How to Type 3x Faster

Is your slow typing a bottleneck for your thoughts?

Photo by Marwa Najjar on Unsplash

I’ve never been a fast typist. In law school exams, for example, my friends would pound out 20 pages in the testing software by the time I squeaked out 10.

Now, as I am embarking on this whole Medium thing, I’m looking to remove barriers to freely expressing my thoughts.

The problem: I type QWERTY much slower than I can think or speak. That’s probably true of almost everyone. It’s why court stenographers, for example, use a special keyboard to keep up with what people are saying in the courtroom.

So, a couple months ago, I started learning Dvorak. Unlike QWERTY, which intentionally separates letters commonly used together (a useful design in the mechanical typewriter era), Dvorak places letters often used together physically near each other, and frequently used letters in the middle row. This design reduces the distance your fingers have to move to type a given word — by one estimate, a staggering 90–95% reduction.

Here’s why I’m learning Dvorak:

1. It’s like hitting the gym for my brain. It’s hard mental work to re-learn how to type. Yes, this Medium post was written fully with Dvorak, and yes, my brain is absolutely exhausted from the mental effort so far (and stronger for it!).
2. Writing will become more fun and effortless when I can type as fast as I can think, in much the same way that talking is generally less difficult than writing.
3. It’s critical to build and maintain a habit of investing time and energy into things that pay off in the long run. Children are raised to do this constantly (e.g., with school), but we allow our adult selves to stagnate. It takes a conscious decision to keep investing aggressively in ourselves.

So there you have it. So far the effort is already worth it for reasons 1 and 3, and hopefully reason 2 will follow soon enough.

What is one way you want to invest in yourself?