When you shift are you moving the shifter like it owes you until it stops moving?

On my old bike the transmission was kinda sloppy and I occasionally had a missed shift where it didn’t shift out of the current gear because I hadn’t moved the shifter far enough. I never accidentally shifted into neutral on that bike, it was almost impossible to put it into neutral.

I guess I’m more sort of tilting my ankle from down to up so it doesn’t have much power behind it.

I’ve also gotten a phantom shift where my dash just shows a “-“ instead of 2. What kind of bike was it?