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Look it up on productivitytalk sm [2008-05-15]
Cheryl Flanders has put step-by-step instructions on there.
Productivitytalk.com
Go to productivitytalk.com and found out [2007-10-04]
s
Not OP, but try productivitytalk.com. nm [2007-09-07]
nm
Expanders [2008-11-09]
Try productivitytalk.com
Hopefully others will weigh in. ?? SM [2008-10-25]
Hi, 135. My first thought is that you may need to figure out what else might be contributing to your low line count. I say that because I'm a slow typist too but with an Expander quickly improved beyond that. So, sorry if any of these are ridiculously inapplicable, but here go some thoughts for anyone trying to get faster:
New to typing? Butt in chair typing away as many hours a day as you can stand until speed is good enough, tiring though it is.
New to medical language? Same as above. The more hours each day, the faster you get good (but the progress in this is obvious and exciting to see).
Use reference books instead of computer references? Books take way too much time to get out and thumb through, and you can't do wild-card and most associated-word searches. Get computer dictionary and medical language programs and get in the habit of constantly googling for terms, often even before the programs.
Type and then go back to adjust punctuation? I saw people do that on my first job, and my heart ached for them because I knew they were doomed to do poorly or fail outright if they couldn't learn to punctuate as they went, continually putting more words on paper.
Slow reader, and maybe slow punctuator? Practice reading. For weeks until you're faster and written-language patterns become second nature. Reader's Digest has a nice crisp minimal writing/punctuation style that's good to absorb, but any books or magazines enjoyable enough to read a lot will help tremendously over time.
Killer high standards? I also worked with a woman who focused on every report as if it was her critically ill mother's. Another major production and income killer as there are drastically diminishing returns on time spent achieving perfection, and no one will thank you for it, neither hospitals paying by the hour, nor production-pay outfits. I suspect a few of the people on this forum who say they cannot make a living have this problem. Most companies require 0% critical mistakes but are happy to accept 98%+ overall accuracy. Over 98% is the goal. And in editing, punctuation corrections are made as needed for reading clarity, not for pretty. This also can be hard emotionally, but it's something else we aren't thanked, much less paid, for. A lot of us have our personal obsessions we can't stop fixing, but settle on a couple of indulgences and relax the others to industry standards.
Problems with a bad work platform? Get another job as soon as you can find it.
Set a goal of $150 for 8 hours now. Once you have that you can start paring your shift down to 6 hours, then even less, to achieve it.
Nothing else is coming to mind right now, so if none of those apply, head straight to productivitytalk.com with notepad in hand. There are lots of InstantText gurus sharing away over there.
And once you bump that production up a bit, definitely find someone who'll pay you a higher base rate AND offers a good incentive pay scale. The incentive pay for higher daily production should get you handily to your $150 goal.
Best wishes.
Carla, imagine yourself scanning down SM [2008-10-07]
a page of text, quickly tapping a single key or a combination of two or three keys as you go to drop in corrections like:
Catheter was TO The catheter was
he TO she
dizzy, nauseated. TO dizzy and nauseated.
the patient; Reported TO the patient reported
q.i.d. to 4 times a day
That sort of thing is a large part of what editing is, (the other part, of course, is checking proper medicalese, medications, dosages, etc.) so the faster and easier you can make all these repetitive corrections, the happier you'll be and the more money you'll make.
At first the reports will likely be very messy and require a lot of typing, but as the SR learns to put out good copy, the idea is to eventually be able to speed up the dictation as fast as it can clearly be heard and seldom have to actually stop the audio while you make a correction.
So, this means entering lots of commands in your Expander with very short abbreviations for correcting punctuation, changing case of letters, and replacing common mistakes the computer insists on making over and over with correct ones.
Regarding that last, a quick command that replaces accession with the occlusions the computer keeps insisting on using will save you from a lot of aggravation expressed on this forum. Just for instance, for this type of correction I use my standard abbreviation for the word I want to change TO and end it with a letter assigned to correction commands (to differentiate it from the regular expansion of that word). Hope that makes sense, but there are lots of good systems.
I would suggest choosing a single key to change the case of a letter up and down; you'll do that hundreds of times a day. A key typed twice (jj, kk, etc) or an easy pair (fj) are nice quick corrections for common mistakes, but not as quick as j and k are--save your single keys for the MOST frequent corrections. Like backing one space, inserting a comma, then jumping back to the next word--another hundreds-a-day correction.
