Changing acceleration of animation path I'm sorry if this question has been asked before but the search showed up nill for me. It could be I'm wording this wrong to be honest but I appreciate and help.

Essentially I have a shape that I have moving from one side of the screen to the other but instead of the animation moving at a linear speed, I want it to have an acceleration aspect to it (so it moves slower at first then speeds to full by the end)

Normally I do this by positioning and adding keyframes manually to make that effect, but it gets a bit time intensive. I'm wondering is there any effect or thing I can do to automatically add that in or make my life easier then doing it key frame by key frame?

I appreciate any help!
Keyframe interpolation is essentially what you're looking for here. One really easy way to achieve this is by using modifying your "keyframe velocity".

This article explains it better than I could:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/speed.html