Settings

I recently had to rebuild the settings in my edit computer. While I had been happily using and adapting someone else's for quite some time, computers being how they are, the settings were becoming corrupt, causing weird and unexpected errors. So I gave myself a "new name" and started to recreate from scratch all the the things I have taken for granted on my keyboard and screen.
 
Seems simple, right? I mean, I have done versions of this process many times before--adding keyboard shortcuts to make my process more efficient--and uniquely mine. Since I barely missed an editing beat after the change, I figured I must have gotten pretty good at it.
 
There was just one thing that bothered me. Perhaps it was coincidence, but one thing was appearing just a little differently on my screen. I found, however, that I could make adjustments to work around it. It made things a little slower, perhaps, but not impossible, so I pretty much let it be. What else was I going to do?
 
Then, this morning, it occurred to me--could it be that one little button that had been clicked on (or off) for all the time I had been using default or preselected settings suddenly have changed when I created my own? Could some little piece I had neglected to check be causing this ever so slightly inconvenient situation?
 
On a daily basis, we don't do much to "check our settings," much less adjust them. We are who we are, and how we function each day reflects that. Yet, changing a setting here and there--where we are, what or when we eat, the time we set on our alarm--can affect how we work, and how we see things. Perhaps our current settings are working just fine, but perhaps tweaking them once in a while could open our eyes to something new.
 
As I began exploring the settings options in my editing computer, looking for something that might have created my problem, I fairly quickly found a list of checkable boxes that seemed relevant. I checked one of the boxes to enable a particular setting, and sure enough, the problem was solved. Sure, it took a few minutes to search for the fix, but that few minutes was nothing compared to the minutes--and sanity--that I saved later, when I was seeing things the way they needed to be, rather than having to adjust each one.
 
Clearly, as on a computer, in life, it's a good idea to check your settings every so often--to make real choices--your own, not someone else's--about which boxes you check and about how you see things. It may take pausing your routine and spending some of what you consider your very limited minutes, but if it ends up preserving your time--and your sanity--it will have been well worth it.