Saving your keystrokes

A couple of weeks ago, Jonathan Rozenblit did an interview with Scott Hanselman for D3, a Web show we have at Microsoft Canada. In the first episode, not online yet (Jonathan is working on it), Thomas Lewis and I discussed about the interview, but we didn’t have the time to approach one subject that I found very interesting: saving your keystrokes.

In the interview, Jonathan asked Scott where does he get the time to blog so often with everything else he has to do. He answered that he tried to save his keystroke. One of his examples was about e-mails: if someone asks you something by e-mail, that could be a blog post, why not writing the post and sending the link to that person instead. You’ll get the same result as the person who asked the question will have the answer, but you’ll share the information with more people that could have some interest in the topic.

As a personal example, I’m in the process of redesigning my blog. The company that will do the integration of the design asked me a list of the plugins that are actually active on this blog. Instead of writing them an e-mail, I should have made a blog post here to list the Wordpress plugin I’m using. Rather than reaching only the team leader, I would be able to reach a lot more people. Some of them would have found, maybe, some interesting new plugins for their blog. Would that take me more time to do it? Probably not, or not that much. It’s a simple example, but you got the point.

I found this so brilliant! We have a limited number of keystrokes, so why not use them to reach more people if that make sense? With age, I’m becoming a huge fan of improving the processes and getting more efficient with what I’m doing. This is a simple advice, but at the same time, it’s so powerful. Blogging and e-mail was one example of how we can save our keystrokes, but you can apply this to many situations. As I believe that my blog is my principal online identity, my home on the Internet, you can be sure that I’ll execute this idea with this blog!

Do you think it’s a brilliant idea? What are you doing to save your keystrokes or have them reach more people? Share your thoughts!

P.S.: As Scott talked about saving our keystrokes, I was sure I could find a blog post on his blog about the topic.