To the Left, To the Left

So I engaged my left hand more today, and gave it new responsibilities: it is now my mouse hand (at work only, because my home mouse is very right-handed in design), effective 10:45am today.

Motive. 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.

Advantages. 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. It also lets me shift my LCD and keyboard to the right, which means I have more deskspace for papers (read: mess). 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.

Adapting. So far, it has been a little strange to use. Already, I have reached my right hand out to rest on nothing -- feels like sitting down to find no chair there. The first thing I've noticed is that my left-hand motion isn't as bad as I thought ... but clicking is much slower. I originally swapped the buttons (so that index finger remains primary clicker), but kept mis-clicking all the time that I swapped it back (so that left button is primary). Because of the relative difficulty in using my left hand for the mouse, I can feel myself trying to use keys more, because using the mouse seems like a mental chore; but I expect that to go away soon.

Ack. It's a little frustrating that my shortcuts to open a new browser window (CTRL-ALT-E) are also based on left-hand keystrokes. Oh, and I just noticed that this slows down my selection / undo / cut-paste motions (since 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.

(Preliminary) Conclusion. Interestingly, I'm not really balancing the workload (the main motive), since I heard that QWERTY keyboards are predominantly left-handed already! I heard that these keyboards make the left hand type about 30% more than the right. All those shortcuts (ALT-TAB, CTRL-X/C/V, etc) just increase this spread. And now I've added the mouse work on top of all that! I'm not very certain this was a good move, but I'll give it a few more days -- this could just be a learning curve / adaptation issue.