…and should generally be treated as vermin.

I have found it a good practice to be aware of how you interact with you system. Being aware of how you access your programs, manage your windows, do text processing etc., will eventually boost your performance.

Do some kind of prioritization in your key and mouse mappings. The tasks you do most often should be the easiest ones to hit on the keyboard. For these tasks, your fingers should stay on the keyboard, and further, they should stay around the same keys, ASDF and JKL;. This philosophy is known from the VIM editor. Less used function can have more “difficult” keybindings, and the mouse should be used for the rest.

Window managing functions is usually underrepresented on the keyboard. For example, you usually type Alt-Tab to switch between windows, and Alt-F4 to close them. These keybindings can be much easier to type. I use Alt Gr-K and Alt Gr-Q, respectively.

I have found out that the Alt Gr button has a very good placement for your fingers, especially on my ergonomic keyboard. It is not use by any application, so you can map the keybindings without fearing that you may override some application bindings. This gives you a lot of good combinations for window management. Winkey is also a possibility, but it is too easy to miss. The same with the Menu key. Control and Alt is generally used by the applications.

For some tasks I even have two keybindings, depending on my hands position. If I have my right hand on the mouse, it can’t use Alt Gr without moving the hand back to the keyboard. That is why I can close windows with both Alt-F4 and Alt Gr-Q. The formed is one-handed, but with two hands on the keyboard, the latter is faster. Make your hands move as little as possible.

Remember to keep your balance as well. Keep in mind that using a “keyboard heavy” application often is harder to learn than the mouse based opposite, so tools/tasks that you do not use that often might be mouse based, or at least, intuitive to use.