Trackpads waste precious time.

Learning these keyboard shortcuts will boost your productivity in the long run.

Even as we increasingly turn to our phones and tablets to shoot off emails or make quick edits to documents, we still do most of our substantive work on laptops and desktop computers.

That means a lot of time spent hunting down tiny buttons, navigating app menus and clicking through form fields with a trackpad or mouse. But constantly reaching for a mouse or taking your eyes off the task at hand interrupts your workflow, while mis-clicks mean redoing work unnecessarily.

Keyboard shortcuts offer a way to speed up actions you do frequently throughout the day, such as switching apps, opening browser windows and highlighting text. While it can take a few repetitions to commit those shortcuts to muscle memory, investing a bit of time upfront will significantly boost your productivity over time.

Shortcuts also get easier to learn the more you know. That’s because most begin with some combination of the CTRL/CMD, ALT, SHIFT or FN keys, so you can learn new shortcuts simply by learning which key to press next. Once you understand the syntax, new combinations become intuitive.

To get started, here are a few shortcuts for actions you probably do multiple times on any given day.

Rather than use your trackpad to search for those tiny “+” or “X” icons, open and close new tabs with the following key combinations:

Even if you don’t consider yourself a “multitasker,” you probably still flip between different apps throughout the day. Instead of constantly looking for an app’s icon in your menu bar, switch quickly between apps, windows and open tabs:

Moving your cursor letter by letter or clicking and dragging to highlight text can be cumbersome. But the keyboard lets you move more quickly around a document or tweak a text selection on a website. Combine an arrow key [←, → , ↑ or ↓] with the following keys to move in larger increments than just a single character:

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