Things I Can’t Live Without As A Sourcer: Part 2 - Shortcuts

In part one of this series, I shared a few of my personal favorite sourcing extensions. In this article, I will share more things I can’t live without as a Sourcer: shortcuts.

Personally, I want to be as productive and efficient as possible. Call me lazy, but why move your mouse to the corner of your screen and click on three things to get what you want, when you can perform the same action more quickly by pressing one key?

I don’t know who invented the shortcuts as we know them today, but I owe them a thank you! They made my life much easier.

Studies show that using shortcuts can be more efficient, which make us more productive. In the following part, I want to show you some of the shortcuts that I use on a daily base and in the end, save me time.

Imagine this:

It’s a great day for sourcing, everything is going well and you are finding many good profiles for the role you are working on. After an hour or two, you find yourself staring at your screen. You have 20 tabs open, 15 chrome extensions running and you are looking at 8 online profiles. Next to that, you are filling out that online survey you forgot about earlier and writing a note somewhere online where it isn’t saved.

Unexpectedly you start hearing a loud noise. The fans in your computer are working like crazy to keep up with your high CPU usage and your computer is getting slower and slower. You decide to close multiple tabs to reduce the CPU and by the time your computer starts to sound less like it’s exploding, it hits you…

You closed the wrong tab and now you lost the text you worked on without saving it somewhere 😱.

Me, finding out about the shortcut to re-open closed tabs.

Yup, this has happened to me… several times. Then one day, I found out that I can re-open closed tabs by clicking a few keys on my keyboard.

Since I found out about some of these shortcuts, I couldn’t live without them anymore.

Re-open closed tabs ♻️

By using the following shortcut you can re-open your last closed tab(s):

Windows: Ctrl + Shift + T
Mac: ⌘ + Shift + T

I love this shortcut. Not only does it return the tab you closed (without having to dig into your browser history). It also restores the text you might have typed in and lost when closing.

Incognito Browsing 😎

There are many reasons why browsing incognito can be useful. One example could be that you want to check what a website looks like without your cookie history and preferences getting in the way. Another example could be that you want to avoid a paywall (like the 3 articles reading limit at the Harvard Business Review or New York Times).

Windows: Ctrl + Shift + N
Mac: ⌘ + Shift + N

Emoji Keyboard 🎉

If you’ve been reading some of my posts, you might have noticed that I am quite the emoji addict. I use them a LOT. Before I found out about this shortcut I used to browse to the Emojipedia to find (and copy) the emoji I was looking for. Using this shortcut saved me a lot of time!

Windows: Win + ; (semi-colon)
Mac: Ctrl + ⌘ + space

Handy, right?

Other shortcuts I use while browsing:

Open a new tab

Windows: Ctrl + T
Mac: ⌘ + T

Close current tab:

Windows: Ctrl + W
Mac: ⌘ + W

New window:

Windows: Ctrl + N
Mac: ⌘ + N

Jump to the next open tab:

Windows: Ctrl + PgDn
Mac: ⌘ + Option + Right arrow

Jump to the previous open tab:

Windows: Ctrl + PgUp (Previous open tab)
Mac: ⌘ + Option + Left arrow

Move your cursor to the search bar:

Windows: Ctrl + L
Mac: ⌘ + L

Delete entire word

Windows: Ctrl + Delete
Mac: Option + Delete

Navigate words

Windows: Ctrl + Right or Left arrow
Mac: Option + Right or Left arrow

Select word

Windows: Ctrl + Shift + Right or Left arrow
Mac: Option + Shift + Right or Left arrow

That’s it?

Nope, not quite. There are many more shortcuts you can use to boost your productivity, these are the ones I use on a regular base. But there are two more things that I want to share with you in this article which helps me be as productive as I can be.

In my screenshots, you might have noticed the icons under the search bar on my screen.

These icons are bookmarks to the websites I use most. You can add a bookmark by using the following shortcut.

Save current page as a Bookmark:

Windows: Ctrl + D
Mac: ⌘ + D

But when you save a bookmark it will also save the name, and that ends up looking like this:

It takes too much space this way

Since most websites will have an icon that you’ll recognize I remove the name when saving the bookmark.

It’s that easy!

Last, but not least

The final thing I want to share is also a bookmark, which I use quite often.

With this simple line of code, you turn your browser into a text editor. The reason that I like it is that it doesn’t have any formatting. So it’s great to use for writing Boolean Strings or writing a text while looking at candidates’ profiles (so you can paste it into email later 😉).

data:text/html,<html><textarea rows="40" style="width: 100%;height: 100wh;"></textarea></html>

One of my former colleagues created this line of code for me after I kept complaining about text editors and their formatting. I wanted a plain text editor I can use quickly.

I saved the line of code as a bookmark, so whenever I want to write a couple of lines while browsing I open it. Closed the tab with important text by accident? No problem! When you re-open the tab with the shortcut the text will be restored too.

I hope that these small tricks will make your life easier too! There are shortcuts for everything these days and you can save a lot of time by being more efficient. Do you have some other shortcuts that you use while browsing? Make sure to leave them in the comments!