42. Well-Practiced Skills Don’t Require Conscious Attention

42. Well-Practiced Skills Don’t Require Conscious Attention

Some skills can be practiced again and again until they can be completed without conscious thought. However, it can be easy to keep going on autopilot and do something you didn’t mean to. It can also be difficult to break these habits. For example, someone who uses a software like Photoshop a lot, has probably learned many of the keyboard shortcuts and their fingers hit them without having to consciously remember their location each time. This is fine, until you are using a different software with different shortcuts and your hand keeps automatically going to Photoshop’s shortcuts

If people perform a series of steps over and over again, the action will become automatic. If you require people to perform a sequence repeatedly, make it easy to do, but realize that the trade-off is that people may make errors because they are no longer paying attention. Make it easy for people to undo not only their last action but also an entire sequence. Rather than requiring people to perform a task over and over, consider a design where they can choose all the items they want to take action on and then perform the action on all the items at once.

Takeaways