I'm a firm believer that everything you do on a computer should be accessible through the keyboard. I guess this comes from working on computers back in the days of MS-DOS where the mouse was an afterthought. Actually, at the time, a mouse wasn't even available on most computers. So, I got used to doing everything with the keyboard. I'd argue that remembering keyboard shortcuts makes you a more productive user. Over the years, I've probably accumulated hundreds or even thousands of keyboard shortcuts stored in my head.
One easy "trick" that I like to do is utilize the start menu to run commonly used applications. If you go to the Start menu in Windows XP and right click on an application in "All Programs", you'll get a context menu that'll let you "Pin to Start Menu". So, what you can do is pin a bunch of frequently used icons onto your Start Menu, for easy access.
But, to truly work efficiently, you can access these programs with the keyboard. Pressing the Windows Key on your keyboard will automatically open the start menu. From there, you type the first letter of the application name that you want to run. If for example you pin "Microsoft Word 2003" to the start menu, you can press Windows Key, then "M", which will put you on the "Microsoft Word 2003" icon. Then you can press enter to launch the app. If however that is the only icon with a label that starts with the letter "M", it will launch immediately without pressing enter. If you have several icons with the same first letter, pressing that letter multiple times will cycle through them. What I do is rename the icons to keep the first letter unique whenever I can. For example instead of , "Microsoft Word 2003" , "Microsoft Excel 2003", and "Microsoft Outlook 2003", I would rename them to just "Word", "Excel", and "Outlook". This way I wouldn't have to cycle through them with the "M" key. Now, if I press W, E, or O, the respective applications will launch immediately. Most of the time, your running the same applications every day so it's a lot easier than sifting through the "All Programs" menu each time.
So there you have it. A quick and easy way to save time starting applications using the "Pin to Start Menu" function.
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