Following post is an import from an old article I co-wrote with my good friend Ben
Both Mike and Ben made the move to LHS mouse, even though both exhibit RHS natural tendencies. Here’s a discussion about how those motives, experiences, and conclusions went.
[review the process (experience) about moving to a lhs mouse for right-handers.]
1. our discussion of what motivated us to make the switch in the first place, and what our situations are like (similarities).
[m] It all started with a simple question, “will I be able to do more stuff while surfing if I pass on the mouse duties to my left?” Of course, the temptation was greater since I don’t know too many lefty-mousers (referred as LM from here on). So, I love being different and never am afraid to flaunt my unique individualism.. Call me vain if you will.
[b] I had the same idea as Mike: namely, productivity. Mainly, I’m doing it so that my right hand gets a break. But I expect that impact on my productivity will be minimal, since I’m a big hot-key (and shortcut key) fan, so a lot of my conjuring up apps and windows is done straight from the keyboard. I’m also hoping for more dexterity (precision) in my left hand after a while at this.
[b] But while being unique is certainly a plus, I had other peripheral (no pun intended) reasons to move my mouse over to the left. In my office, my food / cups are on my right-hand table, so having my mouse on the left frees up my hand for drinking or eating activities.
[m] Come on Ben, being unique is more than just a plus. Haven’t you had a co-worker come in and see you having the mouse on the “wrong” side and comment on it? Or better yet, I had my PDA dock on the right side of the monitor that many have tried to grab assuming it was a mouse.
[b] Haha, I can almost imagine that! I guess most of my justification was more “functional”, but there’s a piece of me that wants the mouse in an unorthodox placing, so that people are less inclined to use my PC. Call it a sideways attempt at increased privacy, I dunno.
[b] Anyway, my PC station (mainly LCD, keyboard, mouse) is on the right end of a long desk. Putting the mouse on my left also lets me shift my LCD and keyboard to the right (towards the end of the desk), which means I have more deskspace for papers (read: paper storm or mess). My mouse can easily be moved out of the way to expand that usable space. [maybe a picture here]
[m] But, but, you have a LCD! Doesn’t that already give you more desktop space? How much difference can the mouse really have? For me, my desktop setup was my Powerbook on the left side and the desktop setup on the right side. Having moved only the mouse of the desktop computer to the left, I had a conviniently centralized mouse collection so that while working on either one of the computers, I didn’t have to reach over to the other side to move the mouse.
[b] My left hand travels less to get to the mouse than my right would, since the right hand needs to pass over the numeric keypad and arrows. And I like having one hand on the mouse and still being able to use the arrow and ENTER keys.
[m] I agree with you on the less travel point but let me ask what some of our readers must be thinking. “Seriously, how lazy do you have to be? Less travel? What, your numeric keypad is 10′ wide?
[b] Yeah, I’ll admit, I was grasping there. At this point, I’ll admit that I was just looking for more “reasons” to explain why I wanted to do something that people would initially think was a goofy pet project. I didn’t want them (colleagues) to think I just had too much time on my hands, so it had to seem important that I make this change, in the name of productivity!
[ so armed with this motivation and justification, we set upon making the move. ]
2.1 Break off into individual threads. Thought process or situational.
[m] mike’s part
So it started one day at work. Gave up my so called “ergonomic” mouse in search of a regular boring laser symmetric mouse. I quickly realized my shortcomings from lacking the fine motor skills with my left side. To ease the transition, I changed the button mapping to match buttons to the corresponding fingers I was used to on my right hand. (i.e. left index now was the left click, the duty its right counterpart was responsible for). This little move resulted in surprising entertainment value. Watching co-workers trying to perform a most basic task of double clicking on an icon to launch applications. I would have kept the mouse on the left side permanently just for this.
Kidding aside, my overworked right wrist was able to enjoy the well earned rest from buzzing around the mouse pad. Now, it took on the duty of attending to the coffee mug and writing pad while the navigation on screen is taken over by the lazy left.
It took a good week before I was able to efficiently operate the mouse without a single thought. I still lacked the skill to do fine operations such as using Photoshop quickly but the requirement for everyday task of a software developer was sufficiently met.
Certain shortcut key combos such as Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V are more or less designed for the left hand but using VIM for the majority of the day have eliminated the need for these combos. Actually, only time I found myself reaching for the mouse was to surf. These rare occations, I didn’t need to be typing which freed up my right hand to press these shortcut key combos.
So the end result is that I’ve decided to permanently become left hand mouse user. I do get the occasional “are you left handed?” questions from passers by or new co-workers. I actually have converted a co-worker to the left side as well. Ah, the joy of finding company in the right hand dominated world.
[b] ben’s part
So I engaged my left hand more, and gave it new responsibilities: it became my mouse hand (at work only, because my home mouse was very right-handed in design), effective one morning at work. (I’m sure you’ll agree that it was a rather unproductive day at work.)
In the beginning, it was more than a little strange to use. As force of habit, I reached my right hand out to rest on nothing — felt like sitting down to find no chair there (except without the embarrassing fall). The first thing I noticed was that my left-hand mouse motion wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. But my clicking speed (and efficiency) was much slower. I originally swapped the buttons — so that index finger remained the primary button, while middle finger was secondary or “right click” — but kept mis-clicking all the time. Shortly after that, I swapped it back (so the left button was primary) again.
Because of the relative difficulty in using my left hand for the mouse, I could feel myself trying to use hotkeys more (even learning or defining new ones). This was probably because using the mouse suddenly seemed like a mental chore; I had to concentrate and focus to use it in my left hand. In any case, it was something unfamiliar, so I figured that feeling would go away soon with practice.
As I continued for the next three hours at work, my productivity decreased slightly. I figured most of the slow-down was attributed to only certain activities. For instance, it was a little frustrating that my shortcuts to open a new browser window (CTRL-ALT-E) were also based on left-hand keystrokes. Oh, and then I noticed that the left-hand mouse conflicted with my selection, undo, cut, and paste motions, since the CTRL-A/Z/X/C/V are all left-hand! Dammit. That may hinder my speed; I may feel the need to remap those in the future, or find another workaround.
I heard that QWERTY keyboards are predominantly left-handed, meaning the left hand types about 25% more than the right. Moving the mouse to the left side wasn’t really balancing the workload (my main motive); it was actually creating more imbalance! And then, all those left-hand shortcuts (ALT-TAB, CTRL-X/C/V, etc) just increased this spread. This is more than likely because software / OS designers knew the mouse hand is usually the right hand, and tried to counter that with left hand hotkeys. And there I was, defeating all their work!
I was starting to think this wasn’t a very good move, but I wanted to give it a few more days — it could have been the learning / adaptation curve I was experiencing.
About 25 hours later, I moved my mouse back. Too many of the hotkeys and shortcuts were designed around the left hand, and I couldn’t find enough workarounds to make it worthwhile. I even got to the point where I put my watch on my right hand (to stop it from scratching on the desk while mousing)! I considered moving all sorts of things around … all for my mouse.
In the end, it just didn’t seem worth making so many sacrifices for a cause that I wasn’t even sure made any sense — turns out, the left hand has 56% of the load, while the right only has 44% anyway. In fact, from reading this, most of the inefficiencies seem to stem from the layout of the QWERTY keyboard (as opposed to DVORAK). Perhaps that’s the next change to try?
3. It might even help to do a quick wrap-up discussion.
