Self-improvement 30 days at a time. This month: getting in shape for my wedding.
I’m happy to report that this month’s goal was successfully achieved. There are three main things I changed that have caused the RSI pain in my fingers to subside without a reduction in computer use:
That’s worked for me. If you have repetitive strain injury, and can’t reduce your computer use, try these tricks and let me know (Grey1618@Googlemail.com) if they work for you.
After realizing that my trackpad caused a great deal of my repetitive stress pain, I spent an afternoon researching ergonomic mice and found one that stood out above the rest: The 3M Ergonomic Mouse.
Under its shell, the 3M is a standard red-light optical mouse, but it’s the casing that makes the difference. The body of the 3M mouse is flat, with a joystick-like projection on the top. You hold the mouse on the desk in the same way you would shake hands with someone sitting across from you. Your thumb rests on the top of the joystick-like part. Beneath your thumb are the left and right click buttons. There is also a button beneath your fingers on the grip for middle clicking.
But, and this is the key to why it works, the 3M mouse is not a joystick. The optical sensor is on the bottom so you move your whole arm to direct the pointer on the screen. I was concerned about switching to a non-standard mouse because I thought that it would have much less precise control over the pointer. Both in the creation of my webcomic, and editing my photographs, I need to move the pointer tiny amounts, sometimes only a pixel at a time. To my relief, the 3M Ergonomic Mouse can do that. Thus, I can use it as my primary mouse, and have come to prefer the way it handles over my old Microsoft optical mouse.
While the price is high, and the profit margin on it must be about 400%, I would easily pay twice as much again for the difference it has made in reducing my RSI.
In my experiments this month to reduce my repetitive strain injury I have discovered the main culprit: the trackpad.
The trackpad on my laptop is an easy and lazy way to manipulate the pointer, but it also destroys my fingers in the process. Twenty minutes of trackpad use is like being on the mouse all day.
Sadly, Apple computers don’t come with any alternatives, such as the nipple found on IBM thinkpads, and there is no way to disable the apple trackpad to force me to use the mouse at all times.
However, it is possible to temporarily disable the trackpad while the mouse is connected:
Open System Preferences
Go to ‘Keyboard and Mouse’
Click on the ‘Trackpad’ tab
At the bottom, check the box ‘Ignore trackpad when mouse is present’
This has helped me, at least a little, to break my trackpad habit.
One of the ways to reduce RSI is to type less. Aside from switching to dvorak to reduce the actual distance that your fingers travel, there is an excellent little tool I found via Merlin Mann called textexpander. Textexpander allows you to type small snippets of text that will explode into longer strings.
For example, when I type ‘wg.net’ textexpander automatically changes it to ‘http://www.WellingtonGrey.net/’. Rather than typing my email address in full, I just type ‘greyat’ and out pops ‘Grey1618@Googlemail.com’. The great thing about textexpander is that it works in every application and is completely invisible. You don’t have to manually start it up or press special command keys to explode the text, it doesn’t interrupt your train of thought so you can keep typing.
Aside from being a productivity tool that actually saves time, on the RSI side I’m using it a lot for reducing awkward commands to type. For example, I write my journals using LaTeX. While LaTeX is a system well-designed for typesetting books, the syntax is ugly and awkward to type. Now in LaTeX instead of reaching for uncomfortable commands like \emph{ } I have simpler snippets in textexpander to create them.
Textexpander costs $30 and is well worth it for the amount of time you’ll save. Download textexpander here.
I came across a program called dasher that I thought might have some application for RSI. Though it turned out to be impractical, it is lots of fun to play with.
Dasher is designed to help people who cannot enter text into a computer with a keyboard but who can use a pointing device. Dasher works by streaming letters across the screen and you use the mouse to ‘catch’ the letters you want to type. The more likely a letter is to be next based on what you have already typed, the larger it will appear on the screen. You can feed dasher a sample of your writing so it will guess better the letter and word frequency particular to the way you write.
After using it for a little while, it gets creepy, especially if you train it on your writing. It anticipates what you want to type before you actually type it, leaving you questioning the nature of your own free will.
While I can’t recommend it for daily use, it has found one particular specialist job in my flat. On the weekends I tend to wake up earlier than my girlfriend. She gets grumpy if I leave the bed too early so I work next to her while she gradually wakes up. Inevitably, she wraps herself around one of my arms, rendering it useless. If I need to get some typing done and my one-handed position is just too impractical, I’ll fire up dasher and let the letters fly across the screen.
Download dasher here.
A reader, suggested that I try AntiRSI — an OS X program that forces you to take breaks. When running it has two timers that count down. Every four minutes it reminds you to take your hands off the computer for a micro break of a thirteen seconds and every fifty minutes it reminds you to take a ten minute break.
During my mouse centric activities, such as photo editing and drawing, AntiRSI helps in more than one way. While the micro breaks help with my hand, the interruptions also have an unintended positive effect: they force me to take a few seconds anyway from the tiny detail I’m focusing on and back up to look at the overall thing I’m trying to create. I immediately liked AntiRSI with the mouse.
