Keyboard First

Legend has it there was an interview with a man named Eiiti Wada, an early computer scientist and distinguished engineer from Japan. In this interview Mr. Wada shared an interesting story about American cowboys who would take their saddles with them if their horses died out in the wild. Mr. Wada said the saddle was the cowboy’s “interface” with the horse and since they had gotten used to using it, it was a very valuable item. He described the horse as the “consumable good” while the saddle was special to each cowboy, and worth lugging out of the wilderness until a new horse could be found. I never heard such a thing before and found Mr. Wada’s opinion interesting.

I have a system I call “Keyboard First” because the idea is to use the keyboard as much as possible and to use the same keyboard for many devices. My goal is to develop a way to protect myself and my muscle memory from becoming reliant on devices or software which are vulnerable to arbitrary design changes or vendor lock-in. I want my experience and practice in one domain to transfer to other domains and I want to be able to move between operating systems without feeling like I am starting over. My desired outcome from this “Keyboard First” policy is to compound the effect of practice and muscle memory across computer platforms and to reduce or eliminate retraining time.  

The story of the cowboy and the saddle resonated with me. As a former pilot the notion that muscle memory is valuable and should be preserved stuck home, even though I never thought of it that way before. I have memorized button pressing sequences and practiced checklists for hours to ensure I could make an aircraft do the right thing when it really mattered. Now I use a computer for work but before reading Mr. Wada’s words, the idea of mastering the keyboard as the primary input device never occurred to me. I realized this was a large gap for me personally and I was working much slower and harder than necessary.

Before getting into this material, one warning: productivity improvement can be an unquenchable thirst. Productivity is important but ultimately there is always some additional optimization to be found. Productivity is not the goal in itself, it is an enabler of other goals. And there is a limit to productivity, spending a lot of time optimizing for tiny increases in speed is almost never worth it. Try not to get sucked into the endless cycle of improving productivity beyond the point of meaningful return. 

Speed Kills

Despite the warning, productivity is still very important. As humans our time and attention are finite resources and we have to allocate them carefully to get the most out of our lives. It is obvious that the faster we work the more time we get for other important things, and the techniques which help us get faster are therefore valuable. Said simply, speed matters. Inside a more competitive framework, operating more quickly allows a person to get inside the decision making cycle of adversaries, adjusting faster, getting ahead, reacting to current (not outdated) information, and generally being in the best possible position to win. In this framework, speed kills.  

Where to Speed Up

When deciding where to invest time increasing speed, I considered how much time I spent doing a variety of tasks. As a knowledge worker a computer is central to professional life and the thing I do most with a computer is type words. Even when coding for a living I spent more time typing English words than anything else. All the emails, IM messages, and notes far outweighed the time spent coding or problem solving.  Spending time improving my touch typing speed became and remains a top priority. This is also unlikely to change unless I pursue a completely different career like becoming a tour guide or gardener. This means that investments in touch typing will continue to save me time for the long term, making the time spent in practice a good investment. 

How to Choose Tools

With respect to the tools I use in daily work, I prefer open source solutions because I can use them anywhere. This means the time I spend learning shortcuts in Jupyter notebooks or VSCode will be useful if I switch jobs and I can use them at home. This decision often involves giving up some features but ultimately I believe the open source tech is generally very good and it keeps me from experiencing vendor lock-in at a personal level.  Free tier services are great in allowing people to try before buying but if a paid tier exists remember that the entire business apparatus is working to convert free services to paid services. That means key features will be excluded from the free tier and it will usually not be obvious. Be cautious when experimenting with tools of this kind, what guarantee is there that the free tier will continue to exist?

A secondary benefit of sticking to specific, open source tools is that I rarely incur the costs of switching to a new tool. This has been especially impactful for me in the domain of note taking applications.  New note taking applications emerge continuously with an ever-expanding arsenal of unnecessary features. I find many such applications underwhelming and after migrating out of Evernote in 2022 after an episode of bona fide data loss (though Evernote does have a nice web clipper), I decided to stick to a highly available, cheap, cloud based note taking system like Google Docs. It lacks many of the features of other applications but it is fast, reliable, almost free, and used everywhere. 

Avoid Rebuilding Muscle Memory

To the max extent try to avoid having to rebuild muscle memory because it takes a long time. This does not mean I never make changes to my setup but those changes are limited to situations which have an obvious benefit.  Switching keyboards from a 87 to 60 key layout because the new keyboard looks cool is a bad reason. This decision comes with a large hit to operating speed and takes months to rebuild muscle memory to regain previous performance. Swapping out the caps lock key for something else (like control or backspace) is a small change that comes with a small cost in rebuilding muscle memory, but results in a more efficient keyboard setup since almost nobody uses caps lock and the default position takes up prime real estate on the home row. 

Conclusion

Everybody is subtly changed by the surrounding environment, which in most cases includes technology like computers and cell phones. Consider the costs associated with human-machine interactions with these devices, are they easy or difficult?  It is possible for individuals to wrestle back some measure of control over these interactions in a way that makes them easier and benefits those individuals directly. By adopting a policy like “Keyboard First” I believe I can insulate myself from vendor decisions that are not always in my best interests. I believe I can achieve more by improving my muscle memory in a way that will be useful in a variety of circumstances, and will ultimately free up time and attention to focus on creation over all else.