Sunday 5 March 2006

Time and motion study

Typing away at something just now, I decided to change the word ‘coincidentally’ to ‘accidentally’. Obviously, there was no point in deleting the 'ally' at the end - that's four keystrokes of my valuable time. So, I put my cursor in front of the a, and prepared to hit backspace. Then I noticed the words had more in common than I thought. There was a 'dent' I had no need to delete and retype... and come to that, a 'ci' in front of that! So, I diligently moved my cursor back through the letters till it was between 'coin' and ‘cidentally’. Then I started deleting. But when I got to the last letter, I noticed it was a c, and I needed a double c for 'accidentally'. So I hopped over it, and placed an ‘a’ before it. Voila.

All this was done without the least hint of self-awareness, as just the logical thing to do. My God, but for someone who is prepared to drop everything for half an hour to stick paper eyes on a tulip, I seem very careful not to waste vital milliseconds typing letters twice…

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Also, my guess would be that the use of the cursor keys makes the number of keystrokes about the same. I know because Mark does this a lot. It infuriates me. It's a fool's errand.

James Lark said...

But using those easy arrows instead of having to feel for the right letters? It's definitely a time-saver.

Anonymous said...

no, it's definitely a saving. It's one cursor press versus a backspace plus retyping the letter.

hope this helps. together we can help banish rsi and extend the running life of our precious keyboards.