To Click or not to Click

This week has been really busy. I feel like I have accomplished exactly nothing all week. But I have been insanely busy just doing things. There are people all over talking about Getting Things Done, and while I suspect that the system is a good one, I know that I’ll never do it, no matter how much time or money I spend on getting things in place to make it happen. I just don’t use things that way. I would really just rather, well, get things done.

So I’ve been trying to tackle my huge pile of tasks, and in the process, a lot of questions have come up about the way I work. Not questions that people ask me – seeing as how I work from home and am alone for many of those hours each day, having someone ask would be odd to say the least. But questions that I ask myself – is this a good way to do it, does this action make sense or can I do it better? Well, I have no clue. I’m just trying to answer those questions.

One of the things that bugs me silly is the Start Menu in Windows XP. I love the start menu. I love that I can get to everything I need in relatively few clicks. But I also hate that, as I’m trying to get to one particular option, the dang thing pops open a sub-menu that I don’t want, which I then have to get rid of to get back to where I was and then it happens with the next item on the list, and finally I get where I want to be and the dang thing takes 3 seconds to display.

I know, 3 seconds doesn’t seem like a lot of time. But when you’re in motion, and trying to accomplish something, having to sit and pause for 3 seconds is a freaking eternity. Half the time, by the time the menu does pop up, I’ve thought of five other things to do, at least one of which often gets done before the menu comes up and I forget all about where I was.

This can’t be efficient. So I am trying a new setting. In the properties for the start menu is an option innocuously labeled Open submenus when I pause on them with my mouse. I always wondered why someone would not want that setting – of course I want things to pop up when I sit there. But for whatever reason, I decided to try turning it off to see if it got rid of the aggravating delays I was hitting by the wrong menu displaying as I passed it on my way to the real destination.

Turns out it works. No longer do I get those annoying menus popping up prior to the moment that I want them. Of course, I now spend twice as long waiting for the dang thing to display before I remember that I turned them off and then another couple of seconds realizing that means that I need to take action, and still another couple of seconds before it hits me that I need to actually click the mouse button to make the menu open up for me. But hey. At least it’s a different problem today. Maybe it will work out once I get used to it. Then again, maybe not.