Around six months ago I wrote a post stating that I was going to learn touch typing. When I wrote it I was already using all my fingers to type, but my speed was terrible. I was typing around 30 words per minute….
That is where we left the story. Then a couple of weeks ago one reader emailed me asking how the touch typing experiment was going, so I decided to write an update.

The experiment went out very well and just as planned. I had tried to learn touch typing in the past, but I always went back to typing with two fingers after a couple of days because it was easier. Then one day I decided I would learn all the positions of the finger and make the switch for good (which is when I wrote that post). That is, I would not return to two-finger typing no matter what.

On the first couple of weeks I felt miserable, typing 30 words per minute. Writing emails was a pain, let alone posts for the blog…. But I started to notice fast improvements, and within a couple of months I was already back to 60 words per minute or so. From there I stopped paying attention to how fast I was typing, but I kept getting faster and faster.

How fast? Today I got curious and decided to go back to the speed test. On my first trial I got 100 words per minute. I am guessing that warmed up I could get over 105 words per minute.
Six months ago I was typing at 65 words per minute, so I basically increased my typing productivity by more than 50%!

This is probably one of the best skills I have learned in a while, and I definitely recommend anyone who is not touch typing yet to make the switch as soon as possible.

Finally, if you are going to measure how fast you type, make sure to not get confused with the number of characters and words you can type per minute. The comparison is always made with words per minute. On my last post there was a guy who wrote a comment like this:
“I swear to God! 152 characters per minute! 29 right and 0 wrong“….