RTFM [Read the manual]

In which the author bitches, and then gives practical advice that will save (segments of) the reader's life.

OK, so here's some quick math that I worked out on a little spreadsheet. Say there's some little routine that takes you five minutes a day, and you could do some tedious work and eliminate that through an hour of research into correctly automating the thing or something. Then over the course of a work-year, you'd save 2 and a half days of time. In the words of the great Margaret Cho, you could take a pottery class. So some research up front can pay for itself many times over; this is nothing your momma didn't already tell you.

But when people sit in front of a computer---the paragon of automatability---people instead want something they can use immediately. A good program, we read, does exactly what the users thinks it should from the start (i.e., is intuitive). It should require no learning of new methods, and should instead analogize to real-world actions like pointing to things (i.e., clicking on pictures).

So if I've set up this essay correctly, it should be completely obvious that the first and second paragraphs there are in direct contradiction. From the perspective of efficiency, intuitive design is not helpful. On occasion we're lucky and the most intuitive and most effective method match, but in most cases we need to learn some new little method to implement the most effective route.

I am flabbergasted, horrified, and in despair over the resistance people have to learning how to use software. People will read the entire frigging Chicago Manual of Style rather than learn to use new software (see below). They're using this one program because in 1997, when they were afraid of computers, they could pick up that program and use it in the first hour---but it's been six years and they've used that program for a thousand hours a year, and they're no more efficient at clicking the little icons, and they spend more and more time trying to do increasingly complex tasks until they realize that there's no intuitive way to efficiently do the complex things they have to do.

Oh, the mortal cost of that first hour! What a seductive compact with the devil were those icons! The little sound effects were so pleasing, yet the software proved to be a siren which drains away all life, one pleasing mouse-click at a time.

We should face facts: we're in front of computers, all day, every day. That doesn't mean we like them, but if we like what they do for us, then it's really worth an initial effort to work out what's good software---not in terms of what matches your immediate intuitition, but what you can learn to use efficiently as you use it every frigging day until you finally reach the ever-growing retirement age and can finally just stay home and surf the Web.

Why I care One: I have to give tech support to people all day long. The fewer people using cute but annoying software, the less tense I'll be. Two: I want better software that I can use. All that effort that goes into making better eye candy for Word is wasted for me. Three: ``No [person] is an island,'' wrote John Donne, and it truly, physically pains me to hear the travails of somebody who wrote their dissertation in Word, which you'll recall the New Yorker describing as a terrible program.

Things you can do Here are some things that are not intuitive, require reading the manual, and will save you huge tracts of time. Listed in order of commitment. You don't have to read the whole manual for any of this; you don't have to memorize anything (just leave the manual open for reference somewhere and you'll remember the important stuff soon enough); you just have to learn enough to understand the basic framework and to know where to look for more info. Geeks will notice a thematic relation between this and the essay of 10 November, q.v.

Stop using the mouse. Most of what you can do with the mouse you can do with the keyboard, such as switching applications ( +), or dealing with the menus (+underlined letter). Not taking your hands off the keyboard is the sort of thing that will save you 1.2 seconds two hundred times a day, for a total of one free coffee break. People used to stand behind me when I was working with multiple applications, amazed at how quickly I could do stuff without using the mouse. They seemed to think it was magic. I thought it was funny.

[And you have learned to touch-type, no? Me, I learned by putting a t-shirt over my hands so I couldn't subconsciously peek.]

Use style sheets. Witin your word processor (e.g., Open Office), there's a feature that gives you a list of header types. Instead of specifying `boldface, larger, new font' for every header, you can instead select `header 3' and the rest is set up for you. This requires initial setup and some cognitive effort, but once you've set up your headers the way you like them, you never have to do it again. When your advisor/boss tells you to change all your italicized headers to underlines, you only have to change it in the style sheet, instead of hunting through a hundred pages looking for all the italicized headers. [In Open Office, this is `the stylist'; no idea what it's called in Word. RTFM.]

Never, ever, write a bibliography by hand. Intuitive, direct method: read the Chicago Manual of Style and learn the rules for italics, punctuation, and ordering. Efficient and effective method: use a bibliography database. LaTeX has bibtex; Open Office has a built-in bibliography manager; for about a hundred dollars, you can purchase EndNote for Word. [The lack of a bib DB is reason enough to dump Word. Thinking about the pain my mother sufferred writing her bibliographies in Word makes me well up.] You have to set up your bibliographic info in a database, then insert formatting codes into your document, and then you're guaranteed that every last comma and period will be in the right place, and that when you refer in text to Schweitzer[15], that Schweitzer is not number sixteen or fourteen in the bib.

Stop using your spreadsheet as a database. Spreadsheets make it easy to instantly create a list of things. The same guy I linked above (Joel on software) worked on the MSFT Excel team. There they were at MSFT, designing amortization wizards (because amortization should be intuitively obvious), and one day they watched some users actually use their stuff, and found that most users just used their software for writing lists; so they added lots of list-making and list-handling features. However, there's actually an entire field of program built from the abstract algebra up for making and organizing lists: databases. As with everything else I'm talking about, databases are conceptually unintuitive, require setting up before you can start writing lists, and will save you hours and hours of your life in the long run. You may have a copy of MSFT Access on your hard drive right now.

[Data geeks: instead of using SAS or whatever, check out SQLite; between that and the GNU Scientific Library, I have the data analysis package I'd always dreamed of. Since 10 November, I really did switch all my models and statistical analyses to C, and the effort has already paid dividends.]

As a matter of fact, dump Word entirely. Even ditch Open Office, which is nicer but still the same ballpark. LaTeX is the best document preparation system in existence, by far. Many authors typeset their books in it. Same as above: initial learning curve, new paradigm, won't get anything done the first few hours, but will save you weeks of pain in the long run.

[There are graphic shells for LaTeX, like Scientific Word. They unabashedly suck. I have pals who write their complex equations in SciWord and then cut and paste the resultant LaTeX codes into their main text-edited document, which seems like the optimal use of these things. People who LaTeX from Windows are fans of WinEdt, which has some nice LaTeX-specific features.]

No, better still, dump Windows entirely. Do I need to say it by now? Windows is aimed at being intuitive from the get-go, while the Unix-type systems are aimed at automating and simplifying your work and then getting the f*ck out of the way. If you have a life sentence with one paradigm or the other, forced to spend a thousand hours a year chained to a keyboard, which would you choose?

Windows people: try Cygwin, which installs a Linux box within Windows, so you can use LaTeX there, and produce beatiful PDFs that you can pretend you wrote in Word. [That's how I'm writing this now, so if a Windows fascist comes by, I can minimize Cygwin and pretend I'm using Windows. In my experience on this machine, Windows & Cygwin coexist nicely.] MacPeople: if you're running OS X, you've already got a Unix box; get to know it and the non-Mac software which will help you do the above.

The commitment here, by the way, is not in installing the OS, since Unix will coexist with Windows or OS X, but in learning the myriad or two of programs which Unix facilitates. If you're still avoiding work, have a look at my essay on Unix and its users, linked at right.