This thread, which is for everyone (not just Andrews students) is going to give a series of exercises to help you discover the "secret" to productivity. Every few days, Redpen will post another in a series of exercises for you to do. After some responses have been posted and she thinks everyone is done with the previous exercise, she'll post another.

When you focus on the expander, on the furniture, and on the time, you are focusing on distractors. These things are not the main issues, they're just what everyone keeps talking about, making it seem like they're somehow important.

You are, in essence, saying that you could do it if you had a better expander, or better furniture, or if you worked a different shift.

Another popular distractor is "typing faster." You think "I could be more productive if I typed faster."

So, you get a better expander, you get new furniture, you move to a different shift, and you practice typing like a madman.

And what happens? Your productivity stays the same. In fact, it might even drop, because typing like a madman only produces more errors.

I can tell you what truly does affect your productivity, but nearly all of you won't believe me. Or, you'll be unable to see what I'm talking about, so you'll ignore it.

Productivity doesn't just "happen," either. It doesn't "happen" any more than a runner just "happens" to get into the Olympics. Do you think that's just natural giftedness? That they just ran that fast all along? No, far from it. They had to work to get that fast. They had to practice. They had to analyze what they were doing and figure out ways to get a little bit of speed here, a little bit there, and they had to build up stamina and discipline.

Are you doing that? Have you analyzed what you do all day while transcribing? Probably not. If you're like most people, you're waiting for a guru to tell you the secret to success. (What expander? What furniture? What shift?)

"If you tell me the secret, I'll be successful. I can't do it on my own."

But, the truth is that no guru can tell you what the secret is, because there isn't any secret. There is no magic technique. (No magic expander, no magic furniture . . . )

Even if there was a secret, you'd never believe it if the guru told you, because you wouldn't understand. That's how it is with these things.

You have to be the one to discover it for yourself. And it's not a secret. In fact, it's staring you in the face every day. You aren't seeing it because things are getting in the way. Your beliefs about transcription and working get in the way and there is a flood of information coming at you that gets in the way and there is a whole bunch of life that gets in the way.

Let's try something different this time. Rather than me telling you the solution, let's see if we can't discover it for ourselves.

I'm going to ask you to make some observations about your work life and then post them. Anybody can participate - you don't have to be an Andrews grad to do this.

It'll take a few days to do this, because I'm going to give you something to do every day or so. After you do it, you can share the results. Even if you do not want to share in public, please do the exercises. Then, read what others have shared.

The first thing I want you to do is tape a piece of paper to your desk. As you are working tomorrow, or tonight, I want you to write down everything you do that is NOT transcribing. Just make a running list - do not organize it in any way. Just write one thing after another.

What sort of things will you be writing?

0800 Started work
emptied trash
cleaned off desk
looked for missing book
read email from work
read personal email
vacuumed
answered phone (from?)
made phone call (to?)
answered door
child interrupted
let dog out/walked dog
took drink of coffee
took bite of food

Included in this, I want you to write down:

- Every time you research something by googling it or looking on the internet.

- Every time you research something by looking it up in a reference book.

- Every time you write a new term in your little red notebook, or whatever other method you use (not saying this is bad, just that you should write it down).

- All the time you spend learning new things while working (again, not necessarily bad - just write it down)

I also want you to write down every time you discover yourself looking for a book or something on your desk or in your computer. If you can't reach for it and grab it instantly - without looking for it - write it down.

Finally, write down the time you spent exercising. I want actual times on that - when you started and how long.

When you have done this for a typical workday, post it below. If you saw some things to change already, let us know what it is so we'll know that you've already cut some things out. (Who wants to confess that they spent an hour of work time watching Jerry Springer!)

And, please do not tell me that you don't have time to do this. If you're feeling threatened by this, and about 90% of you will be real unhappy just at the thought of doing this, that's what you're going to try to tell me. So, if you don't want to do this for whatever reason, just don't do it. No need to explain. It'll be between you and yourself.

What usually happens with this exercise? People are so disturbed by the thought that they might discover something that they won't do it. ("Uh oh! I might learn the secret and my life will CHANGE! That's scary! I'd better not even look so I can stay in my comfortable life.") It's a lot less threatening to just continue looking for "the perfect expander" or "the better job."

Now, to answer your question about what expander I used. Used, because I no longer transcribe (I code now, remember) except on rare occasions when a physician pounces on me and begs for a favor, and when that happens I end up doing it live. However, when I did transcribe, I hit 200 lines per hour within 3 months and I worked for years at 1800 to 2000 lines a day. I had an expander for part of that time, and I truly believed it was the secret. But, one day the hospital where I worked switched to an EMR that didn't have an expander. It didn't even have canned text and the spellchecker wasn't medical and it took so long to rumble through a single page of a document (yup - one page at a time) and it took so long to make a correction (yup - the lines did not wrap, so if you changed anything you often had to retype whole paragraphs, and if it didn't fit on the page then you had even more trouble) that you effectively had no ability to spellcheck and no ability to make any changes. I thought my productivity would drop horribly, but it didn't. After a few weeks, I still managed to do 1800 to 2000 and even 2400 lines per day (6.5 available time).

That's how I know it's not the expander or the furniture or anything else that people usually think is important.

My purpose in the exercise above is to help show you what IS important.

I can tell you right off that Dixie already knows the secret. If she chooses to share her list with us, you will all be most enlightened.

