Everyone who starts Blender learns the same three shortcuts first. G to move, R to rotate, S to scale. And then they kind of plateau. They can move things around, they can get into edit mode with Tab, they can undo with Ctrl Z. But beyond that, a lot of beginners are still navigating through menus for things that could take one keypress.
Here are some of the most useful ones that tend to get skipped, and more importantly, why they are worth your time to actually get into muscle memory.
Ctrl R for edge loops is probably the one that would speed up most beginners the most. Once you realize you can slide a loop cut anywhere on a mesh just by scrolling your mouse wheel to add more, it changes how you think about adding detail. A lot of people are still manually selecting edges and using subdivide when Ctrl R would get them there in two seconds.
Alt click to select a full edge loop is another one. If you are in edit mode and you want to grab an entire ring of edges going around an arm or a cylinder, Alt clicking one edge selects the whole loop. Without knowing this, people are Shift clicking individual edges one by one which takes forever.
Ctrl B for bevel. You can round off edges without leaving your modeling flow. Add a bevel to any edge by selecting it and hitting Ctrl B, then scroll your mouse to add more bevel segments. Smooth hard edges, create realistic chamfers, all without touching a menu.
Shift D to duplicate is one people learn but forget to use. They go to Object menu and click Duplicate instead of just pressing Shift D. The habit takes a week to build but once it is there you feel it immediately.
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H to hide and Alt H to unhide. When you are working in a complex scene or a dense mesh, being able to hide selected objects or parts of a mesh temporarily is incredibly useful. People work with cluttered viewports for months without knowing this exists.
Numpad keys for viewport navigation. Num 1 for front view, Num 3 for side, Num 7 for top. Num 5 toggles between perspective and orthographic. Most beginners rotate the view manually every time they need a different angle, which wastes a lot of time.
The reason beginners miss these is not laziness. It is because Blender does not surface them well. There is no easy moment where the software says "hey, here is a faster way." You either stumble onto them in tutorials or someone tells you.
What makes learning these go faster is seeing them in context rather than reading a list. When you are working on a mesh and an overlay in your viewport shows you that Ctrl B is available and what it does, you are more likely to try it right then. That is the whole idea behind HotkeyBoard. Instead of pausing your work to look something up, the shortcut information is already there in your viewport, visible whenever you need it, changing automatically as you switch modes.
If you are still in the phase where Blender feels like you are always two steps behind the tutorial, getting these shortcuts into your hands is the fastest way through it. You do not need to memorize them all at once. Focus on the ones that match what you are actually building right now and let the rest come naturally.
If you are working in Blender and shortcuts are slowing you down, check out HotkeyBoard. It is a live interactive keyboard overlay addon built for exactly this problem.
