My M2M : July - Week 1
Hello and welcome back to my M2M series, where every month I take on a new skill and try to meet an ambitious goal in that skill. This month’s goal is to type at 60 WPM in Colemak (an entirely new layout for me) for one minute, without any errors.
So far, I’ve been mainly using keybr.com as my training tool. Keybr is a great software which produces sentences of small, incoherent words and forces you to type them in a sequence. At first, you start with words consisting of the 5 commonly-typed letters “E”, “A”, “I”, “N” and “T” (all of which are on the home row thanks to Colemak’s excellent design). As you progress and master these letters, more letters are added to the words until you have all 26.
Having said that, Keybr really forces you to truly master each and every letter before you move on. Equally, if adding a new letter causes you to lose accuracy and speed in one of your previously conquered letters, you will regress and lose one of your hard-won letters. The slow pace can be de-moralising, but I recognise its importance to ensure accuracy and speed throughout the keyboard.
In spite of my occasional progress at a snail’s pace, I think I can look back on my development in Colemak with pride. I added 13 new letters to keybr, at an average of 1 error per sentence and an average of 41 WPM.
I did have one fluke sentence where I got 70 WPM at 0 errors, which makes me confident I can achieve this month’s challenge. If I consistently hit those speeds with 26 letters over 1 minute, I’ll be able to say I smashed my first month’s challenge. Having said that, there are a few challenges which I’m going to have to overcome in order to reach my goal.
- When typing in normal use (i.e. not in keybr or any other typing tutor), I find there are a couple of letters I consistently mishit. I’m particularly struggling with “n”, which I constantly hit in its old qwerty position of “k”. Funnily enough I only struggle with this during normal use, not while using a typing tutor.
- I’m unsure of how to break past the 70 WPM mark. My closest endeavour was an outlying fluke, where the stars seemed to align perfectly, and 9/10 I would’ve left a trail of incorrect letters. Although its still early days, I’m unsure of whether my fingers can physically move fast enough to get to 100 WPM mark which I hope to obtain later on this year.
My plan for the rest of the week is to continue adding letters on keybr. By the end of the week, I hope to have all 26 letters in my arsenal, along with a 50 WPM average. This should give me a good platform to continue on and complete this month’s goal.
I’m looking forward to writing my next update next week.
