Years ago, I began noticing a troubling pain in my fingers and wrists that would sometimes travel all the way up to the elbow. While the pain and sometimes dull ache was not enough to put me out of work, it was enough to interrupt it. Instead of having fingers flying over the keyboard, I found myself pausing regularly to massage my hands and arms. I knew from then on that I needed to get serious about the health of my hands. After all, if you think about it, how much of your work is done by inputting data into the computer via a keyboard? My guess is, a lot.

Many people these days have started or are embarking on the journey towards a healthier lifestyle. I think that’s awesome and we all need to make sure our overall health is good. After all, we are one of our businesses’ most valuable assets. But in the general scheme of getting healthy, or if you are already practicing a healthy lifestyle, let’s not forget the smaller, yet still very important things like…

Your hands.

What would you do if you cannot type or have to severely limit your typing? Not too long ago, I had an excellent developer quit because he can no longer type without being in a lot of pain. His doctor recommended he stop work. I don’t know about you but that sounds terrifying to me. Sure, we have passive income and all that but passive or not, you still have some work to do to keep things going.

If you are a writer, you still have a great option in Dragon Naturally Speaking or similar voice recognition software. But if you develop applications, websites or simply manage websites regularly, such software may not work so well with code. Perhaps you’ve never quite thought of it that way before but your hands are a huge asset to your livelihood – just like a model’s ‘assets’ are crucial to their paycheck. So take care of your hands before it gets to that point.

For me, the pain is what pushed me to rely more and more on macro automation to type for me. Macros can be launched using a mouse. Even if you choose to launch a macro with your keyboard, if pressing two keys can save you from pressing 1oo keys then it is worth it. How many keystrokes do you make in a day? If you typed your web address in 10 times a day and your address is long like mine – 30 keystrokes including the http portion. That makes 300 key strokes. But if I can reduce that to 9 strokes (or less), that makes 90 strokes in total – a savings of 70%. That’s a lot less I have to type and the less I have to type, the better it will be for my hands.

And yes, besides saving keystrokes macro automation like this has other side benefits like improving accuracy. When something is pre-programmed properly, it becomes more accurate than manually inputting data every time since we considerably reduce the chance of human error. Also, it can help shave time off in little bits and they add up quickly.

If you’re curious to know what some of the things I have a macro do for me, here’s a short list:

Word Press template tags (this is a biggie)

• HTML code
• Commonly used JavaScripts
• Email addresses
• Website addresses
• Names, nicknames, pen names
• Signatures lines
• Author bios
• Links or URLs to my photos
• Telephone numbers
• Addresses
• Product descriptions
• Product URLs
• Affiliate URLs

and so much more.

While using macros haven’t eliminated the pain, I believe it has made things more manageable. If you haven’t started hurting yet then don’t wait. Begin taking good care of your hands now.