Once you have eliminated the wasted time and non-transcription activities, and you're in your chair working, and you're in a groove with it, getting comfortable, feeling secure, it's time to work on never making another typo again and never having to backspace to change anything.
I mean anything. Zip. Nada. You want to make NO changes.
Don't even tell me that you have a spellchecker, so it's ok. Or that you have a computer and backspacing isn't a problem. It's not ok, and it is a problem.
There are two prongs to this. First, you want to slow your keying speed to the point that you no longer make any errors whatsoever. You will gain a huge amount of time this way and also decrease the amount of keying work you do. You can use this "saved" work to do more compensable work, or you can consider it a lessening of repetitive motion that would later cause injury.
Second, you want to practice listening ahead so far that you hear the whole of what the physician is saying, so that when you type it, it's for keeps. Imagine that you're back in 1970 (before my time, but I've heard horror stories about it) typing on a 10-carbon form. To make corrections, you had to scrape the carbon wax off all the forms with a knife. Really grim.
You don't want to make changes now anymore than you would have then, because for every letter you backspace to correct, you do several times the amount of work. Type wrong letter, discover it, backspace several times, erase, retype, arrow forward. Look at all that needless effort. It would have been easier to listen ahead and type slowly enough that you did not make the error in the first place!
That's your next task — to slow down enough that you make NO TYPOS and to learn to listen ahead A WHOLE SENTENCE so you type it once for keeps.
Most new MTs now, because they have good transcribing software or machines, hear a word and stop to type it. Very bad.
You need to listen ahead for the whole sentence, understand it in context (really, it'll get a lot easier), stop the playback, then start typing the sentence, then, while still typing, beginning to listen to the next sentence.
You'll get into a rolling wave-like rhythm. Eventually, if you do it right, you'll often be able to be listening nearly the whole time and typing nearly the whole time.
And the whole time you need to avoid making any errors. Go slowly enough that you make no errors and have to make no changes.
There is a little automatic-backspace on playback. It's the thing that rewinds the tape or the dictation a bit every time you stop. Believe it or not, it is a major source of wasted time. You want to set it so that you hear no more than one word, and preferably only one syllable or two after you stop.
You want to hear only enough to be sure that nothing "dropped out." In the olden days, MTs didn't have this and had to stop only in big pauses. The machines stopped so slowly that when you started up again, you'd be way ahead of where you stopped, so if there were words in there, you'd lose them. Now, the tape stops quickly and will rewind a bit.
You should NOT be using this to re-listen to what you just transcribed. Set it short enough that you only hear a syllable--just enough that you know where you are.
We're now getting into actual listening and transcribing methods that waste time. There are more of them, but these are good for a start.
Try working on these for a few weeks and see if you can begin to get in a groove, too. As always, keep track of your production before and after, and let us know how much these particular tips helped you.
We have three:
1. Typing slowly enough that you make no errors.
2. Listening ahead far enough that you have no corrections to make.
3. Setting your auto-backspace very short, so that you're not wasting time listening to the dictation again every time you stop.
_
Redpen
"Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything."
Wyatt Earp
Originally published at MT Chat
on October 12, 2005
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