20151101 Ice Cream Sundaes #5 Typing

Hello ,I’ve only started this newsletter recently and you’ve probably noticed by now it doesn’t feature the kind of roundup advertising and marketing news that I see some other strategy consultants tend to send out. This is because I think there are many news outlets that do a great job of reporting them better than I would. Additionally, I enjoy writing stories peppered with some interesting information. This is what this email newsletter is really about.I was wondering what to write about this week and brainstorming a few topic ideas for myself, for this week as well as future newsletters. I did that a couple of times at separate intervals. I revisited my draft ideas a couple of days later and didn’t think I had the right topic yet. This is when I noticed some pain at the base of my left little finger. As I have been writing (and so typing) more in the past couple of months that shadow of pain had come up before. I just hadn’t paid attention to it. One of those things where you feel like something might be off, and you might have known for quite a while, but you basically ignored it. See what I mean? Yeah, that kind of nagging sensation.As I looked at my keyboard it reminded me of a few things. I remembered finding out about the design of the QWERTY keyboard once. It was originally designed with the first commercial typewriter: The Sholes and Glidden, which was then sold to and manufactured by Remington in 1873. A story grown and spread but apparently with little actual proof is that this first typewriter metal stems linked to the keys tended to jam with each other when adjacent keys were struck in close succession too often.Obviously a jamming typewriter wasn’t ideal so the story goes that they studied words in the English language and devised a keyboard that would set the letters used most often apart from each other to mechanically avoid jams. This is where it gets foggy because subsequent research showed it’s not necessarily true; for example “e†and “r†is the 4th most common pair of letters in the English language and they are adjacent.While the reason for the exact layout of the keyboard isn’t certain, by the time typewriters had become mechanically advanced enough to avoid frequent jams, the QWERTY keyboard design had been adopted  worldwide (for latin alphabets at least). Now we’ve all been typing with computers for years we’re nowhere nearer changing our main keyboard design even though specialists agree it is not an intuitive design and might not be best suited to writing.Some people have experimented with alternatives such as the Dvorak simplified keyboard, but so far they aren't widely adopted.

 QWERTY is just convenient because we’re all used to it now. 

However it doesn't make much sense now we’re using touchscreens devices. Said in a different way, if we asked designers with no prior habit or knowledge to come up with the best way to write with a computer or a touch screen, they probably wouldn’t think about setting letters in an arbitrary grid of square boxes. Without going as silly as The Onion’s satirical Apple computer with no keyboard, there might be interesting ways to rethink the way we write. We’ve only been using the same design for 142 years, it’s not like much else evolved in that time period…I taught

myself 

typing  at a point there weren’t many easily available interactive touch typing lessons available, or if there were I just didn’t bother checking them out. I know I’m not the quickest typist but I do ok. Or at least I thought so.You can imaging it was pretty embarrassing for me when I checked a typing lesson website and realised I don’t type correctly at all. I’m doing it completely wrong actually. I’m not using the right fingers on the right keys. And no wonder I have some pain in my left little finger because I don’t use it. It’s weirdly sticking out there to the left as if I was at a fancy high tea party. For some reason I barely use my ring fingers.For those unfamiliar with touch typing, here is a handy colour-coded keyboard map matching fingers and keys. I was wrong for most of my finger position. It was right under my nose this whole time and I had no idea. As I mentioned earlier, I had signs but I generally ignored them, like I’d occasionally wonder why there were two shift keys even though I almost exclusively used the left one – perhaps because I’m left-handed.I blame it my being French and brought up with an AZERTY keyboard. I didn’t learn much typing at school either, I only had computer courses in primary school programming in BASIC, that was it.  I was terrified to find out that I’m much worse than I thought I was at typing after making many mistakes in the basic typing exercise. I don’t particularly like coming to a realisation that I thought I knew something and it not being the case. I don’t think anybody does, really. I guess sometimes that’s what it takes to level up and get to where you want to be though. I want to relieve the pain in my little finger as well as type faster, so I’m going to have go through unlearning my bad typing habits to pick the “proper†way of doing things.As I’m typing this I’m now more conscious of my bad habits, shifting between slowing down my typing to try and place the right fingers on the right keys, and speeding up the way I usually type. It’s going to be annoying for a while as I take time to unlearn and relearn to type.When I told him, my friend Adam didn’t miss the opportunity to quote Star Wars episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, in the scene where Luke Skywalker is on the swamp planet Dagobah, Master Jedi Yoda says: “You must unlearn what you have learnedâ€.I’m not intending to become a Jedi Knight, but I definitely want to be a better writer, and publish a novel some day too. As I’ve set this goal and am working to improve my writing, new obstacles and challenges come up that weren’t planned - or couldn’t have been because I just had no idea about them.The main message here is watch out for the signs, there might be things ringing bells around you with regards to the objectives you have set yourself. You never know, they might point to the next thing you could unlearn or relearn to further your goals.Enjoy the rest of your weekend in the meantime and I’ll see you next week!CheersWillem

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