I didn’t do my typing test this week. It’s fine… I have had to make a short-notice trip to seek important medical care for Savitar. I have, however, been typing. As I was typing earlier, I recognized a silly thing that has larger implications for life. It isn’t new, and it is a behavior that has been exacerbated (there’s a fun typing word for a left-hand neuropathy!) by the rise of computers and word processing before that (where you could type an entire sentence before hitting enter at which point the entire line would be typed out automatically. Anyone? anyone?)
Even when I was touch typing 100+ wpm, my typing was not the “cleanest”. I have always made my share of errors. As such, this behavior isn’t a reaction…. It is a pattern. Frankly, it has probably negatively impacted my perceived typing skill in online testing. Regardless, it has brought to my eye something that I can change. If we as chronically ill people are “doing it right” and being honest with ourselves, we are always looking for ways to do better or easier. I think that I had noticed this before, but had laughed it away because without a reason to apply it across to life in general it was just kind of a funny “well that’s odd” kind of thing.
So the thing that I noticed. As people who have typed any amount do, I frequently scan things that have already typed seeing as how I can feel when I have made a typo in what I am currently typing. Most of the time. I am scanning back as I type, and I saw a typo. It wasn’t even so much a mistake as it was the omission of a letter. Of course, I am typing on a computer in Google Docs (this is pertinent information)... so instead of simply clicking in the place and adding the missing letter, what I did was deleted an entire sentence (perhaps you’ve noticed that I construct long sentences), added the letter, and retyped the rest of the sentence as it had been written. Because of course I did. Incidentally, I just literally did the exact same thing as I was typing about having done that thing which – in my sight – is a Very Silly Thing.
The point: How many times are we creating more work for ourselves by undoing something that we have done that we didn’t need to undo, only to have to re-do it to continue on making progress? How much more could we accomplish if we just allowed things to stay done. Work smarter, not harder, etc. So there you have it. Today is short, but important.
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