Typing Faster Part 2: How

I've decided to learn how to type fast for a variety of reasons. Probably the biggest one is curiosity. Will it make me more productive?

Use Keybr.com

There are a lot of options out there. I've tried a lot of them but ultimately settled on Keybr.

First it's free. You can go to the page and get started right away. No inertia. You don't have to register but I recommend it if you intend to save and sync your data + settings. You will be able to track speed and mistakes.

Remember we're on a journey! We're on a learning journey! With statistics and numbers and oooohlala!!!

Getting Set Up on Keybr.com

Go to Keybr.com. When you first register you will see something like this:

This is a starter profile designed to help the system get you started. Skip this. Instead go to settings and use these options:

Drag Extend Key Set Size to max and toggle to on Enable Capital Letters and Enable Punctuation Characters

This will enable all characters, capitalization, and punctuation on every single word. This will slow you down, but you will get faster at the keys that are hardest to prepare.

Set a timer for 10 minutes and GOGOGO!!!

There is some getting used to this. You can't backspace, only go forward. Capitalization and punctuation on every single word slows you down a lot as the number of times you have to hold down shift as you type increases 5x.

I highly recommend a timer. This way you can focus on timing and simply type for 10 minutes straight.

My first time was dreadful. It turns out 10 minutes of typing can be painful. The back starts to hurt. But you can't stop. Keep going. A small twinge in the elbow. Keep going. Your brain wanders, mom enters your head, a task to do later, but you've got more typing to do.

It's almost meditative. You're so incredibly focused on this one mindless repetitive task and you can hear all the thoughts running through your head and waving them away with "I can't focus on you right now, I need to improve my typing."

Your Initial Base Typing Speed

Look how sad this is. Sure there's an initial comfort curve, but that dies after a few minutes. I'm generally about 42 WPM, but with the added punctuations and capitalizations my average is 36.7 WPM.

Do this 50 times

My plan is to do 10 minutes of typing 50 times for the next few months for a total of 8 hours and 20 minutes of effort to see how things improve over time. We're going to take a Spaced Repetition kind of practice but for skill development instead of memory.

Track Progress

What's awesome about using Keybr.com is that we will be able to track our statistics over time. We can see progress. It's measurable. How does mood affect you? What are your blockers? Are you stumbling on the E or the punctuation?

One thing that will be interesting to me is how does improvement look on a chart? Is it linear? Is it a process of rise and fall like the a Stochastic process? Will improvement be slow and steady or in jumps when you least expect it? Exciting!