Typing Faster Part 3: The Outcome

In the last posts we found out that I write a measly 40 WPM with capitalization and punctuation on every word. Then I described a plan for how to do this.

Read Part 1: Typing Faster Part 1: Why

Read Part 2: Typing Faster Part 2: How

The Results

I accounted at total of 10 hours and 50 minutes of effort in 5-15 minute per day chunks. My WPM had increased from 40 WPM to 57.9 WPM! I even once hit 71.4 WPM.

This definitely isn't fast, but it is definitely improvement.

Let's look at how that improvement came about:

So we can see that what happened first is my fingers started moving faster indicated by the number of keys. But as the number of keys increased so did the number of errors. That should make sense, I'm firing more bullets, there are going to be more misses.

We see that the number of keys per minute plateaued very quickly and never really increased again throughout the whole experience. My overall typing speed in a series of plateaus and jumps, seemed to steadily increase.

I haven't actually increased my typing speed, I just learned to make a lot less mistakes.

Outcomes

I can say anecdotally that my real world typing is faster. Especially when coding as I'm able to conformably navigate punctuation and capitalizations smoothly. I don't have to stop and look at the keyboard to write JavaScript string literals. However the increase in typing speed had limited value for coding as much of it is about thinking, navigation, and refactoring. Moving this line to there and using the arrow keys traverse a document with my caret, and switching between pages had less to do with typing speed and more to do with whether I knew what I was doing.

The normal typing (drafting) experience showed the most benefit. Even though there was maybe a 50% increase in typing speed, I'd give a 2x boost to performance. The main reason is the decrease in mistakes. Tap tap tap tap taping of the backspace key doesn't stop my train of thought, and I've already moved onto the next sentence in my head as I'm trying to fix the one before. By having a similar typing speed to my brain talking speed I'm much more fluid stop less!

Keep in mind this is only after 11 hours of effort spread over months. This was not significant effort. This was "I'll just do a little typing practice in my downtime and see what happens."

Takeaways

I definitely recommend taking just 5-10 minutes a day for a month to practice your typing. We spend a lot of time drafting text. If my experience translates to the experiences of others you can find that you'll have a lot more time to spend on other things besides actual typing.

There are also other interesting benefits of the experience. By having a measurable skill, I learned a lot about early skill progression. There is a period of fast growth followed by plateaus. You get to see how your brain responds to doing worst today than you did yesterday.

Also I want to say that typing was extremely stressful for me. Your experience might differ. All kinds of random showerthoughts and ideas came about that I couldn't simply stop to ponder about. My back would start hurting and my nose would get itchy. It was interesting never knowing where my brain would want to go next!