On Jan 28, 2021, at 1:25 PM, Bob Bridges <[email protected]> wrote: > > This is fascinating, and not a little disturbing. I have long understood > that keyboard shortcuts that save me immense quantities of time won't help a > coworker who won't take the time to learn them deep down, simply because he > has to stop and think about what key sequence is the next step, while I > (who've been doing it longer) can "just do it". (Actually this can be > applied to almost any task, not just keyboard shortcuts.) So if I want to > eliminate all duplicate values in an Excel column, I can execute all the > steps in ten or fifteen seconds; but once I've explained to my boss how to do > it, and he understands it, it'll still take him 60 or 120 seconds until he's > done it often enough. > > But this quotation would have me believe that the time I save by being > familiar with the process is illusory. Is that possible? It seems to me > that when I want to select a row in Excel, I don't have to think about which > key sequence to find; my fingers hit <Shift-space> without conscious > intervention. But the horrible plausibility of the below claim lies in the > fact that I DON'T THINK ABOUT DOING IT - which is just what your article said. > > ...Nah, I don't buy it anyway. Any complicated task we learn, say driving a > car or playing your favorite X-box action game, involves becoming familiar > with commands and combinations of buttons that get us killed multiple times > at first - I hope that doesn't apply to your driving, but it certainly does > when learning to play EVE Online or Rainbow 6 - until you realize at some > point that you're no longer thinking about the buttons as such: You > experience a strong impulse to dodge right and raise shields, and both events > occur, by magic apparently. > > Come to think of it, this is how we notice we're finally learning a language, > too: I hear something and understand it without translating it, or realize > that I've just said it without having to think out how. > > Still, you've got me a just a little worried.... >
The studies cited took place in the 1980s and probably with people with little exposure to personal computers, or at least computers with graphical interfaces. Muscle memory is definitely a thing. But the real point is that you can’t trust how long it seems to take. “Time flies when you’re having fun,” and it drags when you’re bored. Unless you’ve performed a real measurement, you don’t really know which is faster. -- Pew, Curtis G [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
