How I learnt to touch type in 30 days!

The hunt and peek days

So I have a bit of fascination with typing ever since I was a child. It was one of the things that made me fall in love with computers. As a child, I used to ask myself the question over and over again, if people can write so quickly why do we even need the keyboard? As I grew older I began to understand the need for digitalisation of information and how softcopy and hardcopy of a document have their own list of pros and cons. However, even then for my childish mind, typing was a compromise — a compromise of speed in exchange for the various wonders a computer can do to the document.

I was about 13 years old when I got my computer. However, most of what I used to do on my computer at that time was play games, watch movies, or listen to songs. The amount of typing that I needed to do for this kind of activities was minuscule and as a result no one really taught me the ‘proper’ way to type. As I grew older and the need to type increased, I taught myself the ‘hunt and peek’ style of typing in which one used a max of about 4 fingers at a time and looks at the keyboard to position the fingers and hit the keys. I used this method ever since my high school days when I really needed to type stuff out. Having used this method to type for more than 6 years, when I was actually in college studying computer science, I had become proficient enough to not look at the keyboard and type. However, there was something off about the way I was doing it and I could really feel it. Often I would type the wrong characters and I would have to look at the keyboard to get to the correct position. One day out of fun, I went to some random website where you could type and see what is your typing speed and I gave it a try. I got a speed of around 45 words per minute(WPM).

On tryharding a lot for quite some time, I was able to reach 52 WPM. I could type without looking at the keyboard only for short bursts. I tried to look at the average typing speed of human beings, and it was about 42WPM. I was only slightly better than the average typist.

The revelation

On researching a bit about typing, I got to know why we have the two bumps on the keyboard on key F and key J. I read a bit about touch typing — the proper way to type. So basically touch typing is the actual way to type in which each finger in your hand is assigned a maximum of three different keys except the index finger, each of which is responsible for clicking on 6 keys. As a result, when you touch-type you are actually using all 10 fingers on your hand at the same time, this dramatically increasing speed. I found this concept really cool. It’s not that I had no idea about this prior to this, but this was the first time, I was actually learning in detail about this. I knew I had to try this out sometime however I couldn’t understand how would I go about practicing this.

The Beginning of this stupid obsession

Quite a few months went by but I did not start anything regarding touch typing. One day as I was lazily scrolling through YouTube, I came across this video by Kalle Halden — a tech YouTuber that was titled — “I practiced touch typing for 30 days”. Upon seeing his video, and the tool that he used to practice, I knew instantly that I had to try that out. So the website that he suggested was a really cool-looking website called https://www.keybr.com The coolest thing about this website was that it used algorithms to teach you how to touch type. Initially, you start with a few of the most commonly used keys. As you get used to them, the program increases the keyset and you get to type words with more keys. The program looks for your every key speed and accuracy to determine if you are ready for the next set of keys. So I decided I will try this challenge for 30 days and see if I improved or not.

The grind of 30 days

The grind started with some terrible days when I was unable to keep the placement of my fingers properly on the keys where the fingers were supposed to be placed. I was resorting to hunt and peek technique often due to years of build-up habit. My productivity took a big hit as I was forcing myself to use touch typing for every typing task. I, who usually chats from WhatsApp using WhatApp web, was now using the phone because my typing speed became extremely slow. By the end of week 1, I was beginning to feel that I was getting better and faster. By the end of week 2, I was addicted. I was having fun practising on this site. Beating your highest speed every now and then was fun and rewarding. There were times when I would be so lost in typing that all I would do for hours was type and type.

The results

KeyBr.com has some wonderful analytics features that enable you to keep track of your progress. I will share some of the results of this experiment.

So in total, I practised for about 17 hours which averages around 34.8 minutes per day. I hit a top speed of 76 WPM which was almost double my previous speed. The entire average speed over the 30-day session was over 50 WPM and by the end of the last day I was comfortably hitting speeds in excess of 70 WPM.

Here’s one more graph that shows how the speed increased over time [The green line is the one showing the speed improvement and the red line shows the error rate] and the error rate decreased over the period. Initially, with the touch typing technique, I was only able to hit 20WPM speeds.

This is the heatmap showing the days I practiced. And as you can see I tried to keep no gaps however on some days, I could only work for a little amount of time.

My Takeaway

At the end of this experiment, I had to ask myself whether it was worth the 17 hours I spent to practice touch typing. I can definitely feel that my typing action has improved a lot. I am able to focus more on what I m typing that spending energy to find them damned keys on the keyboard. I don’t know how this practice is going to be helpful in the long term however I can definitely tell that the speed of typing is only going to increase with more typing. Even at the end of 30 days, I could feel that there was a lot of room for improvement. Keeping the improvement in speed aside, the act of typing became a much more satisfying and rewarding activity. As your muscle memory improves and you type words even without instructing your fingers to do so, is so damn satisfying and rewarding. So I m optimistic to find out how much faster can I type in future. Touch typing also made me realise why vim is the way it is and the keyboard shortcuts on that monster of an editor made so much more sense now. Even though I was not able to hit a monstrosity speed of 100 WPM, however, I m happy as to where I stand now.

In case you feel like you want to learn touch typing, you can definitely use KeyBr.com. It is a fantastic site to get accustomed to the finger positions. Here is the link the video of Kalle that I saw that inspired me to take up this experiment.