Can you make a living playing video games? If you work hard. It also doesn’t hurt if you’re South Korean. Want to hear more about that lifestyle? There’s a great Tech Stuff podcast about it.

What does this have to do with ArchiCAD? Keyboard short cuts. I’ve talked about them before and I’ll talk about their importance again. Watch the following video. The entire thing is pretty mesmerizing, but all you really need to watch is the first 10 to 15 seconds.

Seems sped up, doesn’t it? It’s not. If you want to be the best at Starcraft 2 or some other competitive real time computer game, you better practice your keyboard shortcuts. Now as an ArhiCAD user, you don’t need to get your APM (Actions per minute) up into the stratosphere of 200-300. But… it should be pretty clear that just using the mouse and menus is horribly inefficient. You don’t have to memorize all the shortcuts overnight, but you should learn (and create if necessary) shortcuts for everything you use regularly–whether it’s creating a new element, making changes to an existing one, etc. Why spend 10 seconds when you can do it in 5?

Remember. One hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse.