**Friday Favorites**

Today’s favorite is one of my very best and most used time savers, the keyboard shortcut.

With a keyboard shortcut, instead of typing out long phrases that you use frequently, you type in a series of letters and it will auto populate your phrase. This is primarily useful when texting or sending emails from your phone, however, if you are a Mac user it will also transfer to your computer as well. For me, I use this for things like directions to my home and my office and my business and personal email addresses.

My other favorite use for this is for my vacation or out of office “auto” text. Unfortunately, you can’t set up an automatic text reply (at least, if you can, I don’t know how … share in the comments in you do!) and inevitably while I am out of the office even though all of my active clients have been notified and my auto email reply and voicemail out of office are set up I will get a text message from another agent, old client, etc. Instead of stopping what I am doing to send a long text, I simply type in a couple letters and my out of office message pops up directing them with who to contact.

This is a HUGE timesaver … and also a very professional way to conduct your business.

I’m an iPhone user so I am spelling out the steps for you here for how to set up on an iPhone. If you use a different type of device, feel free to share in the comments those steps for set up.

Go to …
Settings
General
Keyboard
Text Replacement

Tap the “+” at the top right corner of the screen.

Now enter your phrase and shortcut. The phrase is what you want to auto populate, and the shortcut is the series of letters than you will type in. IMPORTANT NOTE: The series of letters should NOT spell another word or part of a word. Otherwise, every time you type it your phrase is going to auto populate, even when you don’t want it to.

For example, my out of office phrase that I used most recently when I was away before Christmas and during the holidays was …

“I am out of the office until 12/27. Please contact my Client Care Team at 703-999-3601.“

The shortcut that I use for this is “v c” … I don’t actually have a space in between the v and the c, but if I type it that way here it is going to auto populate again!

Take a few minutes today to think about phrases that would be useful to you to auto populate. Maybe it is something like, “I am on an appointment, will reach out as soon as I finish”, for when text messages come through while you are showing property. Instead of appearing to the client in front of you that you are distracted and not focused on them, you can quickly and discretely auto populate this response by typing two or three letters (maybe use “bzm” for your shortcut … in my mind this stands for “busy message”).

Do you use keyboard shortcuts? What are some ways that you could use this to help you save time?

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