I love typing.
The simple act of pressing a key and seeing the character materialize on screen can be a source of joy. It can be therapeutic even. You know, as they say, it’s the simple pleasures of life.
You might wonder what’s so interesting about typing. I won’t drag you down the rabbit hole of keyboard enthusiasts. No, that’s a whole underground world of uniquely personal keyboard experiences.
I’m not talking specifically about keyboards. I’m talking about the act of typing; on any keyboard, including the ones on a laptop.
Working and writing on a computer
I’ve always enjoyed working on a computer. In the early 2000s, when I had an Intel Pentium computer at home running Windows 98, I dreamed of having a job that I could perform using a computer simply because I loved computers. (I still do, but not Windows.)
I’m lucky enough to have always held a job that can be performed on a computer. Although people nowadays can make a lot of money just by using their phones, I can’t ever see myself resorting to phones to get any work done.
In fact, I H-A-T-E hate typing on a phone. I’ll pull up my laptop every time I need to write anything more than a paragraph.
Anyway, back to computers. As is often the case for a distributed workforce, my work involves a lot of writing.
Slack discussions, internal documents (also known as P2s), blog posts, GitHub issues, and weekly updates are just some of them.
If you could break all of that writing down into a single unit, what would it be?
From time to time, I’ve done a lot of buddying new hires, which basically means being the go-to person for a new Automattician as they get up to speed with how things work. Plenty of that work is asynchronous, meaning it’s done on a P2 by writing. Although we’ve changed it recently to include more screen-sharing sessions, there’s still a fair bit of writing involved.
That’s not all! My team is planning an in-person meetup early next year. I’ve volunteered to wrangle several aspects that involve writing, such as a meetup recap, which is primarily meant for other teams to learn from our experience and plan their own meetups.
As you can see, that’s a lot of writing!
And if you haven’t realized that by now, many of those apply to people in other roles as well.
If you’re a developer, you probably type a lot less than someone in customer support. However, you still type a lot — Slack discussions, weekly updates, internal posts (many, many of them), meetup recaps, A/B test results, and so on.
If you could break all of that writing down into a single unit, what would it be?
Single unit of work
Sure, the real “work” happens in your brain. But when you’re putting that work down, you type. One single key press at a time.
Even if you’re using AI to generate a large block of code or several paragraphs of words, you’re still typing your prompt.
I know that you can use your voice to dictate, but I just don’t think it’s super efficient in many cases, especially for non-native English speakers. At least for me, I can think and type, but I can’t think and speak at the same time when writing longer documents and reports.
So, typing is pretty much how I get any work done.
My overthinking brain has led me to run a ridiculous experiment to see what would happen if I were to…lose a finger! 😳
It’s not just work, though. I love writing, which is primarily why I’m in this profession.
Like many writers, I admit that I write more in my mind than in real life, 😁 but I still treasure the fact that I can sit down and get some writing done to scratch my creative itches. (Just like I’m doing now!)
All that is why I absolutely love typing. It’s also why anytime I feel even the faintest of discomfort in my wrist or fingers, I start worrying.
You may remember the pain in my wrist and fingers back in 2020. I felt all depressed because my ability to type was affected.
Even today, nothing makes me feel more depressed than the notion that someday, I might have trouble typing. In fact, my overthinking brain has led me to run a ridiculous experiment to see what would happen if I were to…lose a finger! 😳
But that’s a post for another day. At least, now you know why typing is so important to me.
Do you ever feel the same? Or is it the first time you ever really thought about it?
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