Visual fatigue in computer screens
When most of your day is spent in front of a computer screen, improving your experience turns out to be very important.
Arguably the most important principle for heavy computer use is visual fatigue, where you spend extra time staring at the screen searching, finding and moving your mouse to find a particular button before selecting it. This happens when reading emails to find the right one, scanning search results, checking video titles, filling out forms, etc.
I tend to think of integration with a computer as how quickly a thought can turn into an action on the computer. If I decide to search for info on a particular topic, I want to get there as quickly and with as little effort as possible. Normally it would look something like: Ctrl + T which is set to my M4 macro, then typing in the first letter of the autofill, or, tab twice, and arrow keys to go through my bookmarks quickly. That’s a lot different than moving your mouse to see where it is, moving it up the the + button, then clicking it, then clicking the search bar, etc.. I try to avoid clicking with the mouse when possible, and when I do click, I usually try to do it quickly.
Something that helps a lot when you do need to use the mouse, is zooming everything in, usually 130% to 150%. This makes every button easy to click, with almost no visual fatigue, because in most cases I don’t need to position my mouse perfectly—it’s just a flick to the general area of the button.
Having precise mouse movements is overrated, because nobody is precise all the time, and there will always be slight corrections to where your mouse needs to be.
I estimate that saving even half a second every time I click something has saved me somewhere close to a hundred hours per year. That may not be completely accurate—I probably click well over 10,000 times a day, and that adds up quickly. Your average office keyboard warrior clicks like 4k to 7k times a day..
Knowing all the keyboard shortcuts is very important, too. Alt+Tab to switch between windows, always Ctrl + F searching for content on the screen, Windows+Shift+S for screenshots, using Tab/Shift+Tab when filling out information online, Ctrl+arrow keys to move your cursor around quickly. Alt+F4...
There are a million ways to improve efficiency on a computer, and the key is to get fast enough that the communication with the computer doesn’t break your train of thought. Having a nice keyboard helps out a lot as well, I went from an 80ish words a minute to well over a hundred depending on the context, just from getting a nice keyboard.
I saw some guy the other day zoomed way out on his email, hunched over trying to find something, squinting at the screen and thought I’d write something to clear the thoughts out. Its all unnecessary extra work for the most part..