You might not believe this, but . . .
Posted By: Redpen on 2008-12-31
In Reply to: tips - Rebecca
Do you ever make typos? Do you ever have to fix something because the doctor changed his mind just after you typed it? How many misspellings does your spellchecker stop on?
The cumulative time lost with those things can be enormous. It's "invisible" time, though, because we think it's normal to do them. We think that it's so easy and quick to fix them that we don't really lose any time. Or, we think that the advantage of being able to do this is worth a little lost time. Only, for some people, it's not just a little time.
One very good way to increase productivity is to slow down to the point that you make no keying errors. This sounds contradictory, but it's true.
When you have to back up to fix typos, you lose the time you took to key the error, the time you took to backspace to the error, the time to delete it, the time to retype it, and the time to get back to where you were. Depending on how often you make a typo, you can lose quite a lot of time this way.
A related problem is having to change what you've already typed because you didn't listen far enough ahead to catch that the doctor was going to change something. Again, you lose multiple times when you fix things like that.
Spellchecking also uses up a lot of time. Granted, you need to do it, but if you avoid making any errors while typing the report, the spellchecker won't stop on as many errors and you won't lose the time it takes to deal with them.
You can gain far more than you think you can by slowing down to the point that you make no errors.
Years ago when MTs transcribed on typewriters, they learned to listen ahead and type only after they were sure it wasn't going to be changed. They learned to type accurately, because every time they had to "erase," they had to roll a whole carbon pack out of the platen and scrape the letters off every one of the carbons . . . one at a time. They also had to spell correctly on their own, because there were no spellcheckers.
I have seen MTs become 10-50% faster overall by just slowing down to the point that they were making no errors.
Complete Discussion Below:  marks the location of current message within thread
- tips - Rebecca
- You might not believe this, but . . . - Redpen
The messages you are viewing
are archived/old.
To view latest messages and participate in discussions, select
the boards given in left menu
Other related messages found in our database
|
