How I went from 11wpm to 109wpm in 15 hours
Tags: productivity, webdev, programming, beginners
Published: 2022-01-18 02:11:13

Long story short, I spent around 15 hours in practicing touch typing and was able to achieve 109wpm (measured for 15secs).

So a bit of context here, I'm a web developer, I work on both frontend and backend, but more concentrated on frontend.
I was always fascinated by the super fast typing of these developers in youtube videos and dev conferences, I'm not sure how productive it made them but it definitely made them look "cool 😎". 

I was not a slow typer by any means. I was typing at **70wpm** and it was fast enough for what I do but I wasn't able to improve any further with my 6 finger technique, so I was wondering, should I give touch typing a try, A proper technique using 10 fingers. I knew I had to unlearn all my typing skills to learn this, but with the just got inspiration from [Power of habit](https://g.co/kgs/p8VuFV) and the genuine interest of being more productive 😅 I bit the bullet and started practicing touch typing.

Oh boy.😐 Typing at 11 wpm from 70 wpm made me feel like a cave man, but I pushed through. I was able to do the first 3 hours progress in just 2 days and it was going good i progressed to around 25wpm.

I was not able to spend much time after that since i had a day job. 
I used [this](https://www.typingclub.com/sportal/) site, you can use whatever you are comfortable with but I strongly recommend this one.

Days went by and i was practicing for at least 30 mins a day and i was able to clock 30-35wpm in a few days and i wanted to try using touch typing in day job, to my surprise i was not even able to type at 10wpm 😱, at this point i didn't learn special characters but even for statements with only alphabets i was struggling, then i realised that i was able to only type at 35 wpm for words i can see and my brain doesn't have to process anything extra to type. 

so i started practicing in the hopes of making typing a muscle memory, it was on and off but i didn't stop practicing.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/9sbruvh4zhh97j74i8aa.png)

After 2 months of practice, I was at 55+ wpm and started using touch typing everywhere i type including at my work it was frustrating at first but i persisted and eventually was able to get back to my normal speed and i must say this time i was far more accurate specially with special characters 😜 compared to my 6 finger technique, and wasn't prone to keyboard size changes.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/hrprsakenqdqukim6nh1.png)

[monkeytype.com](monkeytype.com) is another website where you can practice typing and its more of leisurely typing than learning, i used it to improve and benchmark my speed and i was happy that i was able to cross the 100wpm barrier but its only 15 secs. 

## Conclusion

Was spending this much time unlearning a known skill and learning a new skill worth it ?, I would say yes!. It gave me the confidence that things seems unachievable at first but eventually they will fall into place, you just have to be persistent enough. 

Does it improve your productivity ? Yes, but mostly no. coding is more of thinking and reading than typing. I'm a terminal guy, so it definitely made me faster in terminal. 
Did it make me look cool ? Hell yes! 😁

If you already didn't realise, Im a newbie at writing articles as well and planning to do this more. Follow me for productivity tips.