Typing is an important part of your life if you are from Computer background or you want to set up your carrier in Data Entry and Processing or you are planning to pass the tests held for a Govt. job. Also it is necessary to have a good hand in typing if you are a software developer, Blog writer, Reviewer etc. by profession.
With the dramatically increase in use of Computers and internet, in last decade, in general life, typing plays a key part when it comes to anything related to Computers whether it is writing your e-diary or life story or it may be your college assignments or project reports.
In my own case; professionally, I am a software developer. I am average good in my logics but many times I feel lacked behind as compared to my colleagues when we were working on a projects. It was because of my slow typing speed. Internally it was annoying for me. One fine day while working on a project on of my colleague I noticed it luckily that I am lacking behind due to my slow typing speed. That day I finally decided to work on my typing speed and to increase it.
Initially I found it difficult because I was habitual to look at keyboard while typing. Many time it started with a determination that I will not look at the keyboard, but I started feeling irritated when I do a lot of mistakes with a speed of 12-15 words per minute (WPM) and started following my old practice.
How I did it?
But I had already made my mind to do it. So one day I was almost free and Googled the shortcuts to increase the speed. After reading for 3-4 hours and watching 10-12 videos, I found that unluckily there is no magic stick to improve speed in minutes or hours but the key lies in practice and a few other important factors discussed in this article.
Exercises of your interest
I started practicing and I figured out that I can perform a lot better when the content I am practicing with is of my interest. Then I collected ten articles of my interest and stared with them. Hurry! It was an amazing experiment; I was improving much faster than my expectations. I got a jerk start and was happy with my performance, but not satisfied internally.
Finger Memorization
After reading more, I got that finger Memorization plays an important role to increase your speed. I prepared a few exercises to memorize character on keyboard. It started working and I was improving. Then I prepared a few exercise which contains repeated common words like the, has, are, with etc. and practiced with them. After a week I noticed that these exercises were doing a good job and I reached 22 words per minute (WPM). It worked because when you typing and recall key positions from mind, this process takes time to respond for correct key position. Whereas finger memorization responds very quickly and time to request the key positon of a particular character on keyboard and get response from brain is saved. Although the difference is in milliseconds, but it makes a big difference when you repeat this process many times (almost 5 times for a word on an average). So, if you are typing an article of 500 words and it contains approx. 2500 characters and spaces and average 15-20 milliseconds has been wasted for each keystroke then you will waste 37,500-50,000 milliseconds. For an article of 10 minutes, you will waste about a minute. In other words you are wasting 1/10 of your time.
Less use of backspace
Then I counted backspace which I used to press while typing and it was hilarious. I was pressing backspace more than 100 times for an exercise of 500 words. It means I was wrongly pressing 100 keys then 100 backspaces to delete them and 100 keys to type the correct characters. In total, I was pressing 300 keys instead of 100 and 200 strokes were wasted every time, which in-general means that I was missing 40 words (200 characters/5 = 40 words). I know it is not possible to completely stop using backspace, but it can be cut-off to half or more and I did it and saved 20-30 words for an article of 500 words, which means I have improved by 2 words per minute (WPM).
And finally, the practice did it for me. I worked 2 hours every day for a month and improved from 12-15 WPM to 46 WPM.