Life as a Productivity Suite – Part 2: Touch Typing

This is the 2nd part of a series of blog posts where I write about productivity as a means of handling the volume and stress of today’s mostly digital life. [Part 1](adler.svbtle.com/life-as-a-productivity-suite-part1-email) is about email.

The majority of the people I see in public who are typing stuff on their computers don’t know how to touch type – typing without looking at the keyboard. I learned this during my first year in high school. Doesn’t every school teach this nowadays and acknowledge how utterly beneficial this is? This should be required education for today’s youth who are immersed in computers during most of their waking life.

I consider touch typing as a super power in today’s digital age.

Touch typing still stands as one of the top productivity skills for me. It’s something I can’t live without anymore when facing a desktop or a laptop. A good familiarity with the keyboard is underestimated in today’s digital age where text is still the default vessel in which we disperse our thoughts, ideas, and emotions on the web. People who can’t touch-type and who think that learning to touch-type is bunk are depriving themselves of a super power.

Touch typing also gives you a sense of confidence in your command of the computer, since it not only allows you to type words quickly, but also to learn keyboard shortcuts with ease by knowing proper finger positioning.

On a side note, touch typing also leads to finesse in typing on mobile devices with your two thumbs, since your familiarity where a character is placed on the keyboard can be transferred to smaller devices. When I type on my mobile phone, I just look at the message that I’m typing and not anymore on the keyboard. If you’re already a touch typist, try this method and you’ll be able to write really fast on your mobile device once you get the hang of it.

A quick primer and further resources.

Learning to touch type usually starts in familiarizing yourself with keys on the home row (asdf jkl;) where your fingers naturally fall. Your left index finger goes on the f and your right index finger on the j. These are the only keys where you can feel a slight ‘bump’ on their surface, so that your fingers can always find themselves in the home row without having to look at the keyboard. Your thumbs are positioned on the space bar and you may choose which thumb to use for pressing.

Now try typing sad and falls without looking at the keyboard. Your first few exercises start by letting you type different chunks of characters on the home row. Afterwards, you familiarize yourself with adjacent keys such as g, h, e, i, ;, and the shift button. You continuously add more keys to the repertoire, and thus more sets of words to practice on, until you have spanned most of the keyboard during which you can now consider yourself a touch typist.

Just as with anything that can be learned in this world, you’ll never truly grasp it until you’ve practiced it. Typing Web and Typing study are really good sites that offer an interactive “get your hands dirty” approach to touch typing.

For programmers who feel the need to be more familiar with non-alphabetical keys such as parentheses and brackets, I highly recommend Typing.io. It involves you typing code of your selected programming language/s and offers you quantitative insights on your command of the keyboard. I find Typing.io really fun and challenging. It significantly helped me reduce my mistypes of special characters when I’m programming.