In a pinch, and many of us are in a pinch regarding time, money and organization, protocol will stand-in for organization.

There is something about my creativity which inhibits organization, and on a computer this is suicide.  So, I am substituting protocol for organization.  I now, as of today, don’t allow a space in MP3 or web file names. This beautifully eliminates a really broad range of possible file names.  I put an underscore where I might have placed a space.  While this may not sound like a break through, I have already saved myself at least fifteen minutes while searching through files today.  Fifteen minutes saved and the day is still young.

This probably doesn’t make sense to you if you are already organized, and if so, bless you and ignore me, or better yet, HELP ME!  But if you are organizationally challenged this might be just the ticket.  Naming a file is a creative act, and standardizing in ways that leverage without limiting can simply make life easier.

Passwords that are supposed to make us feel all warm and safe and fuzzy inside drive me wild.  The only person they protect me from is myself, keeping me out of files and programs regularly.  How do you standardize them?

When I think of file names I ponder OCR.  Optical_Character_Recognition.  I love the process of eliminating the most letters with the least effort.  In other words, OCR uses the qualities of the letters themselves to identify them.  So, only closed loop letters need apply?  That eliminates all letters without a closed loop:  “o” and “a” are in, while “r,” “t,” and “v” are out. Naming your files today in such a way that the name makes sense to you tomorrow can exhibit this same process if done consistently.  While creativity has a lot to do with spawning or utilizing possibilities, finding your car keys or an MP3 file has a lot more to do with eliminating possibilities. As a card carrying member of UnOrganized Anonymous (UOA), I wish to have the greatest degree of organization without it impinging on my creativity.  I don’t want to buy a new pair of pliers just because I have misplaced my other ones, and I don’t want to have to write the same code or document just because my previous one is hiding somewhere on my computer with a really creative but non-pragmatic name.  While I advocate people creating spaces between their thoughts, between their breaths, and nearly everywhere in their lives, the simple addition of a space in a file name seems to make finding that file much more difficult.  Which_means_that_I_shouldn’t_probably_lose_all_the_spaces_in_my_life.  But I can find ways that protocol can help with organization, and enjoy the rewiring of my brain as I typed the sentence with underscore in place of space.  I want more spaces in my life, and if using underscore in file names makes that possible while still finding files, I say, “Go_underscore.” I would really appreciate your suggestions for handling passwords, gigabits of MP3, word documents, spread sheets and more.  How do you do it?

What a difference a change in layout of the keys makes.  The short-cut keyboard is called Dvorak, after the man who invented it.  It has the keys you use the most on the home row.  Have you ever noticed that the standard QWERTY keyboard puts keys you don’t use often right at your finger tips?

The Dvorak layout was designed to address the problems of inefficiency and fatigue which characterized the QWERTY keyboard layout. The QWERTY layout was introduced in the 1860s, being used on the first commercially-successful typewriter.  The QWERTY layout was designed so that successive keystrokes would alternate between each side of the keyboard so as to avoid jams of the mechanical arms as they reached up to slap the metal shape of the letter onto the ribbon of ink putting the imprint onto paper and slide back into place allowing the next mechanical arm to make its way to the paper.

So much has changed since then, but our keyboards haven’t.  The standard keyboard was designed to make typing as slow as possible.  Dvorak not only noticed this, he did something about it.  Patented in 1932, this “new” keyboard was designed to make typing more economical, more fun, faster, and simply better.

There was a problem though, and it wasn’t with the new keyboard, it was that people who already knew how to type on the slow, outmoded keyboard, who didn’t want to learn the new one.  Oddly they still don’t.  It takes two weeks to learn to type on the Dvorak keyboard and you don’t have to buy a new keyboard.  Windows Regional Settings allows your current keyboard to simulate the Dvorak keyboard.  Mac has settings for Dvorak as well.

Not only is the keyboard much better than the standard, it may reduce carpel tunnel syndrome and other conditions that result from overuse of our precious digits.  It may also result in your typing faster and it will certainly amuse your friends if they try and type on it.

Here is a simple sentence typed on the Dvorak keyboard:  The dog jumped over the white picket fence.

Here is that same sentence typed on the QWERTY keyboard:  Kjd hsu cfmrdh s.do kjd ,jgkd rtivdk ydlide

As you can see, very few of the keys are the same.  Can you tell which key is the same?  While working out the code may be difficult for you, the actual learning of the Dvorak keyboard is really easy. (A:  the letter “m”)

Dvorak studied letter frequencies and the physiology of people's hands and created a layout to adhere to these principles:

• Letters should be typed by alternating between hands.
• For maximum speed and efficiency, the most common letters and digraphs should be the easiest to type. This means that they should be on the home row, which is where the fingers rest, and under the strongest fingers.
• The least common letters should be on the bottom row, which is the hardest row to reach.
• The right hand should do more of the typing, because most people are right-handed.
• Digraphs should not be typed with adjacent fingers.
• Stroking should generally move from the edges of the board to the middle. An observation of this principle is that, for many people, when tapping fingers on a table, it is easier going from little finger to index than vice versa. This motion on a keyboard is called inboard stroke flow.

You can continue to walk sixteen miles to work, or, with a little retraining and relearning, you can walk one mile to work.  Older versions of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing actually have the option to learn the Dvorak keyboard.