Productivity
The most valuable skill you need to have today.
How learning to type fast saved me hours of my life.
In Asia, a lot of companies fear death by a thousand cuts. Meaning that they fear that one day all their small mistakes and imperfections will add up and reach a point where they become life-threatening to the company. That’s the mindset that is causing them to relentlessly go after any imperfection, even the smallest ones. If you apply this to your personal life, it will result in you becoming as effective as an Asian car factory. Although this might not be what you will write in your Tinder or Instagram biography, it will greatly improve your productivity and therefore save you a lot of time. What can you learn from this? Small improvements can lead to big improvements if you accumulate enough of them. That’s why I want to share one of those small improvements with you today. It’s: learning how to type fast and correctly, using all your fingers.
I can still remember the time when I couldn’t type fast. It was horrible. I spent minutes every day just looking for the correct keys. In some sense, I even felt kind of blind when using the keyboard. After all, I was using the same device every day, but still, I didn’t find even the most basic keys without looking at the keyboard.
All of this made me waste a lot of time. I know this might sound strange to you if you never deeply thought about it before, but if it takes you just two seconds to look for a key, then even writing a short text of 300 words will already take you 10 minutes. This is also where the anecdote of a thousand cuts from the beginning comes in handy. Searching for one key might not take you that much time, but if you need to search for just this one key a thousand times, as is common when using a keyboard frequently, then the problem will grow to an unignorable size.
Besides how much time typing slowly cost me, it also hindered my thought process, because my brain had to spend more energy on searching for the correct key than it did spending on actually thinking.
A few months ago, however, I discovered a pretty handy and free website. The website is called TypingClub and there they offer a free interactive online course on how to type fast. They guide you through everything that is important to know if you want to type fast. What I liked the most about the TypingClub is that they not only provide exercises but also spend a big chunk of time with you teaching you the correct way of hitting the keys, which is equally important as the muscle memory to move your fingers.
After using the website for just two months, I have already improved my typing speed from 20 words per minute to around 60 words per minute, and I am looking forward to reaching the 100 Words per minute mark soon. Learning to type fast has therefore saved me a lot of time already. I am also pretty sure that it will continue to do in the future.
And that’s where you come in. Learning to type fast is one of the most productivity-increasing things I have ever done, therefore I want you to do it too. At least give it a try. In the end, it’s free anyway, so better sign up at the TypingClub(this is not an affiliate link) now and get started right away.
Trust me, learning to type fast is one of the best things you are ever going to do.
I have however one final tip for you. It’s on how to learn all this the easiest: To learn to type fast and build a solid routine out of spending five to ten minutes a day practicing typing. That’s how I did it, too. Just practice daily (or consistently in general) and you will eventually be able to type fast.
