Lifehacks

[andrewducker]

Here's a little trick that helped me learn 10-finger-typing really well:

When you read an article in your browser, activate the search function (ctrl+f) and just start typing the text you are reading. With firefox or chrome, the text you are typing will simultaneously get hightlighted.

Just read the hightlighted text. You'll want to know what comes next so you'll type as fast as possible. You want to read the text fluently, so you'll type blindly and so on. Worked 100 times better than all these boring training programs.

From

I learned to touch type (ish, very ish) by forcing myself to look away from the keyboard when i was typing, and stare at the screen. This lead to about a week of very slow typing, as I kept fumbling my fingers across the keyboard, trying a key, deleting it because it was wrong, trying a different key, etc., etc. And then, after that, my typing as was fast as it had been before, only I didn't have to look at the keys. And, shortly after that, it was faster.

Come to think of it, there are a lot of things like that - places where you have to leave a point of high optimisation*, and be _less_ efficient for a while, in order to find your way up a different hill to a new optimal solution. I did that when I left my previous job and moved to my current one - I took a £3000 paycut because I believed that I'd have more potential in the current job - and sure enough my pay is now 70% higher than it was then. there have also been the odd social situation like that - I found it very hard to let go of some things because it felt like life was getting worse, but it was necessary to do so in order for things to improve in the long term.

*See Local Optimum for more on this kind of thing

Comments

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

MSN enabled me to be able to touch type. :)

[andrewducker]

Oooh, how? I'm intrigued!

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

Using MSN for about eight hours a day means that you're typing significantly increases in speed! I don't think I use my ringfingers or little fingers as much as I should whilst typing but on Facebook I measured my typing speed as around 80wpm which I don't think is too shabby...

[andrewducker]

Yeah, that was pretty much how I started - just typing a lot will get you a pretty damn good typing speed!

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I was fortunate enough (or smart enough) to take an actual class in typing in HighSchool, about 65 years ago. It's highly-probable that my reasoning for doing so involved the fact that this was a class that included about 90% *girls*. I wasn't conspicuously successful at either learning to type fast & accurately, or with ... whatever else I had in mind (*sigh*), but the skill served me well in University, later when I got into publishing /r/e/a/m/s/ /o/f/ fanzines, and now in doing OnLine stuff. I'm firmly of the opinion that no knowledge or skill is totally useless (even though, say, Plains Indian quillwork, hide-tanning, or flint-knapping may be of limited practical functionality).

[andrewducker]

Even if the skills are useful purely because they allow you to meet new people who are interested in the same skills, there's usually something there.

[draconid.livejournal.com]

My mum was a touch typist (with big old heavy typewriters) and I learnt from her very old books that I guess she'd used to learn touch typing. I think the most useful thing was a map of the keys showing where your fingers should go. Rather than looking at the keyboard I'd look at the key map which meant I'd know where my fingers would be. Eventually I guess muscle memory set in and I didn't have a problem. I'm sure having to learn on a heavy typewriter helped my words-per-minute too!

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I learned in secondary school from a workbook while studying Office and Information Studies, an otherwise useless course because it was taught on those little box macs that no self-respecting business was using even then - pointless.

I think the reason that the touch typing stuck though was less because I was typing a lot on computers (I wasn't, and didn't for another six or seven years) but because I ended up going through the workbook more than twice - we had started it before the summer and I finished it over the break, and then got into the class to find that no one had and was forced to do the whole thing all over again. And having done it before, I finished before anyone else, so I had to start it a third time.

The workbook itself was great I think - the whole first half of it was repetitive finger exercises that accustomed you to which keys you were typing with what fingers, drilling it into your muscle memory where things were on the keyboard. Sounds boring, but I type like the wind. I actually only use eight fingers to type mid you - on the letters at least, saving my pinkies for the peripheral stuff like shift, but my high wpm despite my spelling and aphasia issues is most definitely down to my muscle memory for the keyboard.

[andrewducker]

Sounds liek a very frustrating lesson - even if it was worthwhile in the end. I'm sure my typing would be significantly faster if I actually did a course, as I'm basically typing six-fingered at the moment, with four of them hardly used at all.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I was able to quite enjoy it but I tend to be able to turn tasks like that into a game as long as they're not for anything important.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - I did the same when I worked in a call centre. Trying to answer the calls in the shortest possible time kept me going :->

[zz]

my typing's terrible, because along with being uncoordinated, i'm constantly switching between different keyboards and positions on desktops and my laptop, so i never completely get used to any of them.

[andrewducker]

I rarely use the same keyboard for long stretches of time. My muscles seem to have adapted for proportions, not actual placement. Funny things, bodies :->

[likeneontubing.livejournal.com]

I learned when I got my first pc, it had mavis beacon with it free. I went through it 4 times, and never stopped. Touch typing ftw. Fast as all hell!

Learned to type using...

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

Text based, time-limited adventure games.

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

I learned to type (and touch-type) variously by
a) typing in (BASIC !) programs from computer magazines (this dates me a bit!),
b) writing an adventure game ("Land of Death") and rewriting it successively in BASIC, Pascal, C, C+XWindows - especially typing in all the room descriptions,
c) Playing TinyMU* and LPMuds - especially when I had a modem (2400 baud, I think) and an old computer, which suffered some strange issue which resulted in garbled output if my typing wasn't even-paced,
d) And doing stuff with computers for fun and profit ever since.