I needed a new mouse upgrade desperately as my productivity was suffering badly.

A few years ago I brought a Dell Alienware setup that at the time it was the higher end of the range. It came with a gaming mouse as well which to be honest I never really took advantage of.

I Actually Wore A Mouse Out…

Anyway, after a few thousand hours of gaming in my favourite world of Diablo this mouse had started to show its age particularly the left click hack and slash special button. The clicks were still clicking meeting it’s warranty promise of over one million clicks guarantee but clicking and dragging was painful sometimes working extremely hard against me. There were multiple times when this dodgy mouse almost cost me a hard-core character death which would be devastating after 100 hours on a character.

It was actually listing on eBay which finally convinced me it was time to buy a new mouse to obtain a productivity upgrade. At times when listing books I need to grab the ISBN to add to the listing (to prefill the listing). I currently use an Auto Hot Key (AHK) hot key which opens the snippet app and then the idea is to quickly take a snippet of the ISBN, reduce the window size of the eBay window which allows me to type it in seeing the ISBN in a neighbouring window. Easy process until actually trying to take the snippet with a dodgy mouse. At times it would take two or three times to get it. Eventually I worked out I could actually use the right mouse button to get around this but alas this mini work around does not work in other apps I often use such as Word or PowerPoint.

It’s the type of problem that in the moment its annoying but not insurmountable, so what, it might take an extra 10 seconds on the occasional listing. That by itself was not the catalyst, it was all the other apps that really caused me to take action. Trying to create graphics using office products and not being able to easily click and drag to draw a simple rectangle was downright frustrating.

So this weekend just passed I ventured out into a nearby physical chain store specialist in office products. Alas I can state that the Coronavirus has not improved WAs abysmal customer service. Turns out I should have ordered from Amazon and saved myself a little bit of money. My impatience cost me $10.

What To Buy?

Initially I considered buying another gaming mouse but gaming’s not a huge priority at the moment with a new bubba so I went for practicality with a mouse that has 8 customisation buttons to really apply my hot keys I have already worked on.

I brought the Logitech 910-004792 Triathlon Wireless Mouse M720 and as is always the way immediately wished I had done this sooner, the mouse was set up in less than two minutes and another couple to install the Logitech software allowing the button customisation. Mapping my existing AHK hot keys took only a few moments.

I used an existing key sequence that I already had set up previously using AHK to open the snippet app and instantly create a new snippet and mapped it to the mouse side front button.

For now I have the mouse side back button I mapped another AHK hot key which opens up my custom google To Do List form in chrome. So handy. I think of something, one button press and I’m typing it in and submitting and then its gone out of my mind leaving me to get back to focusing on what I was doing. I love this already.

Some other examples of using the gesture button to create 4 different actions:

But Wait! There’s Still More.

After exploring the Logitech interface further I was actually surprised that the mouse can also do all sorts of powerful operations such as opening apps etc…

As an example (Refer above picture) I could have the same button open the snippet app using this interface to do it instead of my AHK hot key. It won’t be able to set it ready to take the snip like the AHK script can but its still most of the way there.

Get It Done, Now.

If you haven’t already tried mapping some of your mouse buttons to custom actions I strongly recommend it. Even without further augmenting with AHK you will still get a massive productivity upgrade.

On some chance you are still using a seven dollar legacy mouse with the wheel and two buttons you are way behind, spend some money (tax deductible for business) and invest in a quality mouse which can elevate your productivity to new levels.