Observe your fuck-ups

I made a wonderful boring accidental discovery at work today. When using a web browser in Windows, Alt+D selects all text in the address bar. I did a little jig to celebrate. 

Like I said, it’s totally boring. It’s relatively trivial, too, and I’m sure it’s not news to some people. But the way I discovered it illustrates a lesson worth keeping in mind. 

I was trying to press Alt+S to navigate to a particular tab in a database I spend a lot of my time working in. My finger slipped and I pressed Alt+D. It took me only a split second to see I wasn’t getting to the tab I wanted, so I more-or-less unconsciously corrected the mistake in my second attempt. After I had got where I wanted, though, I realized that during that split second when I was correcting, the address bar had turned blue. After poking around for a few seconds, I figured out it happened from pressing Alt+D. And I was happy, because I like to use quick keys as much as possible, and I had previously wondered whether there was a quick key for selecting all in the address bar. Hooray!

Obviously, this new trick is going to save me only a negligible amount of time in my web browsing. But this is far from the first time something like this has happened. I’m routinely showing my colleagues faster, more efficient ways to manipulate the systems we use—systems they’ve been using for a decade and I’ve been using for 18 months. They ask me how I find all these clever shortcuts. The answer is that I pay attention to my mistakes.

Everyone always says to learn from your mistakes. This advice is fairly easy to follow when our mistakes come from conscious choices and take place in a measurable amount of time. If you make a bad investment and lose thousands of dollars, that’s a mistake you can study. But a lot of our mistakes happen unconsciously and fast—slipping and pressing the wrong buttons, for example. We don’t study these mistakes because we usually don’t know what we did wrong, and we do know how to immediately remedy the mistake.

You mean to press a key combination that will print your document, but you accidentally press two keys that close the program. Fuck! You go and reopen your document and try again. But wait a second. What keys did you hit that closed the program? It was frustrating in the moment, but maybe it’s something you could use later.

This is how I’ve discovered most of the slick navigation that has eluded my more experienced colleagues. In my haste, I routinely mess up and do things I don’t mean to.  Nine times out of ten, the mistaken click or button combination does nothing at all, or at least nothing I didn’t already know about. But once in a while it will do something unexpected, and I will retrace my steps to see what I did and how I might employ it in the future.

My colleagues don’t do this. Their routine mistakes are just another of the many frustrations facing them each day. They would benefit from thinking forward to circumstances in which the “mistake” might be useful. On an individual level, none of the shortcuts I’ve found amount to a significant increase in productivity. But they add up to eventually make a difference.

More than anything, I think it’s just the right attitude to have. We all have so many routines in our lives. There must be times during those routines when we make mistakes that could actually improve other parts of our lives, but which we take no time to examine. Who knows what we might be missing?