Ever since driving my first car with automatic transmission, my life has not been the same. The best thing is that I never worry about which gear I am in and what I should switch to. The process takes care of itself. Rarely in life such things happen that are easily identifiable to instantly make life instantly much better.

In front of me is a laptop. It’s small, handy, and has 54 keys. Most of these are letters and numbers, while some are special characters and others serve specific functions.

In total, they give me quick access to 54 commands in Sibelius. Pressing ‘I’ opens the ‘Add or remove instruments’ dialog, while ‘W’ toggles between parts and score. Other keys open galleries: ‘T’ opens time signatures and ‘K’ opens key signatures. Some keys don't do anything... yet.

With hotkeys used for the ribbon, we can now focus on where to take advantage of shortcuts. My main point is to look for uses of shortcuts in gallery items that are often used. If you, like me, are tired of dragging ye ole mouse all the way to the top-left corner of the screen after hitting Q, you will be happy to implement this strategy

When Homer Simpson was working from home, he found himself answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’ DOS-prompts all day. Homer is not the type for careful consideration, so he opted to choose ‘yes’ every time. After a couple of days, he hesitated in a fit of celebration, only matched by a group of cheerleaders chanting, ‘Give me a Y, give me an…’ and before he had pressed the E-key, DOS had accepted his answer. Homer’s profound epiphany was this: He had tripled his productivity.

When you’re writing music, the last thing you want to think about is technology. You want the least amount of friction from thought to paper. Automating all the steps in between will get you closer to that, and in this series, I’ll show you how I’m implementing automation in various ways to write efficiently. Starting with this first post with a geek-level of 1, which means it only takes you a couple of tweaks inside Sibelius to shape up.