“But being lazy means you aren’t productive, right?”

Lies!

Being lazy is about getting as much done as you can with as little effort as possible. Think “task streamlining” rather than “task avoidance.”

The tasks that take the most time for me are repetitive text-manipulation tasks and responding to email, so those are the two things I’ve worked on automating the most.

The tools I prefer are Autohotkey (free) for Windows or Text Expander ($35) for Mac. Both allow you to set up keyboard macros which will perform longer text-entry tasks. I will not go into incredible depth for either of them, but I will go into the basics of why they’re useful.

What Email Signatures?

We all have to sign our emails; it’s polite.

And it takes a while, especially when you add up the 10 to 20 seconds you spend per email every day. Today I sent fifty-six emails. Fifty-six emails multiplied by 15 seconds to sign the email (on the conservative end) is 840 seconds which is about 14 minutes per day spent signing emails.

But wait, I use signatures!

Well that’s great but it’s not flexible. My signatures vary depending on who I am emailing. To manage your email efficiently, finding a way to streamline or automate this process could save valuable time and make email communication smoother. I use formal signatures and informal signatures and all sorts in between.

For example, when I type “ssq”, Text Expander types:

If there is anything else I can help with, please let me know.

Regards,
Ian at FITS

This is great! Now I never have to think about how to sign off on an email again. I write what I have to say, type “ssq”, and send it off.

Or I can type “sse”, and Text Expander types:

Regards,
Ian at FITS

“Yeah but that takes no time to type—you must type really slowly.”

Nope!

It took me 4.8 seconds averaged over six attempts at typing it really quickly.

Don’t believe me? You try.

Actual Email Messages

Now think about the longer text you type over and over and over.

Here’s a sample short snippet I type five to fifty times per day:

Greetings,

Your add user request has been completed. Please log in and ensure that the user(s) appear as they should.

It’s a greeting and one line of text all of which takes about 16 seconds to write. So again, lots of time wasted writing the same thing over and over and sometimes I’d misspell things or send the wrong information or whatever further extending the time it takes to write.

The rate most people perform composition typing at is nineteen words per minute (Karat, et. al., 1999). If you compositionally type similar bodies of text regularly you’re wasting time.

Now imagine if that were two paragraphs consisting of three to five sentences typed two times per day. Times four per week (lucky you, working four days a week). Times four weeks per month.

Now let’s take my wonderful body of add-user text above, which is about twenty words. If compositionally you type nineteen words per minute, it will take you one minute to type that sentence, times three sentences per paragraph (low end), so at three minutes per paragraph times two paragraphs, you’re spending six minutes per day composing each email. If you have two students or coworkers a day who ask similar questions, you are spending 12 minutes a day doing unnecessary, repetitive work.

Multiply that by your generous four-day work week, times four weeks per month, and you’re spending 3.5 hours per month writing just that one email over and over. Now if you regularly compose five similar emails, it scales quickly.

Suddenly you are at 15 hours per month wasted.

And knowing you, everything is misspelled, has coffee spilled on it, and the really important bit of information got left out anyway.

Horrifying.

References

Karat, C.M., Halverson, C., Horn, D. and Karat, J. (1999), Patterns of entry and correction in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems, CHI 99 Conference Proceedings, 568-575.

I have a particular penchant toward the self-published.

You see, I grew up with printed pages still warm from a Kinko’s copy machine. I was taught with manifestos stapled sideways, printed in perfect punk-rock attitude and do-it-yourself aesthetic. A girl who was awash with the unspoken mission statement of “anyone-can-do-it” chanted by movements like Riot Grrrl and Act-Up, I learned that you didn’t have to hit the New York Times Best Seller List to be considered an author. I learned that, given time, a typewriter, and some dimes for the copy machine, you could print your own stories, your own news, and your own ideas. I learned that my voice and thoughts counted. I learned the magic of self-publishing.

So it’s no wonder that when I went to teach for the first time, I was influenced by pedagogical tactics that pushed for decentralizing knowledge. When setting up our reading list, I worked hard to use anthologies, collect stories from multiple voices, and use small-press books by relatively unknown authors.

Moreover, I wanted the texts we read to exist outside of the echo chamber that can be created in academia. The feedback of one text calling to another, that text calling to a next, all reverberating until the topic at hand is buried beneath layers of rhetoric. I wanted fresh views, even if the topics we were discussing were well known. I wanted my students to hear the poetry in knowledge, the lyricism in all our different epistemologies. So, I brought them zines, written by local authors, and even brought in my thesis, which a friend of mine had formatted into a folded-in-half, 8”-by-11” zine. Basically, I wanted my students to tap into a more creative, yet still academic means of learning.

But now? Now, I’m a little worried. What will happen to the self-published when we all go paperless? It’s hard not to hear the clamor of eBooks and digital readers, let alone not see them in the hands of all the morning commuters. I’ve heard all about how libraries across the country are digitizing their catalogs; I’ve seen how the old paperback novel is now kindling the fires of online eBook sales. It’s hard not to see that every nook of the Internet is saturated by the phenomenon.

But, for a girl like me? A girl who not only self-publishes her work, but is a hopeless consumer of zines and small-press works, well, I worry about the impact on small-press and indie authors when we go fully digital and paperless.

But there is hope. If you search the Internet a little bit, multiple web-based zine libraries are popping up, all with digitized archives ready to be downloaded and consumed. (If you’re interested, check out the list of zine archives from zinebook.com.) For indie authors, Smashwords.com is the place to go, with its wide selection of self-published eBooks. And then, of course, there is Apple’s release of iBook Author, the Mac-based application that allows anyone to create their own multi-touch textbooks. So, suffice it to say, at the moment, there seems to be space still for the self-published, ready and waiting to fill your digital bookshelf.