Get Everything Done

Remember when texting first got started? Phones had Num Pads only, no QWERTY keyboards, nor auto-complete. You had to tap the "7" key three times to get an "R", and pause a moment before tapping the "7" key four more times to get an "S". Often providers charged per character for text messages. As a result, to save time, money, and irritation, people would abbreviate the heck out of everything.

Yeah, Easyscript is like that. http://www.amazon.com/EasyScript-Express-Learn-Notes-Matter/dp/1893726002

Easyscript is shorthand (in English) made easy. Rather than learning a new alphabet of heiroglyphics like Gregg Shorthand (the squiggles that secretaries of old used to take dictation), Easyscript simply teaches 5 general rules by which you can abbreviate virtually any word in the English language. When you read it, it looks like those old TXT MSGS from back in the day.

The most powerful part of this method are the prefix and suffix abbreviations. Rather than abbreviating a word to a unique combination of letters, Easyscript has several one-letter abbreviations for prefixes and suffixes. For example: "pre-, per-, pro-" all abbriviate to "p", and "-tion, -sion, and -ation" all abbreviate to "h". Therefore pre-sent-ation abbreviates to "psenth". You can easily abbreviate a large swath of the entire English vocabulary by memorizing a few prefix and suffix abbreviations.

My experience with Easyscript? I learned it in an afternoon, and from there it only needed some practice. In college, I had plenty of opportunity for practice. I had a lecture where the professor would put a lengthy slide up on the screen and sit silently while the class transcribed the whole thing verbatim. Then she would flip the slide and the class would copy the next one. After the class copied verbatim all the slides for the day, she would go back through them and discuss them. All her test questions were directly from the notes, just in question form. Therefore, if you copied it all in class, and studied what you wrote, you'd ace all the tests. I sat next to a friend with a laptop. I used Easyscript on paper, he used his laptop, and we'd race to see who could finish transcribing the page first. Half the time he won, half the time I won - but it was always close.

Consider a paper based implementation of any of Mark's systems. Think of all the writing and re-writing you do in that system, and add to it the general notes you would normally take. Then cut the time it takes to write and re-write to about half. Would that be valuable to you?

It sure has helped me, and I thought I'd share.