Back in my college days, I had one friend who tweaked and customized Windows XP on his computer such that it had no start menu, task bar, or desktop icons. He launched all his applications from the “run” command line. He went so far as to set the desktop background as black because he believed it might lessened the amount of “radiation shooting at my face.” Lest you jump to conclusions, I can (mostly) vouch for his sanity.

Eventually, his minimalist computing experiment crumbled as Windows became increasingly less stable with its pillars of normalcy toppled. Years later now, I use some simple tricks that echo this bygone experiment to help me quickly access my most relevant programs, files, and web pages without so much as the click of a mouse. Call it laziness under the guise of efficiency.

Now if you’ll excuse a divergent style change, below is a “how to” for those interested in some of the techniques:

Launching anything you want from the “Run” command line
Prereq: Use shortcut “Windows key + R” to quickly bring up Run.

The default directory for the Run command line is the C:\Windows or C:\WINNT directory. Anything you put in this directory can be called directly from the run line by name. For example, copy a shortcut to Firefox into your Windows directory and rename it “ff” (or whatever you want to call it). Now you can launch Firefox simply by typing “ff” at Run.

To direct Firefox to a specific web page when launched, right click on the shortcut you created and click properties. On the “shortcut” tab, append the web address to the end of the “Target” field. For example: “C:\Firefox\Firefox.exe” http://www.google.com
You can type in multiple web addresses at the end and it will launch them all.

You can also create shortcuts to folders or other files in the same manner. For example, when I type in “music” it brings up my music folder.

Roll your own shortcut key
I stumbled across this one mostly by accident. It only works for items on your desktop or on your quick launch bar. Right click on your item of choice (must be a shortcut) and choose properties. On the “shortcut” tab, enter a letter or number into the “shortcut key”. If you enter “E” for example, it will create a shortcut key of “Ctrl + Alt + E”. You can also use the number pad which saves you from having to enter the “Ctrl + Alt” (must have NumLock on). Launch away!