Writing the Same Thing Less

I typed the same sentence four times last week before I noticed I was doing it. Something about foodborne illness risk, the same four lines I tack onto any post that touches diet or health, worded almost identically each time, my fingers finding the same path across the keyboard like a tractor settling into a rut it made itself. That's when it occurred to me — I'd been doing this for months and never once asked why.

There's a point where a repeated motion stops being part of the work and starts being the work, quietly, without asking permission. Sharpening a tool is useful. Sharpening it three times before you've cut anything is a different thing entirely, and it's easy to slide from one into the other without noticing the line was ever crossed.

So this week I finally sat down with TextExpander, which I'd installed on the Mac Studio some time back and mostly ignored. The idea is simple enough — you type a short string, a few characters, and it expands into whatever block of text you've stored ahead of time. I built one snippet, for that disclaimer I mentioned, the one that reminds readers that general food safety information doesn't substitute for guidance from a doctor or a source like foodsafety.gov when it comes to their own health. Four lines, gone in an instant, the same every time, no more hunting for whether I'd phrased it the same way I did last Tuesday.

It took about ten minutes to set up. That's the part I keep turning over. Ten minutes against — I did the math roughly — probably three or four hours over the course of a year, just on that one paragraph. And that's the smallest example I could find. I've got email sign-offs I retype, a note I leave for editors about photo credits, a boilerplate line about republishing rights on Medium. All of it sitting there, unexamined, costing me a little bit of the day, every day, in a way that never feels large enough in the moment to fix.

There's a particular kind of blindness that comes from small repeated tasks. A weed here and there doesn't look like much. It's only when you stand at the end of the row and look back that you see the pattern, see how much ground the thing has actually covered while you weren't paying attention. Typing is like that. You don't notice the cost because it's paid in such small coin, a few seconds fifty times a week, and the total never presents itself as a bill.

I don't know that I've found all the places where this is happening. I suspect I haven't. What I've found is that the noticing is the hard part — once you see the rut, filling it in is the easy half of the job. The harder half is staying alert enough to keep spotting new ones, since the mind that types four hundred words a day is awfully good at not noticing what it repeats.

What do you find yourself typing over and over without ever stopping to ask why?