Caps Lock

Who would have thought the Caps Lock button on your keyboard would cost you money. Now don’t go looking strangely at the keyboard – there is some real truth behind this finding.

Consider how often when you are typing away writing an email, proposal or even some web copy and you notice there are capital letters in the wrong place. I’m not referring to my poor grammar where I have a reputation for inserting random unnecessary caps in the middle of a sentence or in a word that I am trying to emphasise.

Consider a time when you were lost in typing – if you are anything like me you haven’t mastered the art of touch typing and therefore spend great amounts of time looking at the keyboard rather than the screen. With this in mind, in theory there should be nothing on the page that you haven’t asked to be there as you are looking at the keyboard more than the screen, alas this is not the case.

Consider letter usage on a keyboard – the letter ‘a’ is a vowel and because of this it is used in a high proportion of words, it is typed a lot. Now think about the fat fingered typist or the larger than average digit and which key is situated next to the ‘a’ on the standard keyboard – yes, the Caps Lock. Every time a poorly placed keystroke is struck there is a great potential for the Caps Lock to be switched on accidently and you have to back track, recover and amend.

So what? I hear you cry – what happens and why should I care? Let’s look at this briefly from another angle, in front of your keyboard at the moment there will be a number of items sitting on your desk, items ranging from notepads and pens to business cards, headphones, coffee mug, mobile phone and your lunch, to name but a few. While you are sitting focused on the keyboard and the monitor you receive an email or a text message on your mobile phone, cleverly you know about not having the reminders popping up on your computer screen as that would distract you but you’ve never gotten around to switching it off on your mobile. Your train of thought has been broken, the green or red dot is now flashing and you need to finish whatever you are working on as quickly as possible so you can check what the message might say. Productivity is kicked into space, your focus has gone and it will now take you anything from 30 seconds to 30 minutes to get back to where you were at.

So removing all things that distract you from your primary focus is a good thing! How often do you have to back space, delete or go back to and amend parts of your paragraph because you have added in random capital letters? For some of you this may never happen at all and you have no idea why I am making such a fuss about it, by contrast there are those of you that know exactly what I am referring to and the costs in time and flow. Moving backwards through your text to make amendments does not take long with each key stroke taking just a millisecond of time, but consider this how often do you do it per paragraph, per document, per hour, per day, per week – this all adds up. In the ongoing increasing demand on our time and effort reclaiming lost time can have massive impact on personal and professional productivity.

If this has tickled you might like to know that there is a whole movement that is trying to get the Caps Lock button removed from keyboards – www.capsoff.org  If this is a problem for you then take a few moments to look up on any ‘quality’ search engine clever ways to create different short cuts to your keyboard keys and amendments to their functionality and this can remove the issue for you. Don’t suffer in silence, there is a way around this for you. Of course you could always invest in your personal training and development by taking a touch typing course!