The information contained in this thread has been compiled and placed permanently at MT Desk.
This thread, which is for everyone (not just Andrews students) is going to give a series of exercises to help you discover the "secret" to productivity. Every few days, Redpen will post another in a series of exercises for you to do. After some responses have been posted and she thinks everyone is done with the previous exercise, she'll post another.
POST YOUR RESPONSES IN THIS THREAD. Remember, this is a friendly, helpful series of exercises, so please don't spoil it for everyone by being negative.
Redpen is putting it in the Andrews Forum so that people who don't like it won't feel a need to say cranky things about it.
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(This is a copy of the post she put in another forum.)
When you focus on the expander, on the furniture, and on the time, you are focusing on distractors. These things are not the main issues--they're just what everyone keeps talking about, making it seem like they're somehow important.
You are, in essence, saying that you could do it if you had a better expander, or better furniture, or if you worked a different shift.
Another popular distractor is "typing faster." You think "I could be more productive if I typed faster."
So, you get a better expander, you get new furniture, you move to a different shift, and you practice typing like a madman.
And what happens? Your productivity stays the same. In fact, it might even drop, because typing like a madman only produces more errors.
I can tell you what truly does affect your productivity, but nearly all of you won't believe me. Or, you'll be unable to see what I'm talking about, so you'll ignore it.
Productivity doesn't just "happen," either. It doesn't "happen" any more than a runner just "happens" to get into the Olympics. Do you think that's just natural giftedness? That they just ran that fast all along? No, far from it. They had to work to get that fast. They had to practice. They had to analyze what they were doing and figure out ways to get a little bit of speed here, a little bit there, and they had to build up stamina and discipline.
Are you doing that? Have you analyzed what you do all day while transcribing? Probably not. If you're like most people, you're waiting for a guru to tell you the secret to success. (What expander? What furniture? What shift?)
"If you tell me the secret, I'll be successful. I can't do it on my own." But, the truth is that no guru can tell you what the secret is, because there isn't any secret. There is no magic technique. (No magic expander, no magic furniture . . . )
Even if there was a secret, you'd never believe it if the guru told you, because you wouldn't understand. That's how it is with these things.
You have to be the one to discover it for yourself. And it's not a secret. In fact, it's staring you in the face every day. You aren't seeing it because things are getting in the way. Your beliefs about transcription and working get in the way and there is a flood of information coming at you that gets in the way and there is a whole bunch of life that gets in the way.
Let's try something different this time. Rather than me telling you the solution, let's see if we can't discover it for ourselves.
I'm going to ask you to make some observations about your work life and then post them. Anybody can participate--you don't have to be an Andrews grad to do this.
It'll take a few days to do this, because I'm going to give you something to do every day or so. After you do it, you can share the results. Even if you do not want to share in public, please do the exercises. Then, read what others have shared.
The first thing I want you to do is tape a piece of paper to your desk. As you are working tomorrow, or tonight, I want you to write down everything you do that is NOT transcribing. Just make a running list--do not organize it in any way. Just write one thing after another.
What sort of things will you be writing?
0800 Started work
emptied trash
cleaned off desk
looked for missing book
read email from work
read personal email
vacuumed
answered phone (from?)
made phone call (to?)
answered door
child interrupted
let dog out/walked dog
took drink of coffee
took bite of food
Included in this, I want you to write down:
- Every time you research something by googling it or looking on the internet.
- Every time you research something by looking it up in a reference book.
- Every time you write a new term in your little red notebook, or whatever other method you use (not saying this is bad, just that you should write it down).
- All the time you spend learning new things while working (again, not necessarily bad--just write it down)
I also want you to write down every time you discover yourself looking for a book or something on your desk or in your computer. If you can't reach for it and grab it instantly--without looking for it--write it down.
Finally, write down the time you spent exercising. I want actual times on that--when you started and how long.
When you have done this for a typical workday, post it below. If you saw some things to change already, let us know what it is so we'll know that you've already cut some things out. (Who wants to confess that they spent an hour of work time watching Jerry Springer!)
And, please do not tell me that you don't have time to do this. If you're feeling threatened by this, and about 90% of you will be real unhappy just at the thought of doing this, that's what you're going to try to tell me. So, if you don't want to do this for whatever reason, just don't do it. No need to explain. It'll be between you and yourself.
What usually happens with this exercise? People are so disturbed by the thought that they might discover something that they won't do it. ("Uh oh! I might learn the secret and my life will CHANGE! That's scary! I'd better not even look so I can stay in my comfortable life.") It's a lot less threatening to just continue looking for "the perfect expander" or "the better job."
Now, to answer your question about what expander I used. Used, because I no longer transcribe (I code now, remember) except on rare occasions when a physician pounces on me and begs for a favor, and when that happens I end up doing it live. However, when I did transcribe, I hit 200 lines per hour within 3 months and I worked for years at 1800 to 2000 lines a day. I had an expander for part of that time, and I truly believed it was the secret. But, one day the hospital where I worked switched to an EMR that didn't have an expander. It didn't even have canned text and the spellchecker wasn't medical and it took so long to rumble through a single page of a document (yup--one page at a time) and it took so long to make a correction (yup--the lines did not wrap, so if you changed anything you often had to retype whole paragraphs, and if it didn't fit on the page then you had even more trouble) that you effectively had no ability to spellcheck and no ability to make any changes. I thought my productivity would drop horribly, but it didn't. After a few weeks, I still managed to do 1800 to 2000 and even 2400 lines per day (6.5 available time).
That's how I know it's not the expander or the furniture or anything else that people usually think is important.
My purpose in the exercise above is to help show you what IS important.
I can tell you right off that Dixie already knows the secret. If she chooses to share her list with us, you will all be
most enlightened.
Oh, also, future exercises will ask you to use a timer, so if you have one, drag it out. It doesn't have to be an expensive one, but it should count up as well as down, and one that will time two things at once might be handy. Even a sports timer--the kind that coaches use--will help. You can get one at Walmart for cheap.
animated gif (c) k roach
I, also, work on Tues-Sat, so I will not be posting until Tuesday, but am looking forward to learning more about my work habits!
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