The best thing you can do when learning a new program is to learn and use the keyboard shortcuts right off the bat. Using your keyboard shortcuts is the number one way to increase the speed of your workflow. No more hunting around in menus and then dropping down into sub-menus. Just hit the key stroke and poof you’re there.
Many of today’s programs offer customizable shortcuts which are a great thing to take advantage of. With Photoshop, the software I use about 8 hours a day, I have set all my most used shortcuts up to execute with a “shift + F keys” and also many combinations of alt, command, control and shift. Some of these key strokes seam horribly hard to hit reliably at first, but if you’re a gamer or guitar player you know that you just have to train the fingers to do it.
You should not only use software shortcuts, but your operating system, whether its OSX or Windows(which is crap) has tones of keystrokes and mouse button combos that can greatly increase your workflow
Here are a few lists of shortcuts to some of the most commonly used Adobe products.
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