Sending an email without ever opening a mail client or browser

Something strange is happening to me. I seem to be using my mouse less and trying very hard never to take my hands off the keyboard. I know many older and more experienced computer users that are like this; they are old an crotchety. Am I becoming one of them?

Why am I so fascinated with the fact that I can do nearly everything on my computer without ever touching the mouse? In Visual Studio, I build, get latest, checkout, etc all with keystrokes. In outlook, I send email, reply to email, scan email and never take my hands away from the keyboard.

When I got my Mac Book Pro, I noticed they keyboard is much better than anything I've ever had in the past. I feel like I type faster now, but that still doesn't explain why I'm obsessing about not using my mouse. In fact, I went and bought the "Mighty Mouse" because I'm a mouse guy. I come from the drag-and-drop programming era. Things are changing... Maybe it is because I have more responsibilities at work and an urgency to be more efficient? Maybe it's because I'm a father of two and seem to have less and less keyboard time. Maybe it's because I implemented the GTD system in my life and this is just a natural progression of a person who is efficient.

Here is where this all started:

I was introduced to a mac application called Quick Silver. "It's the holy grail of application launchers", so I was told. I didn't really know what an app launcher was before this. I simply pinned the apps I needed in the start menu and they were always a click away.

The app launcher is mega smart. It has some indexing gigatron that knows exactly what I'm looking for with just one or two key strokes. What does this mean for me? Well, lets say that I want to open Tweet Deck. I typically grab the mouse, click the start button, and go down the menu to about the 3rd positions and click. With Quick Silver, I hit control > space > t and BAM! I'm in. It's way more efficient because I've slapped those keys in about the same time it would take me just to move my hand over to my mouse.

This equates to more efficiencies in my day to day work which means better faster programming, faster responsiveness to things like emails and issues, happier clients and customers and hopefully a happy boss + a happier salary.

So, here is where this comes in really handy. As I've written before, I'm trying to become a GTD master. I have an obsession with it and I'm good at it. I use RTM and Evernote exclusively now and I've found that using a app launcher allows me to quickly get through my GTD process without leaving the keyboard. I have Evernote and RTM as contacts so quickly sending myself an email, which is converted into a task or a note, depending on the system I target, is a sinch with this app launcher.

A real life example using Quick Silver:
I want to send an email to my Flickr blog. I simply type ctrl > space bar > this is a test > E > F > Return and it fires off an email without ever opening the mail client, or without me ever having to open the web browser. Think about it... How long does it take you to type "ctrl(1) space(2) this is a test(3) e(4) f(5) enter(6)"? So five key strokes, plus the subject of your email, is all it takes! "Hello", is five key strokes. "Phone" is five key strokes. See what I mean? This is amazing. Think about the time that it takes just to open outlook and wait for it to load before I can even compose a new email, which also takes time for the word composer to load. I could probably send 20 emails out within that time.



Windows users, you are not alone. They have a program called Launchy that I'm using on the work pc. This is just like Quick Silver and has a nice scripting engine. To send emails using Launchy, I found a little VB script that composes an email and sends it using my gmail smtp account.

I hope you try this out and become an app launcher ninja like me!