Increasing My Typing Speed - Up to 37 wpm

The act of simply observing what I am doing and spotting where time is getting wasted is proving to be a very productive one.  Quite apart from anything else I am getting a lot more writing done.  I now have about a dozen and a half blog posts scheduled over my three blogs, which is a nice feeling.  But the most significant benefit I have found is that the activity I am working on is in fact improving.  My typing speed has gone up by about 20% on 14 days.


How have I done it?

First of all I have allocated some time to this project.  I have done three one hour sessions devoted to improving my typing.  I wrote stuff I wanted to write anyway, so it wasn't a pure time investment but nonetheless I did have to fit it into my schedule.

Secondly I engaged my conscious brain.  While typing I observed what I was doing and tried to see where time was being wasted.  I noticed very quickly that I spent a huge amount of time correcting errors.  Basically a lot of words were exercises in trial and error.  By consciously slowing down my fingers I increased the accuracy of what I was typing and got the words right the first time.  That was quite a revelation in fact.  I felt like I was typing more slowly.  But when I looked I was in fact typing quicker, if you measured it in terms of completed words.

I have been keeping up the exercise whenever I remember whatever typing I am doing.  I think this actually represents the bulk of my practising in fact.  I usually spend at least an hour or two most days doing some kind of typing related to my job.

What I find is that the biggest problem I have at the moment is that I keep wanting to switch back to my old slower mode of typing because it feels quicker.  It provides my brain with a steady stream of clicks that makes it feel like I am forging ahead.  This is an interesting disconnect between what you experience and what you actually achieve.   If I wasn't measuring my typing speed I would probably have already decided that my old approach was faster than my newer one.

Incidentally Write or Die provides a great way of monitoring your typing speed as you type.  You can set targets by the number of words or by the time you want to type for.  If you do both at once, as you type you get a bar filling in across the top of the screen as you get closer to your goal.  The number of words is in grey and the time elapsed is in red.  If you set it for the the number of words per minute you think you can achieve, all the time you are ahead of your goal the grey line is ahead of the red one.  I don't know if that visualisation actually increases your typing speed or not.  That will have to be another experiment.

I wonder how many other activities I do regularly seem to me to be fine, but would benefit from a bit of conscious effort and measurement.