Writing the Same Thing Less

Aug. 7/26

I typed my email address into a form on Tuesday and caught myself mid-keystroke thinking about how many times I've typed that exact string in my life. Thousands, probably. Same twenty-some characters, same finger pattern, over and over since sometime in the nineties. It's the kind of repetition you stop noticing, the way you stop noticing the creak in the third porch step until someone new comes by and asks about it.

TextExpander has been sitting on my Mac Studio for a few weeks now, and what's struck me isn't the big, obvious use — the boilerplate reply, the mailing address — it's how much of my typing is invisible repetition I'd never bothered to count. Snippets for phrases I use in every other email. A shortcut for the disclaimer I put on health posts. Small things. None of them save more than a few seconds each, but seconds add up the way a slow leak empties a stock tank — you don't see it happening until you notice the water's low.

There's a parallel to farming here I keep coming back to. My father used to say the difference between a good year and a bad one was rarely one big decision — it was a hundred small ones, done right or done sloppy, over and over across a season. Typing isn't planting, but the logic holds. You don't fix your days with one dramatic overhaul. You fix them by finding the small thing you do badly, or slowly, or by hand when it could be automatic, and you build a better way to do just that one thing.

What I like about TextExpander, and what I was skeptical of at first, is that it doesn't ask you to redesign your whole workflow. It just sits underneath whatever you're already doing — Mail, Notes, this document I'm writing right now in Ulysses — and waits. You type a short trigger, it fills in the long version. No new app to learn, no new habit to build beyond the noticing. The noticing is the actual work. The software just makes the noticing worth something.

I'll admit I haven't gone all the way with it. I've got maybe six snippets built, and I could probably use twenty. That's fine. This isn't a productivity system I'm selling you. It's a small tool that rewards you in exact proportion to how honestly you look at your own repetition — and most of us, if we're honest, are doing the same handful of things far more often than we realize.

So here's what I'd ask you to try this week, same as I'm asking myself: find one thing you type or do repeatedly — a phrase, a reply, a form you fill out the same way each time — and spend ten minutes building a shortcut for it. Not ten things. One.

What's the one thing you type most often without ever quite noticing you're typing it?

This post reflects personal observation and experience, not professional advice. For questions about food safety, consult foodsafety.gov.