Getting expert at S*&# I do all the time
I started thinking about the stuff that I’ve learned over the past few years about the brain and how it works. How my brain works. And I decided to do something about it
One of the things that I came across in Jonathan Foer’s book, Moonwalking with Einstein was the process through which he developed his outstanding memory skills. He cited work by K. Anders Ericsson of the University of Florida describing how expertise is developed by skilled performers. In the first phase you have to concentrate on each step. In the second, you achieve some fluency. And generally people stop there. He says:
Most individuals who start as active professionals or as beginners in a domain change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work and leisure experience in a domain is a poor predictor of attained performance
…the critical difference between expert musicians differing in the level of attained solo performance concerned the amounts of time they had spent in solitary practice during their music development, which totaled around 10,000 hours by age 20 for the best experts, around 5,000 hours for the least accomplished expert musicians and only 2,000 hours for serious amateur pianists.
| Here we go back to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours in Outliners (the 10,000 hour rule having been obtained from Ericsson as well). People who are serious about a particular activity—musicians, for example, or people serious about sport do exercises over and over to develop excellence at each skill. Where a casual basketball player might take a few foul shots while waiting for a game to start a pro will spend hours perfecting each little aspect of the game. Hours on foul shots. Hours on dribbling. Hours on rebounds. Hours putting combinations together: rebound and then shoot. Rebound. turn and shoot. And so on. |  |
So I started thinking about my own professional skills and realized that many are merely adequate. Not good. Which ones? Typing for example. I can type “fast enough.” What’s fast enough? Well, by definition the speed at which I type with the number of errors that I make is fast enough. That’s why I don’t work to improve it.
But should I? I do a lot of typing and my typing is considerably slower than my thinking. So if I put in a little extra training time typing then perhaps over the life that’s left to me (which I hope is considerable) I’ll make that time back, plus interest.
Reading Gmail and using my browser are other skills I use over and over. There are shortcut keys for each that will let me do everything without touching a mouse. Reaching over to move the mouse is a time-waster. But I waste that time. Before yesterday the only Gmail shortcut I knew was ‘c’ for compose.Now I know ‘o’ to open the message you are on. ‘r’ to reply and ‘a’ to reply to all. ‘u’ to go back to the inbox. and others. Power! Now I know how to navigate through my mail, open it, archive it, and so on with keystrokes only.
Likewise Chrome. The only Chrome browser shortcuts I knew were Ctrl-N to open a new window and Ctrl-Shift-N to open an incognito window. There are others and I am going to learn them. More Power!
Then I went looking for sites that would help me type faster. I found two. www.typingweb.com has a fairly comprehensive series of exercises starting with pairs of keys on the middle row –for example sequences like this:
jjj fff jjj fff jjj fff jj ff jjf ffj jjf fjf jfj
fff jjj fff jjj fff jjj ff jj ffj jjf ffj jfj fjf
fjj fjf jfj fjf fjfjj jjj jjf fffj fjf fjfjf jff
moving from there to combinations of middle row keys, and on and on from there.
Yesterday when I started doing this I was barely able to make 30 “words” per minute and with many errors. Today I’m up to 40 with almost no errors.
Another approach is http://keybr.com/. Rather than just simple letter combinations they exercise with combinations that are liable to occur in real text—but are not. For example:
Here’s an example text to type:
These are not quite words but also not quite arbitrary sequences of letters. Two different styles of study.
I’m going to do my daily (or semi-consistent daily) practice toward excellence. I’ll report results later
Comments
Post a Comment