Learning touch typing. I've never been 100% on typing without looking at the keyboard when going fast, and I think that learning to do so would boost my productivity.
Another useful skill that I’ve found helps is getting good at reading from a source and typing it as you go.
When someone’s presenting, I can quickly type something they’re showing. Usually quicker than interrupting, asking them to copy & paste and then waiting for them to get on track.
Another is if for some reason you get sent a printout, an image or something, transcribing whatever you need from it is super quick.
If it’s too fast I don’t internalize what it says, I just type, but it’s nice.
A personal story,
My grandma and my mom where both secretaries. I used to sat down on the typewriter at home for fun. As soon as I did and started typing you would hear, “back straight!, hands!, feet on the ground!”
When we finally got a computer, it died a bit. They couldn’t hear the keyboard when I typed so I had some time to slouch before they walked in and saw me.
That’s of course if I remembered to turn off/down the speakers when I booted the computer up.
Ah, definitely. I'm in a work-from-home situation right now, and have been trying to type things during video calls (being careful to mute my audio and not show the typing on video, of course). I can imagine that within two weeks, I'll be at least at my old speed, if not far faster.
What are you using to learn and how are you finding it?
I ask because I myself am working on a touch-typing course for developers[0] because I wasn't satisfied with the other options available. It's one of my two quarantine projects.
Ah fair enough, I used that to learn natural language typing and thought it was great but then found it lacking for learning to touch type when coding. I'm taking a lot of inspiration from the design of typing club though.
