The right spot on the toolbar
Jul. 11th, 2021 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
readerjaneI live in a cloud of distraction, sort of like Charles Schultz's Pigpen lives in a cloud of dust. It's not ever going to go away.
By paying more attention to things that frustrate me, I'm figuring out more coping strategies. Yay for middle-aged wisdom. Like: when things aren't where I expect them to be, I have to stop and look for them. This makes me lose my train of thought, which makes it much easier to lose track of what I was going to do next. And even once I've picked up that thread again, a critical step may have been lost in the process.
So it's helpful to *not* need to stop and think. When my keys are always in the same purse pocket, it's easier to get out the door without forgetting that the first errand needs to be the post office, so that one place which doesn't accept online payments, gets their bill paid.
This applies to icons on my computer taskbar too. When they're in the order that I'm used to (email, chat and text on the left, then browsers, then office applications, then tools like image editor, calculator and remote desktop, and finally database apps on the right), I don't need to stop and hunt for them. And the more I can relegate the little stuff to muscle memory, the fewer times per day I'll need to stop and think about what I was going to do next. The fewer things I'll forget to do, or think I already did them when I haven't. And the less time I'll spend feeling like I'm stoopid, careless, irresponsible, hopeless.
My employer locks down our browsers so we can't choose our own homepage. The browser always opens to the company intranet landing page. I loathe that landing page. It's aggressively animated. The search function sucks. One needs Ariadne's yarn to find one's way back to any useful resource. I've typed up my own handmade file of html links as bookmarks which I can see all at a glance on one screen. I figured out how to create a shortcut that launches a browser, then goes directly to my html bookmark file. Oh, and maximizes the screen to block out all the distractions around the window's border. Now I can go directly to the resource I need without hunting, and without dropping a to-do item.
But even though I had that shortcut at the correct spot on my toolbar, the browser would still open way to the right side of the toolbar. Which meant when another application was in focus and I needed to get back to that browser, I'd aim for the spot it was supposed to be, realize it's not there, hunt across the toolbar until I found it, and as often as not, forget why I wanted to go there.
Today I worked out that the toolbar icons always return to the order in which I created them, rather than the spot I dragged them to. So the answer is to create them in the order I want them to stay. I built a folder with all the shortcuts I want on my toolbar. Then I un-pinned everything that was currently on the toolbar, and re-pinned them in the proper order.
Strategizing doesn't keep me from forgetting things. But it greatly reduces the frequency, enough that when I catch myself having missed a step, it's a "whoops, fix it" instead of an "aRRRRGghghgh, why does this keep happening?!?".
By paying more attention to things that frustrate me, I'm figuring out more coping strategies. Yay for middle-aged wisdom. Like: when things aren't where I expect them to be, I have to stop and look for them. This makes me lose my train of thought, which makes it much easier to lose track of what I was going to do next. And even once I've picked up that thread again, a critical step may have been lost in the process.
So it's helpful to *not* need to stop and think. When my keys are always in the same purse pocket, it's easier to get out the door without forgetting that the first errand needs to be the post office, so that one place which doesn't accept online payments, gets their bill paid.
This applies to icons on my computer taskbar too. When they're in the order that I'm used to (email, chat and text on the left, then browsers, then office applications, then tools like image editor, calculator and remote desktop, and finally database apps on the right), I don't need to stop and hunt for them. And the more I can relegate the little stuff to muscle memory, the fewer times per day I'll need to stop and think about what I was going to do next. The fewer things I'll forget to do, or think I already did them when I haven't. And the less time I'll spend feeling like I'm stoopid, careless, irresponsible, hopeless.
My employer locks down our browsers so we can't choose our own homepage. The browser always opens to the company intranet landing page. I loathe that landing page. It's aggressively animated. The search function sucks. One needs Ariadne's yarn to find one's way back to any useful resource. I've typed up my own handmade file of html links as bookmarks which I can see all at a glance on one screen. I figured out how to create a shortcut that launches a browser, then goes directly to my html bookmark file. Oh, and maximizes the screen to block out all the distractions around the window's border. Now I can go directly to the resource I need without hunting, and without dropping a to-do item.
But even though I had that shortcut at the correct spot on my toolbar, the browser would still open way to the right side of the toolbar. Which meant when another application was in focus and I needed to get back to that browser, I'd aim for the spot it was supposed to be, realize it's not there, hunt across the toolbar until I found it, and as often as not, forget why I wanted to go there.
Today I worked out that the toolbar icons always return to the order in which I created them, rather than the spot I dragged them to. So the answer is to create them in the order I want them to stay. I built a folder with all the shortcuts I want on my toolbar. Then I un-pinned everything that was currently on the toolbar, and re-pinned them in the proper order.
Strategizing doesn't keep me from forgetting things. But it greatly reduces the frequency, enough that when I catch myself having missed a step, it's a "whoops, fix it" instead of an "aRRRRGghghgh, why does this keep happening?!?".
no subject
Date: 2021-07-11 09:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-11 11:07 pm (UTC)I may well get up the courage to do so someday. It would require overcoming a whole heap of aversions, though.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-11 11:23 pm (UTC)Yeah, this was a . . . six-year work-in-progress for C? Something like that. If it helps, she never wants to go without meds again and wonders what took her so long.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-14 02:39 am (UTC)It's enough to drive an old lady mad.