And so on, but go check productivitytalk.com for techniques. I'm strictly an amateur compared to people there and have several of my best expansions thanks to their generosity. The offerings go from simple to very elaborate commands to reduce whole series of strokes we do all the time to a single step.
Have fun. Since you're preparing in advance, I suspect you'll end up doing well at this.
You can pay and download on line. But SM [2008-08-17]
do your homework, research here and on productivitytalk.com, and then and buy the one that sounds the best for you. Don't let price be a factor in your decision. They're not that expensive and a professional-grade program is THAT important to your work.
Ditto what Deb says, although I haven't seen SM [2008-08-11]
that site. What program DO you have? Another site is productivitytalk.com. You can either borrow an abbreviation system from one of these sites and start building your own abbreviations or actually download many thousands of ready-made abbreviations to your program.
In any case, I'd recommend starting with either one, rather than totally reinventing the wheel for yourself. Eventually you'll end up with 50K entries and more, and accommodating and remembering them requires system.
Whichever, enjoy. You're going to love it.
XX,, I promise you can double that typing speed quickly SM [2008-08-04]
then triple it, and eventually quadruple it with an Expander used right. You're doing something wrong, but I assure you once you know what it is you can correct it easily and immediately start seeing the benefits having your expander do much of the typing for you.
To begin with, though, most of your increased speed is going to come NOT from inserting blocks of text standard for one dictator but rather abbreviations for the individual words, phrases, and headings you're constantly typing anyway.
For instance, I type RPSV for reports that. It wasn't hard to remember. Variations of report are used constantly, so RP became report, RPS reports, RPG reporting, RPD reported. V is that. AO is also for me, and F is he, so he also reported that becomes FAORPDV and he also reports that becomes FAORSV. This is the first time I've seen those on paper; you don't memorize the long forms, just string together the constantly used short ones. Amazingly quickly your fingers remember (muscle memory?) so you don't have think about it.
Smartype is probably not the best expander but fine to start on since you have it. Later on, better programs have conversion programs that will allow you to move your abbreviations to that program.
In the meantime, go to productivitytalk.com and start reading and asking questions. If you wish, you can import a whole ready-made dictionary compiled by an MT abbreviations.
But you could also take another tack for now just as a trial. Instead of trying to use Smartype's abbreviations, if that's what you're doing, enter just a handful of your own that you can get very familiar with. I love these that I use and am happy to pass them on to anyone who wishes to try them:
Make T expand to the
F expand to he
G expand to him
K expand to she
J expand to her
T expand to the
B to but
Q to who
R to right
L to left
F to for
D for and
That's more than enough for now. If you do this, I think in a couple of days you'll be loving how a quick tap of the finger drops in all these little words so much that you'll eventually become addicted to abbreviating everything in sight--and to watching your scores on your speed tests rise and rise and rise... Best wishes.
Productivity Site [2008-06-17]
I am fairly new to Instant Text. However, there is a site at: http://www.productivitytalk.com/forums/index.php This site specializes in MT productivity and there are several very experienced people here. Check it out, you'll be glad you did.
There is a huge difference between expanders and the limits of [2008-05-20]
autocorrect and autotext that is only available in Word. Take a look at the Instant Text and ShortHand forums on Productivity Talk to see how an Expander can do a lot more for your productivity than just expand text.
Productivity Talk at http://www.productivitytalk.com/forums/index.php
For IT issues/questions [2008-05-18]
I have found that productivitytalk.com has tons of information!
Give them a try! :)
Look it up on productivitytalk sm [2008-05-15]
Cheryl Flanders has put step-by-step instructions on there.
Productivitytalk.com
There is [2008-05-02]
just what you asked for at Productivity Talk at http://www.productivitytalk.com/forums/index.php
Enrichment is done easily in IT, although it can be done in Shorthand sm [2008-03-21]
This is where you take several days' worth of work for one doctor (if you have your dictionaries divided by doctors) and run the Enrichment option in IT. It looks thru the work and picks out the common phrases and words and automatically adds them to your dictionary. It's really cool! Shorts you didn't know were there suddenly pop up for you all the time. A lot of times it's things it never even clicked to me that the doc says it all the time.
If you want to do this in Shorthand, it's not automatic but can be done. You need to have another piece of software (or a website) and you enter your text in there. It picks out the common phrases and lists them out for you. Then you have to manually go to ShortHand and enter them. Takes quite a bit longer, but still worth it!
