Typing

I recently read this sassy blog post from 2008 and felt very inspired to learn how to type. I guess some of the challenging "coachy" attitude of the post seeped through and activated some of my very old and tired competitive brain cells.

My takeaway is that I didn't know how much I actually type wrong. Or rather, I knew how much I typed wrong, but I was very unaware about how unnecessary it was. I used to be obsessed with typing fast, so even though I knew about the standard position of the "home row", I often typed past it and did whatever my hands felt was the more effective way to type the word, regardless of whether I was using the correct fingers for the keys. Separately, I was aware that I often had to reach for backspace and correct my typing because I was missing keys a lot. Reading the above post enlightened me to the fact that these two incidents are correlated.

Basically, I had speed but not form. By forcing myself to slow down and type using the correct fingers for the correct keys, I feel like I am typing much more accurately and it is much less frustrating. I am still not as fast as I was, but I'm slowly getting there. And once I start to speed up, I'll be able to type fast without missing keys.

The post also had some very inspiring quotes from a football coach. My favorite is the allegory to learning to play classical music. First play as properly as you can, not caring about speed. Then play really fast, not caring about your precision. Finally, try reaching a middle ground where you play "on beat", making as few mistakes as possible. Rinse and repeat.