Why shortcuts and key-combos don't save me time.

30 Jan 2023
 #autism #being me #thinky thoughts

I encounter many wonderful, helpful people in my day-to-day. They love to share productivity tips and I'm always happy to hear them. I think on occasion people are offended to find out I haven't implemented any of their ideas or suggestions. My peers seem to be confused when I haven't adopted the latest shortcut, key-combo heavy IDE or Vim or Emacs (I'm absolutely not having an Emacs v Vim conversation). I'm always fascinated by how much focus is placed on physical action.

So many people try to help under the impression that my primary struggle is the speed at which I can get information from my brain to my finger tips/code editor. In my case, the limitation isn't the speed at which I can type syntax. In fact, often times taking the time to type all of the syntax including the boilerplate helps me to focus my thoughts. It's taken me a long time to start to understand how differently I think compared to my peers. I'm not slow-witted, I don't think slow. I do organize my thoughts slower than most people. This isn't slow thinking, however. This isn't a lack of articulation or practice in communication. It's a deliberate exhaustive effort to organize my thoughts before I communicate them to avoid confusion for myself and for my audience, even if that audience is only my code editor. Incomplete thoughts aren't thoughts at all for me. They're fragments I don't know what to do with and the effort of hanging on to an unintegrated thought is cognitively expensive. This process is, in fact, work for me. The compulsion to integrate the thought into my existing framework is overwhelming.

I'm not failing to type syntax because I don't understand the concept. Rather, I haven't attached all the floating pieces of data to an existing node yet and I'm trying not to lose them. Once everything is connected to an existing point of information I can proceed with the next step which is usually speaking or typing. While I often appreciate the attempts to be helpful the help often fails to address the point of conflict or 'slowness', my brain, not my code editor.

Thinking is a from-scratch exercise most of the time, at least it is for me. In order to ponder a thing I have to build up a framework either from my memory or my immediate environment (what I can read, hear someone saying, etc) this construction of a framework often takes time and effort on my part and it may appear as though I'm not engaged in the immediate goings on (to some degree, I'm not) but without taking the time to do this I simply can't participate in a conversation, meeting, pairing-session, etc.

What does it mean for how I work and how I'll work in the future? It means I probably won't try to learn new physical patterns to speed up my work. I find the majority of my work is cognitive. Additionally, I'm not certain working faster is to my benefit and probably not to the benefit of whatever I'm working on.

Does this mean that shortcuts and key-combos are bad? Of course, that's what it means. Shortcut and key-combo users are bad people, they don't give their pets the love and attention they need, and they chew gum while talking in a conference call.