The past two weeks have been very “interesting”. My left hand and wrist showed signs of RSI, with extreme pain in being touched, bumped, twisted or used for typing. When you live your professional life glued to a keyboard, the latter isn’t very helpful! So I’ve had to slow down.

One of the changes I’m making is shifting from the QWERTY keyboard layout to Dvorak, which is much less impactful on the hands. But after being a touch typist for 17 years, re-learning how to type on a totally different keyboard layout is mentally exhausting — due to typing having to shift from the back of the brain to the front cortex. I’ve realized that we don’t type letters, but rather words (a memorized sequence of neuron firings and muscle movements), and so I am having to re-learn how to spell. I’m glad to report that I pretty much have “the” and “that” and “and” down to a fine art again. And I’ve discovered new keyboard commands that I didn’t know about previously. I leave the office much more tired than normal …

And tasks take much longer. My Daily Report is taking 3-4 times as long to type out, even with copying-and-pasting much more. And this blog post has taken a good 30 minutes to type.

Kid time here …