If you’re lazy like me, you probably hate doing tedious tasks. Most of the tedious tasks I have to do on a day-to-day basis occur on the computer. One of my biggest pet peeves is opening programs that take more than one click to access. Talk about first world problems. However, there is a simple solution: hotkeys. You’d be surprised at how many people have no idea what a hotkey is or how to assign them. Hotkeys allow you to bind keyboard combinations to whatever program you want. For example, as a former MacOS user I loved how easy it was to take a screenshot of a selected portion of your screen. On Windows, it becomes a bigger hassle because you have to open up your Snipping tool app. Like I mentioned before, I hate having to go through multiple steps such as going to the search bar, typing “snipping tool”, and then opening the app to take a simple picture. You know how people say you lose ten minutes of your life when you eat a slice of bacon? In my case, replace slice of bacon with manually opening snipping tool.
Assigning a hotkey to snipping tool
- Go to the search bar and type in snipping tool (If you already know the file location you can skip this step)
- Right click “snipping tool” and click on open file location
- Right click on “snipping tool” and open up properties
- In the shortcut option, go to the shortcut key and assign it to F1.
- Press okay
Now anytime you want to open snipping tool, all you have to do is press F1. I chose F1 because I do not know a single person who uses function keys and it is easy to remember. However you can also assign it any of the other function keys or Ctrl+ Alt+ any letter. You can do this with any program that you frequently use. Don’t care about snipping tool, but always need to open up Outlook? Find the file location of Outlook, right-click properties, and assign F1 to Outlook. You can do that with whatever program you desire. I promise you this simple tip will make your life so much better.