But, during my keyboard centric activities, such as writing for the journal, the interruptions really annoyed me. There I’d be, halfway through a sentence and nicely in a state of flow when bam, focus stolen and thought lost. AntiRSI caused real nuisance during my first few days on the keyboard, and I almost gave it up.
However, after about a week, I realized that my annoyance with the interruptions taught me a new behavior: taking my hands off the keyboard/mouse whenever I paused to think.
I started to do this because AntiRSI has a smart feature: it will reset the micro break counter if you don’t use the computer for thirteen seconds. So, by taking my hand off the mouse when I stop using it, I don’t accidentally move the pointer and keep the clock running, the same applies with my hands on the keyboard. A week and a half into using the program, I find it rarely interrupts me for a micro break anymore because I naturally take them.
The people who made AntiRSI also have a good aesthetic sense. It’s well integrated with the look and feel of OS X and seems professional. I hope the developers add a menu bar indicator that mirrors the dock icon. I hide the dock to gain screen real estate, so sadly can’t take advantage of their beautiful dock indicator. The only complaint I have about AntiRSI is that, after it steals focus for a break, it doesn’t return focus to the program you were using at the time.
I highly recommend you try out AntiRSI and give them a donation if you find it useful.
Back in college I switched to the dvorak keyboard layout. The Internet is rife with flamewars on whether dvorak increases one’s typing speed, but I don’t care: it dramatically reduced my pain while typing.
When I switched, I worried about how long it would take to relearn the layout. Surprisingly, it only took about two weeks to get to were I didn’t have to consciously think about the location of the letters. After another two weeks, I returned to my previous typing speed.
I’ve seen a lot of people suggest various typing programs to help you relearn the keys, but that didn’t work for me. I found them too frustrating and didn’t like the feeling that I was starting life on the computer over from scratch. I recommend you learn the new layout by printing a copy of the keyboard and taping it to you monitor. Then, when you want to type something, look at the paper, not the actual keyboard.
This had the side benefit of making me a better typist. Even though I touch typed on qwerty, I didn’t realize how many times I actually sneaked a look at the keyboard. With dvorak I now have much better typing skills because I can’t look at the keys and I have to do it properly.
As a side note, I can no longer touch type in qwerty. This isn’t a problem for me as my employer changed the keyboard layout at work. On the rare occasions I do use a qwerty layout, I can type by keeping my hand on the home row, but I have to look at the keyboard.
I don’t recommend getting a dvorak keyboard or physically rearranging your keys, both seem like a waste of time and effort, when it’s simple enough to switch the layout using software.
To change to a dvorak keyboard on Apple OS X:
Open System Preferences
Go to international
Click the ‘input menu’ tab.
Scroll down the list and check either ‘dvorak - qwerty’ (this will let you keep the keyboard shortcuts the same) or just ‘dvorak’ (if you want to go hard core)
Check the box ‘Show input menu in menu bar’.
Now on your menu bar will be a little icon with either your national flag or the letters ‘DV’ on a black background. When the flag shows, the keyboard will be in the default setting for your country. When the DV shows, it will be in dvorak.
I’ve been a heavy computer user since my parents brought home an Apple ][. Immediately addicted by the glowing screen, I typed and clicked until my wrists and fingers would no longer let me. At that stage, the pain usefully reminded me to take a break from the eight-hour starcraft marathon. After a day, the ache would abate.
But last month something scary happened: the pain in my hand didn’t go away. The first and middle fingers on my right hand chronically hurt even when I wasn’t on the computer.
The pain grew and, concerned, I visited a doctor who diagnosed it as a repetitive strain injury. When I asked what could be done to fix it, his advice was essentially: “Sucks to be you. Take some ibuprofen and stay off the computer, nerd.”
While just five years ago I would have felt guilty not following advice to limit my computer use, I don’t now. Like it or not, benefit or not, the computer is a central focus of life now for the younger half of the population. I’m lucky that as a teacher, I don’t spend a full working day at a computer, but resource creation still requires screen time. All my hobbies, from photography to writing, to drawing involve the computer. Living overseas, the computer is the only practical way to keep in touch with my friends back home. Giving up my silicon symbiote, isn’t an option.
So, I face this month’s goal: to reduce my RSI as much as possible without giving up my computer. I have no idea how this will work, so I’m open to suggestions.
This year I turned 26 in April and, while still caught in the throws of a quarter-life crisis, I thought it a good time to re-evaluate my life. While my situation has changed a great deal from my early twenties (I’ve moved to London and become a physics teacher) I feel much like the same person. Trying to change how I live and act on a daily basis — how to change habits — is a hard thing to do.
I’m starting this blog as a motivator to begin small changes in my life. To trial them out and see if they’re worth sticking to. I came across an idea in Steve Pavlina’s blog: instead of deciding to change a habit for the rest of your life, and inevitably failing, just try it out for one month. No pressure, no strings attached. If you don’t like the change, ditch it.
So, in my 26th year, I’m setting myself goals, one a month, and chronicling my progress in this blog. I don’t expect to always be able to make it, to reach all the goals, but I’ll try.
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