As a freshman in college, I was introduced through friends to a new keyboard layout, named Dvorak. Its layout resembles the traditional "Qwerty" keyboard, but the positions of the letters are modified to optimize for how people type. (Legend has it that the Qwerty layout was designed to make sure that people typed slowly, so as not to beat up the typewriters' innards with extreme speed.)
I was intrigued, and the idea absorbed me for weeks. The elegance of optimizing the keyboard's layout to suit me seemed genius. And I wondered: should I do it?
This was essentially a tradeoff of time. As for the long term, I knew that I would spend a good portion of the next forty years at a computer. At the same time, I was at college, so I had papers to write and programs to code, both requiring a lot of keyboarding. Learning a new keyboard layout could slow me down a lot in the short term, making it more difficult and time-consuming to finish my coursework.
Life is full of these kinds of compromises. Should you work on the proposal due tomorrow, or spend some strategic time planning a more streamlined business process? Plan a lesson for teaching a course, or devise a better process for planning lessons?
In the end, I decided to stick with my trusty Qwerty skills for a while, though later, when I was keyboarding a lot less (only writing letters home once a week, as a missionary), I made the switch—the short-term cost had gone down enough to make the long-term benefit more appealing. And to this day, I still do most all my typing in the Dvorak layout.
The guiding question should be: is it worth more to you to have your current performance in the short term, or increased performance in the long term?
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