial to set this up just to save a few clicks, but when you perform the same action over and over, those clicks add up. Plus, once you have one set up, setting up macros for other actions is pretty much the same.

I also set up a few keyboard shortcuts to take me to frequently visited locations in the ticketing system like my own support queue or the ticket creation screen. For example, “^N” opens the page to create a new ticket. These are even simpler to set up because they only require the Click Link action.

 

 

As an added bonus, I created a simple workflow for Alfred, my app launcher of choice so that I can get to these common destinations even when I’m not using Safari. Typing “rt new” into Alfred also brings me to the page to create a new ticket.

 

 

Right now, I’m still breaking my muscle memory of using the mouse, but already I can tell these improvements will save me a considerable amount of time each day. If nothing else, they’ll save my wrists from the impending carpal tunnel.

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