Learning To Become An Expert Typist

I was listening to a podcast in the car this morning about memory. In it the speaker made a bit of a digression on the subject of learning skills.  We all know the saying that practice makes perfect.  Well as sayings go, it doesn't really hit the mark as perfect itself.


The experience most of us have most the time is one where practice makes just about okay after a while, followed by not much in the way of improvement after that.  It turns out that this process has been best studied in the field of typing.  Most of us teach ourselves to type, as I did many years ago now.  You start off with two fingers then gradually achieve a reasonable level of competence after which improvement slows off until a rough equilibrium is achieved.

I dare say my experience is fairly typical.  I can type at a reasonable speed most of the time. I get a bit better when I have been doing a lot, and fall back a bit if I don't hit the keyboard much for a couple of weeks.  But basically my typing speed is pretty much where it was thirty years ago.  I have never really thought about it, but I have had a sort of unexamined belief that I was already at the natural limit of my ability when it comes to typing and have been bascially happy with the situation.

But the subject of increasing typing speed is one that is of some importance to office managers and they have looked into how you go about training people to much greater typing speeds.  How they do it turns out to be almost banally straight forward.  They concentrate on what they are doing when they type and make conscious efforts to overcome the issues that hold back their typing speed.  And er, that is it.  In fact this basic pattern is common to developing exceptional skills in any field.  For example, amateur musicians tend to play whole pieces of music.  Now doubt they enjoy it, but it doesn't really stretch their abilities.  Professional musicians concentrate on the difficult bits and repeatedly practice those bits that present a challenge.

I found this quite fascinating, and really quite a revelation.  It was interesting at least as much because it is so obvious as it is for potentially being useful.  We all know that as we practice things tend to start to operate on autopilot as our subconscious minds pick up how to carry out a skill and take over from the limited conscious brain.  What the super typists and the professional musicians are doing is simply keeping the conscious learning process going for longer.

This sounds like an idea well worth investigating.  And why not start with typing?  I have given typing virtually no thought in thirty years and yet it is one of the skills that has the biggest bearing on my productivity, especially my blogging.  Can I improve it?  Well as it happens I am doing so at this very minute with this very article.  I set the clock for 15 minutes and my target word count for 450.  In the event I made it to 500 words in 15 minutes.  This works out at 33 words per minute, which I don't think is tremendously impressive.  The idea is to see if a daily 15 minute conscious attempt to improve my typing speed will have any effect.

Just to add a bit of extra difficulty I'll try and turn each of those exercises onto a post on this blog.

The podcast was an interview with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Foer