One thing I’ve learned from writing is that I write “just” a lot. I assume that I also say “just” a lot since I write dialogue from my own speech patterns and patterns of people I know. As in, “I just wanted to see how…” “Just put that…” “You can’t just ignore…”
In writing the first draft, I don’t worry about it. I just (there it is again!) write. In the revisions, I force myself to hunt down every occurance of “just” in my manuscript and decide whether it’s absolutely necessary. 99 times out of 100, the word gets deleted with no adverse effects on the sentence around it.
Now I wonder if there are other words I sneak into all my speech. In high school, one of my teachers tried to get a girl to stop saying “like” after every three words by ringing a bell whenever she said it. I don’t know if it had any effect on the girl in question, but it made me conscious of saying that word. Somehow though I let “just” slip into my speech when I banned “like.”