Whenever you see a movie about hackers typing extremely fast, you immediately have the opinion that this is fake. It’s not real.
But, deep down, you probably wished that you were able to type that fast.
Meet William Lin.
If you haven’t already seen him on YouTube, you are about to get impressed.
He is only 18 years old but is a really skilled competitive programmer, who recently started his freshman year at MIT.
He won the gold model in the International Olympiad in Informatics, getting 100% of the points.
He also won the Google Kickstart Round A, getting 100% of the points.
He even passed a mock Google Coding Interview before graduating from high school, which is actually quite hard even for experienced engineers.
One particular thing that really stands out when you watch him is his typing speed.
It’s really impressive.
According to one of his videos, he can type up to 130 words per minute, whereas the average person can type up to 45 words per minute.
What a usual person can type in 1 hour, William can finish it in 20 minutes.
Let that sink in for a second.
Although we are not supposed to simply focus on just writing faster, but also what we write, still, if we can increase our typing speed, it could help us be a lot more productive.
Our work and life would generally be a lot better, simply because we are decreasing the time it takes us to translate our thoughts into words.
There are people who have practiced typing faster and have seen considerable improvements in a short period of time.
Hence, even if you aren’t currently typing that fast, you can still improve your typing speed with practice.
There are many resources that can help you increase your typing speed, but I am going to be listing here 3 of them that you can start using right away.
TypeRacer
If you want to practice your writing speed, this is a really good place to start.
It has lessons that you can follow, but you can also compete with others.
People who participate in races at this site are usually some of the fastest typers that I have come across in many places.
It is challenging to win a race here, but the more you practice, the higher your chances of winning.
I believe healthy competitions can help us push way beyond our comfort zone. TypeRacer can be really helpful with that.
KeyBr
This website has an algorithm that generates seemingly random words that do not have any particular meaning which is also a challenge for you to type.
However, these lessons are supposed to help you learn key combinations that are used in actual words, such as “th” or “ion” among many others.
Knowing that we spend a long time in front of our computers, it’s highly likely that we have already memorized how to type many frequent words, but we may still not be able to type at a fast pace some uncommon ones.
The more you use the platform, the more it adapts and gives you personalized statistics that you can use to be aware of your typing patterns.
You can also compete with others.
10FastFingers
This is one of the most recommended sites from many people who have been preaching about the importance of increasing your typing speed.
It is similar to the previous one where you usually get to type actual English words that may not have any particular coherence between each other.
It has practice sessions and also timed tests that you can checkout your typing speed.
There are people who have already managed to cheat it, so do not get intimidated when you see people typing extremely faster than you do.
Of course, there can be ones who have been doing these types of practices from a very young age or for years, so they are also at a higher level than a usual typist.
Bonus: PhraseExpress
This is not a resource that can help your actual typing speed but can still massively increase your productivity.
This is an application called PhraseExpress.
I have been using it for a few years now and I am nothing short of impressed by its usefulness and the ability to help you out in your efforts to be more productive.
It lets you write long pieces of text using only a short phrase on your keyboard that you choose. I use it to quickly write text passages that I often have to repeat.
If you need to write the same passages consistently, then you may give PhraseExpress a try.
Let’s say that you want to write a few similar reports several times a week and do not want to waste a lot of effort by writing it all out each time you need it.
You may not like to copy and paste it from a directory to your own email either, since it takes effort and it is a boring routine that you wished were not punished to do.
You can use PhraseExpress to write those emails with only a short passage of your choice.
You may have a similar email that you use to send weekly reports.
Imagine if one of your emails looked similar to the one below:
Hi Ben,
During the last week, I have worked on the following tasks:
-Task 1 -Task 2 -Task 3
I wish you a good time at the weekend.
Thanks in advance
Cheers,
Fatos
Maybe you also need to write Slack messages to your manager about the things that you have been doing recently.
One starting template that you could be using is the following:
What did I do yesterday?
- Task 1
- Task 2
- Task 3
What am I planning to do today?
- Task 1
- Task 2
- Task 3
What are the impediments in my way?
- Impediment 1
- Impediment 2
- Impediment 3
You can add such new items in PhraseExpress and associate the text above with a meaningful phrase that you find easy to remember, for example, wreport (weekly report) or dreport (daily report).
You can do similarly for other emails or texts that you want to write quickly.
Here are some suggestions which you can use PhraseExpress for:
- Emails
- Greetings
- URLs that you do not want to put in your bookmark bar
- Long physical addresses
- Telephone numbers
- Other text passages that you repeat consistently
- Code snippets that you may need from time to time
It is available for Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.
One last thing before you leave: Avoid looking at your keyboard.
The more you avoid looking at your keyboard, the more you force yourself to figure out the positions of the keys in your keyboard.
It can be hard at first.
You are probably going to be slower, making many more mistakes than usual, but over time, you will notice that you are going to get used to doing it.
Looking at the keyboard and then back on the screen can take quite some time, so simply focusing on looking at your screen as you are typing can be really helpful in the long run.
One bonus tip: If you want to score higher in these online tests, look up the words ahead of the current one that you are typing.
This should at least help you have a faster momentum and more likely to move at a faster pace.
