I was in a meeting today where one person (who just happened to be closest to the computer in the room) acted as secretary and kept notes. It was a meeting where the exact words used in the document were important and had to be edited until everyone in the meeting agreed on the wording.
Two minutes into the meeting I realized we were going slower than we could if the person on the computer were using more efficient techniques. I noticed right away that instead of Shift-Ctrl-Right Arrow, the editor used the mouse to highlight the word immediately in front of cursor. Not only did this take longer, the first letter of the word was missed with the click and drag of the mouse… and the whole process had to be restarted. At that point I started keeping track at the TSPY, but in the end I had to add another parameter.
There were twenty people in the meeting. The extra time used by our editor didn’t just cost the editor a few minutes. It cost all of us a few minutes. During the two hour meeting we could have saved about eight minutes with all the TSPY amounts added together. With twenty people in our group, we wasted a total of 8 x 20 minutes. That’s two hours and forty minutes.
When I am in front of other people, I don’t like to waste their time. Using technology in an efficient way is one more way to give extra time to the whole group.