As an evolved homosapien, the goal is always to do the heavy lifting with your brain. "Work smarter, not harder" is the familiar adage. At our office the need for manual labor is relatively light, so this applies mostly to the areas where we spend the bulk of our time - on the computer. Clicking. There's so much clicking. Clickity click click clickclickclick. Each of those clicks is a decision, each decision a tiny infinitesimal finger fluctuation.The other day I learned that former Haven-DW nerd Stephen had taken the time to program the mouse to achieve a double click with one click. And that's most amazing thing I've ever heard. This resonates so deeply with nerd culture that I'm afraid I risk alienating most of our readership with this concept leaving the effective audience to mostly myself and members of Haven, who will likely give this a cursory read. I'm going to dive into this anyways because I just cannot help myself.The act of double-clicking is just about as old as modern computing. It signifies a decision. It takes two actions to communicate the decision to the computer. One finger twitch, then less then 500 milliseconds later, another. If you're too slow, no decision is communicated. All modern computer users are so used to this convention that achieving a double-click isn't particularly difficult. But it does take more effort then a single click. So much of what we do in Sketchup requires a double-click, that it can get somewhat onerous. Here's where the fancy mouse kicks in. This genius selection system is why we click so so much. (image: dummies.com)Your typical mouse only has two or three buttons. But we use these fancy mousies which allow all the buttons to be programmable to different actions. So we have one of the buttons execute a double click action. BOOM SINGLE CLICK = DOUBLE CLICK. And it gets worse. Sometimes we need to triple-click. You can single click a regular click and then click the double click click and it will equal a triple click click click! You can go crazy if you want and program the mouse to repeat clicking every 500ms as long as you hold the button down and that gains you essentially the ability to "infinite-click" with a single click. You can just sit there holding down the button while the mouse is just working so so hard clicking the heck out of itself until you are done achieving stuff and then you can get up and take a break having worked so smart and not hard.A screenshot of my settings. Obviously I use "jump" and "grenade" pretty often.I mean, if productive work were as simple as just clicking. But that's the point. The work we do is mostly mental. We need to spend our energy making decisions with our brains and the computer should more or less execute those decisions with minimal effort. By streamlining the work we do, reducing clicks or whatever, we spend more of our time thinking about the design and less time thinking about how to make the software obey. Are you ready to go get a new mouse and double your productivity?