Oh, also, future exercises will ask you to use a timer, so if you have one, drag it out. It doesn't have to be an expensive one, but it should count up as well as down, and one that will time two things at once might be handy. Even a sports timer (the kind that coaches use) will help. You can get one at Walmart for cheap.

Don't worry too much about backsliding. I think once you see how much it cost you, and how much faster you can get your work done, and how much less distracted you are, you'll develop willpower to rival Dixie's.

A lot of the time, we have trouble getting motivated to do something if we can't see that it does us any good. If we have reinforcement by way of being able to see concrete progress - especially a lot of progress - that we didn't have to exert any extra effort to achieve, it's very easy for us to make it a habit because we WANT to do it.

That works out to be a 32% increase in salary? You were doing 170 lph, increased it by 54 lph, which is a 32% increase.

Yes, I think so. If you had been making $10 before, you gave yourself a raise to $13.20. Am I right? Somebody who's an engineer or something? Any geeks out there?

Or, looking at another way, if you worked for 6 hours, you upped your line count 324 lines. Anybody need 324 lines a day to meet their goals? Or 1620 per week? That's $23 a day or $115 a week extra . . .

So, for the next few days, I want you to keep that same type of list. Make a list at the top of the things you are eliminating, so you're clear on what has to go. Then, as you work, still write down everything that crops up as a time-waster.

This time, though, you will start seeing the time-wasters as they crop up, so if you choose to skip them, write it on your list anyway (as something you skipped). Put a little column over on the side somewhere, or start another list, to write down things you wanted to do but didn't and which you'll need to do later. A reminder list.

Remember to keep track of your productivity this time. Every day, as you eliminate things, we want to be able to see how it affects your productivity.

Kelli, "listening ahead" is, literally, listening ahead. When transcribing machines would not stop/start easily or do that nice little "auto-backspace" by which you can listen to the last few words every time you start the tape running again, you would lose a chunk of the text every time you stopped. It got lost in the grinding to a halt and the accelerating up - the voice didn't play during those times.

To avoid losing this text, you had to plan ahead. You could only stop during a pause. Usually, this occurred at the end of a sentence.

It was also horribly difficult to correct mistranscriptions, because you used carbon sets. You either had to retype the whole page or scrape small errors off all the pages with a scalpel blade. (I'm not old enough to have used either of these things, but I had an unfortunate opportunity to explore the concept with a digital Dictaphone which was set to no auto-backspace - it chunked out a full 2 or 3 syllables.)

The only way to save yourself was to listen so far ahead that you could plan ahead to stop after a sentence AND so far ahead that you heard all the changes the doctor was going to make.

Today, most new MTs type word-by-word as they listen. They think that computers allow edits so easily that this is "ok." It's not ok. It's really, really bad.

This is not only inefficient, because you don't hear the changes and have to correct them, but it's dangerous. If you are not listening far enough ahead to understand what you are hearing - you're just parrot-typing along - you have much more trouble understanding what you hear and you often get the wrong notion of what is being said, so you type nonsense.

One of the main problems student MTs have is parrot-typing. They become frustrated because they can't get "a word." Well, most MTs can't get just "a word" - the only way to transcribe is to hear enough of the material that you comprehend THE MEANING of it, which you then WRITE. That's different from hear-a-word, type-a-word.

The thing to do, then, is to listen to the first sentence in full, stop the tape in the pause at the end, and then start typing it. At that point, you're writing, not parrot-typing. You will have to think more and plan more, but eventually you'll get the hang of it.

Halfway through that first sentence, you start the tape up again and listen to the next sentence while typing the rest of the first. Yes, this is doing two things at once. It's not easy, but if you practice it, you'll become able to do it.

That's listening ahead. Literally, listen ahead one sentence. You hear one in full, then begin typing it. Halfway through, start listening to the next. On and on like that.

After a while, you'll get a rhythm going and this will seem very easy.

If you don't see a need to do this, you'll never be able to do it. If you're not patient and if you do not practice this consistently and really work to develop the skill, you won't be able to do it.

But, before you get ahead of yourself, it's important to take this one step at a time.

Do you see that I gave everyone an exercise and then left them alone for oh, gee, hmmm, several months to work on it?

Waaay up at the top, I believe I mentioned that nobody ever believes what I was going to tell them, so I was going to let everyone discover it for themselves. I think I also mentioned that nobody ever wanted to do the initial exercise to discover their problems - they'd rush to the end to get those "Redpen hints" which would save them.

The Hint for the Day is to go back to page 1, read my posts there, see what the initial exercise is, and then do it. It'll take you several days.

You don't even need to read beyond those first posts. In fact, you shouldn't. Just do the exercise.

Then, when you've completed it, come back and share what you discovered.

I'll bet that you suddenly start seeing why it is taking you 11 hours to do 758 lines.

You're doing 69 lines per hour. That is 1/3 of what you should be capable of.

When an MT is transcribing 69 lines per hour, she's not transcribing continuously, but at a stupendously slow rate. No. She's transcribing at a RATE of 200 lines per hour, but she's not transcribing for 2/3 of the hour.

Seriously. That's the problem. You are not actually transcribing for 40 minutes out of every hour. You're doing something else, and it's not transcription. What is it?

If you will go back to page 1 and do the exercise I gave there, it will reveal what you are doing in those 40 minutes. Knowledge is power. You can then begin to control your working life.

Try that and let us know how it's going!

Really, it's a fun exercise. Very informative!

How's everyone else doing with this now? By now . . . and I'm sorry to have had to vanish like that, but duty called . . . you should have had some success. What's your productivity looking like now and how have things changed for you??