None of these habits are clever, which is the point. I collected them over a couple of years, some of them from articles on ForGeeky, and together they give me back a surprising amount of time.

Keyboard shortcuts first. I learned only the handful I use every day, and I learned them by forcing myself to use them for a week, badly and slowly. Copy, paste, undo, switch window, lock the screen. Small stuff. But my hands now do it without me thinking, and the mouse feels clumsy when I have to reach for it.

The password manager habit took longer. What changed it was deciding I would never type a password twice. If a site asks me to log in and the manager does not offer to fill it, I stop and fix the manager entry instead of improvising. Sounds fussy, saves a lot of resetting.

Cleaning the desktop is my favourite because it takes no time at all. Everything that lands on the desktop gets deleted, filed or dragged into a folder at the end of the day. A clean screen at nine in the morning does something good to my head that I cannot really explain.

Automatic backups I set up and then forgot about, which is exactly how it should be. I check once in a while that the folder list still includes the things I care about, because a backup that quietly skips your photos is worse than no backup at all.

And closing tabs. I used to keep dozens open as a way of remembering things. Now I close them and trust that whatever mattered will come back to me, and it usually does, faster than scrolling through a wall of tabs looking for the one I need.