If you’re a freelance blogger who works on
a per-piece contract, you agree with the adage that “time is money.”
Each minute that you waste is profit down the tubes. On the other hand, streamlining your workflow (even in the smallest of ways) can help you realize greater productivity.
As someone who does a lot of blogging myself, I’m always interested in learning new tricks for optimizing my processes.
In this post, I’ll share a simple keyboard trick I learned a few years ago. I would guess that this has saved me hours of useless pointing and clicking.
Titles: Jump from Beginning to End (in One Keystroke)
Most content management systems ask you to input a title, which usually serves as the H1 tag of your completed article. Sometimes, writing a compelling title is trickier than drafting an 800-word post.
It’s not uncommon to change an article’s title a dozen times. All of these edits could require many different clicks or keystrokes. That is, unless you know this trick.
The next time you’re working on a title and need to jump to the beginning, simply click the up arrow on your keyboard.
Voila, you just saved yourself the hassle of grabbing the mouse, pointing, and clicking.
If you need to go back to the end, click the down arrow. Presto – you’re back where you started!
Content Body: A Few Keystrokes to Faster Edits
You can also use your keyboard’s directional control pad to save time in the post’s body. Granted, you may have to make a few extra keystrokes.
Here’s how it works.
Let’s imagine you’re writing an article about cats. You start by making the following bold assertions:
You realize that your introductory sentence isn’t very “cat-chy” (sorry, I couldn’t pass on the pun). Despite your cat-like impulse to grab the mouse (again, my apologies), you instead click the up arrow. This places your cursor in the middle of the previous sentence.
Pressing the up arrow one additional time will force your cursor to the beginning of the sentence.
Now, you can update your article to be more convincing. (Good luck, I’m allergic to cats!)
Stop Grabbing the Mouse!
I hope this tip shaves seconds off of each post you write. Over the course of hundreds of articles, each second definitely adds up!
