Old Habits Die Hard: Copy and Paste

Copy and paste is bad.

Every single person who uses a computer learns how to copy and paste.

Copy and paste is necessary to perform many tasks.

Old habits die hard.

Email and Word documents and illegally downloaded movies all expect you to use copy and paste because it’s how you’re supposed to do things: copy this email into that folder, move that paragraph of text into the next chapter, copy those illegally downloaded movies to the external hard drive for safekeeping.

There’s a time and place for copy and paste, but why resort to it when you do the same task multiple times every day? It’s passable when the situation can’t be made better, or can it?

Sounds like old habits die hard.

Sure, copy and paste is quick when you’re good at it, but the time adds up. For example, take the process of navigating into a bunch of files and folders to copy the same five files to a different place. Let’s be earnest here and say it takes a minute of this theoretical person’s time. Based on the work they do, they repeat the same copy and paste job ten more times that day. This time adds up.

Yes, old habits die hard.

Humans are excellent at copy and paste. Guess what else is excellent at copy and paste as well? Computers!!! Computers are better than humans in every way possible when it comes to performing repetitive copy and paste tasks. Speed. Accuracy. Longevity. It’s a combination which doesn’t disappoint.

Luckily where my soliloquy is headed involves people who program computers for a profession: Programmers. Programmers write programs to make computers do things for humans. Copy and paste is one of them. So why are Programmers still using copy and paste to do things themselves repetitively instead of programming a computer to do it for them?

Old habits die hard…

Let this sink in for a moment…

Programmers are proficient in telling the computer what to do, namely copy and paste. But they’re still using copy and paste things themselves because they’re really good at it. It’s been a habit since they started using a computer however many decades ago.

This shocks me, especially in the sense where programmers are paid very well to program computers, but instead they’re spending a chunk of their time performing repetitive copy and paste tasks, not to mention they’re fully qualified to program the computer to do it for them.

It’s a bad habit of programmers to repetitively copy and paste. Knowing so and continuing to do must involve masochism. Be a better programmer and get the computer to copy and paste for you!