I would suggest y'all head over to productivitytalk.com and start absorbing all the knowledge for your particular expander. There is just a ton of knowledge over there, it will blow you away!
BUY IT!! YES YOU WILL BE ABLE TO TRANSFER YOUR AUTOCORRECT ENTRIES!! SM [2008-02-21]
go with the best, Instant Text or Shorthand, and you will be able to transfer anything you have now into their system.
go to www.productivitytalk.com for step by step instructions and more than info than you think you will ever need!
MT2B, it's a good average sort of starting point. SM [2008-02-17]
Not at all bad, not fast.
More finger-speed will come with practice. Your next step is to buy the best word Expander you can find--recommend either ShortHand or InstantText, both avery well thought of by their users--and start with an initial goal of doubling that speed to 140, then improving from there.
An MT is paid by the line produced, and imagine how many more lines you will be able to churn out when you can type hyd25mpb and have hydrochlorothiazide 25 mg p.o. b.i.d. type out for you. Plan on starting with abbreviations not for medical words, though, but for the common nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs used thousands of times a day in every document. Like t for the and v for that, and so on. If an extremely common word's more than 1 letter long, consider if you shouldn't be shortening it. I shorten he. Seriously--it's a tap of the D on my keyboard.
Strongly recommend a book like Saving Keystrokes by Diana Rolland and the website productivitytalk.com. Best wishes.
bring your expertise!! sm [2008-01-17]
bring your expertise over to http://www.productivitytalk.com/forums/index.php. they are always looking for new ideas!!
good ideas [2008-01-11]
There are fantastic ideas here http://www.productivitytalk.com/forums/index.php
Good luck!
Holy cow, 11? My brain would explode. [2008-01-10]
Here's a neat website that's all about productivity:
http://www.productivitytalk.com/forums/index.php?act=idx
See link inside for "jump to" help....sm [2007-12-23]
See link below. Think this what you what. I made one using blank fields and made a keyboard shortcut of Alt-J.
http://www.productivitytalk.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1837hl=jump+to
It took me a while, too, but now that [2007-09-24]
I've had IT for 6 years andjust started forcing myself to use itin the past year. Your production will suffer in the beginning, but play around with it to find what suits you and, before you know it, your production will be up to par again.
When I first got IT, I hated it and didn't really use it much, but now I've forcedmyself to use it since my memory isn't the greatest anymore. The longer I use it, the more I remember (if that makes sense). You don't have to stick to the first letter of every word ya know.You can make the shorts whatever you want.
Go to the Instant Text forumto see what you can do with it at http://textware.com/board/itmainforum/
and also check out http://productivitytalk.com
Both sites have great ideas and can help you learn. Stick with it. You won't regret it.
You can set up IT to work like SH, but then you lose some of the features. (sm) [2007-09-08]
I switched from SH to IT, wasn't sure I liked it at first, and there's still a few things I don't like, but I'm sticking with IT.
Choosing from a list isn't as bad as it sounds, because you can use the same abbreviation for more than one thing, which is nice. It also has a finish it for me feature where you start to type something and it will suggest the rest of the sentence or whatever, and just hitting a key will type it in for you!
For more info and to learn a lot more, visit this great website:
www.productivitytalk.com
I switched from Shorthand to Instant Text.. sm [2007-09-07]
and love my Instant Text! It is much smarter than I am though and I am still learning, but it has features that ShortHand did not. The support staff is great and the Productivity Board is also very helpful. There is a lot of information there and if you have not visited it, I would suggest you check it out as there are Shorthand and IT users there. It is www.productivitytalk.com.
Oh, there has to be a way! Try...sm [2007-08-27]
Going here for help:
http://www.productivitytalk.com/forums/index.php?showforum=33
This link was given to me when I asked a similar question to yours. It looks like a fantastic site for help with that kind of thing.
Which expander are you using?? [2007-08-16]
For some of the Expanders you can find lists that you can just download and add to your dictionary. Productivitytalk.com is one that has some for ShortHand and some others. Use Google to try and find lists to download that are already set up for the Expander you use. This will save you the time of trying to set up the lists yourself. Good luck and welcom to the fun....
hmm...feeling challenged here LOL [2007-08-16]
http://www.productivitytalk.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1164hl=copyfirst
Love this site [2007-08-13]
I just found productivitytalk.com, and it is great. There are a ton of things to download/copy into your ShortHand dictionary, and instructions for almost everything. This is going to greatly improve my lph count which of course = more $$$$$
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