The Shortcut Contest: Share Time-Saving Tricks as a Team
A shortcut contest is a quick team game where everyone shares their best keyboard shortcuts and time-saving tricks for the tools you all use. It works because the best productivity gains are usually already living in one colleague's habits — the contest just spreads them to everyone in a few minutes of friendly show-and-tell.
Most of us use powerful software at maybe a tenth of its speed. We do the same action a hundred times a day the slow way — reaching for the mouse, clicking through three menus — when a two-key shortcut would do it instantly. It's not that we're incapable; it's that nobody ever showed us, and we're too busy doing the task to stop and learn the faster way. Meanwhile, the colleague two desks over has known the shortcut for years.
The best keyboard shortcuts for productivity rarely come from a manual you'll never read. They come from watching someone else work and going "wait, how did you just do that?" A shortcut contest manufactures that moment on purpose, for the whole team at once.
What keyboard shortcuts save the most time?
The highest-value shortcuts are the ones for actions you repeat constantly, not the obscure ones you'll use twice a year. That's why crowdsourcing beats a generic list: your team already knows which actions they do all day. Across most tools, the big wins cluster around the same jobs — switching between apps and tabs, searching instead of clicking through menus, copying and pasting without formatting, jumping between recent files, and creating something new (a doc, an event, a message) without touching the mouse.
But the real value isn't a universal list — it's surfacing the specific tricks hiding in your team's specific tools. One person's muscle-memory shortcut in your project tool or spreadsheet might save everyone else thirty seconds, fifty times a day. That's the math that makes a five-minute contest worth it.
How to run a shortcut contest, step by step (about 15 minutes)
You need a team meeting and a shared screen.
- Set the prompt: "Show us the one shortcut or trick you'd hate to lose." Framing it as a favourite, not a tutorial, gets people sharing their genuinely-used tricks.
- Go around and have each person demo live. Watching it happen on screen sticks far better than reading a key combo. Let them show, not just tell.
- Capture each trick in a shared note as it's demoed — tool, what it does, the keys. You're building a team cheat-sheet in real time.
- Vote for the most useful. A quick "which one will you actually start using?" crowns a winner and signals which tricks are worth adopting.
- Pin the cheat-sheet and challenge everyone to use three this week. A trick you saw but never used is forgotten by Friday; deliberate practice for a few days makes it permanent.
A worked example
A team runs a 15-minute contest. One person demos a shortcut to paste text without its formatting — something half the room had been fixing by hand, every single day, for years. Another shows how to jump straight to any file by searching instead of clicking through folders. A third reveals their tool's "quick switch" to hop between projects without the mouse. None of these are secret; they were just never shared. The cheat-sheet has twelve tricks by the end, and the paste-without-formatting one alone quietly saves the whole team time forever.
When this is most useful
A shortcut contest is great as a light, recurring team ritual — a fun 15 minutes that produces real efficiency, ideal for the end of a meeting or a team day. It's especially valuable when a team has adopted a new tool, or when you've got a mix of long-timers and newcomers whose tricks haven't cross-pollinated. It's less impactful for teams that don't share core tools, since the shortcuts won't transfer — though even then, general OS and browser tricks usually do.
The takeaway
The fastest productivity boost on your team is probably already in someone's fingertips — it just hasn't spread. Run a quick contest where everyone demos their favourite shortcut, capture them on a shared cheat-sheet, and challenge people to adopt a few. It's fifteen minutes that turns one person's invisible habit into the whole team's everyday speed.
This is one of Funstorming's 100 quests — bite-sized soft skills methods you actually put into practice, not just read about. Try it, then bring your result (or your sticking point) to the Funstorming community of practice (CoP), FunHub | Your Soft Skills Playground.
#funstorming #softskills