Resuming the Rhythm

I was determined to learn touch typing when I started in 2022, and so I made a habit of practicing every day, no matter how small it may be. Times would come when I wouldn't practice for a while—owing to whatever circumstances it may be—but I always come back to practicing regularly, as that really is the only way I would improve. And such a time came again recently.

I haven't practiced in a very long time—probably more than a month—and I don't remember what may have caused that. I used touch typing every day to make my posts on Hive, so I didn't feel the impact of not practicing that much. That omission in my nightly routine had been persistent for too long, and so I started getting this niggling feeling that I may have actually dropped in speed and dexterity.

To give myself a kickstart, I set myself on a course today to run my finger through some exercises and to also figure out what my speed would be.

There are certain touch-typing websites that I frequent to practice and learn, and so I picked out four of them in number. For each one of them, I would run two 60-minute tests, making it eight sessions in total. That was going to be some serious exercise to do after such a long time of not practicing, but if felt appropriate anyway.

In the video in this post, you will find me going through all sessions, practicing live.

Ideally, my practice sessions would not start with me going at high speeds. I would rather build up very slowly and warm up, then type much faster. Starting slow helps me "get in the groove." This wasn't the idea for the practice session anyway, so I just went full-steam ahead to get the results.

You would find in the video that my speed increased gradually as I went through each session and that I made more mistakes and restarts in the earlier sessions. At some point, fatigue set in, and so I just couldn't get any faster and started to get slower and make mistakes too often again.

The highest speed I could get was 74 words per minute (WPM). That wasn't bad at all, as it was generally my average speed when I would practice before. I have crossed 80 WPM a few times before.

My observation after the sessions is that I have not dropped in speed per se. I didn't increase in speed either. Essentially, I maintained speed, and that was only possible because I touch type quite often every day. I only got fatigued way earlier than I normally would, and it took me longer to acclimatise to higher speeds.

Touch typing isn't all about speed, though. It sure is nice to be very fast and type out a couple of words in a matter of seconds, but how useful can that be when accuracy is very poor? It's important to be very accurate first rather than fast. That's what my practice sessions are usually about, and that's how I have managed to grow from 10 WPM to 70+ WPM with time.