Time needed for setup: 4 minutes | Effort: ⭐★★★★

This one’s so simple, it’s almost silly. I’ve set up a lot of different custom keyboard shortcuts with templates I can populate:

  • Filling in a template takes up less brainpower than recreating a process every time.

  • Hitting a quick keyboard shortcut like “&priorities“ also takes less time than finding a document somewhere every time.

  • Baking in prompts into these templates helps me ask important questions that make me better at whatever role I need to play in a given situation.

How to set up a custom keyboard shortcut on a Mac

(for Windows users, here are the steps)

1. Type out your template

2. Copy your template into your system preferences

  • They’re under System Preferences > Keyboard > Text

  • You click the +, add your keyboard shortcut, for example, “&priorities” , and copy in your template.

3. Type in your shortcut and hit the space bar

4. Fill in your template - voila! Time and brainpower saved.

Examples of how I use custom keyboard shortcuts in my work life

For example, my keyboard shortcut “&monday” helps me get my head in the game before I start planning my week and as I start prepping for my first check-in with the team for the week:

`How last week went:`
:thought_balloon:
`Principles to win this week:`
:round_pushpin:
`Critical Outcomes for the week:`
:dart:
`How that helps with the OKRs:`
:fuelpump: 
`WIHTY:`
:speech_balloon:

As a team lead running a content and a product marketing team, I’m constantly oscillating between strategy work, planning and very concrete execution or giving my team the right information in the right manner at the right time.

Outside of saving time and mindshare thanks to the keyboard shortcut, this template helps me to:

  • Ask myself where I can have the most impact this week: I try to never have more than 3 “musts” in a week because I find that’s really the maximum of big rocks I can get done as an individual contributor while also being there to support each team member.

  • Remember to remind my team of important milestones: I represent my teams at a lot of meetings so they don’t have to be there. The downside of this: Just because something is top of mind for me doesn’t mean that my team members, who are all juggling their own backlogs and pipelines, also have it on their radars. Anyone running teams know that jumping events or deliverables on your teams last minute does not go down super well, so a prompt to check what I need to update them on is part of all my cadence templates.

  • Share things I’ve learned frequently: It’s also super easy to go into “transactional” mode and only talk about dependencies and deliverables when things get busy. This way, a lot of useful practical and more meta realisations or lessons can get lost. I also find that the more I do this, the more my team members share things they have learned - this doesn’t just help the rest of the team but also gives me a better insight into their realities, especially now that we’re remote.

After I’ve organised my thoughts with the help of the template above, I populate the following Slack template to share my week plan & standup with my team on Slack:

=====================
My priorities for this week 
=====================
:one: 
:two: 
:three: 
:exclamation: [to remind the team of anything important comping up in the week]
------------------------
Monday Standup => remember to leave people better than you found them! [this just serves as my personal reminder of what my job is actually about - I generally delete it before posting]
------------------------
[RAG status | What I'm grateful for | what I want to double down on | what I want to drop]
NB for today:
:speech_balloon: 
:pencil2: 
Things to raise:
:woman-raising-hand: 
Things I’ve learned:
:bulb:

Here’s another example of a template my team tends to use after stakeholder interactions:

Hey [stakeholder name],

Thanks for the chat about [XXXX].

To recap:

Collateral and users:

We are going to create/update…

This will be used by [users] when [doing x]

The goal of the collateral:

Stakeholders of this project are:

To give feedback: [names]

To keep in the loop: [names]

To sign off: [names]

The timeline:

First iteration by:

Final version by:

The channels we’ll use for comms:

#channelname

Other NB important info:

Leave days, other context etc

Next steps:

[Person to do X]

[Person to Y]

[Stakeholder tags] Please take a look at this and let me know if it captures what we spoke about!

Pretty self-explanatory, really. But: Working on cross-functional campaigns with other teams has taught us how easy it is to misunderstand the intent, scope, goal or timeline of a project. That’s why we’ve created this cheat-sheet of information to gather in a kick-off meeting to ensure we and our stakeholders have a chance to address any misunderstandings right at the start.

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