How I Increased My Typing Speed in Two Days

Can you actually improve your typing speed in just two days? This is a question I’ve been dying to find the answer to.

Typing is one of those invisible skills which most of us will use every day, but we very rarely train. That’s why I set myself the challenge of improving my typing speed with three hours of practice over just two days.

Amazingly, I was able to increase my speeds by over 25%.

Today, I want to share the techniques I was attempting to implement, the websites I used to practice, and something surprising that I’ve learnt during this process.

🛠️Why Should You Improve This Skill?

There are two great reasons why I feel everyone should practice their typing:

1. Increase Your Productivity: Typing faster means that you are increasing your output, which can save you time across the day. This is especially true for anyone who spends a good chunk of time writing on their computer.
2. Help Your Creativity: Typing slower than your brain can think disrupts our creative flow, so we should aim for our hands to keep up. It’s also true that looking down at your keyboard to find a key can break your progress.

♟️The Techniques

When you consider the fastest typists, they will be using a technique known as “touch typing”. Touch typing means to engage all your fingers on the keyboard, without having to look down at your keys.

Over my two days of practice, I was particularly focused on improving my technique for touch typing. These were the three techniques that I attempted to utilise across my three hours of practice:

1. Correct Resting Finger Position: Your hands should be positioned with your left forefinger on the “f” key and your right forefinger on the “j” key. You will notice that both of these keys have ridges to guide you towards the correct position. Your remaining fingers should rest along the next keys.
2. Avoid Looking at your Keyboard: Given that we want to prevent our eyes from seeking a key, we need to get into the habit of blocking this option. For my practice, I placed a towel over my hands whenever I felt that I was looking down too much.
3. Know Keyboard Shortcuts: Being able to navigate around your keyboard without having to use a mouse or trackpad is an additional time-saving. Two shortcuts I learnt were “Option + Backspace” to delete whole words, and “Command + Backspace” to delete whole lines.

🌍The Best Websites To Practice

Over the two days, I spent my time practicing on these websites:

1. Keybr.com: This would be my recommended site for beginners learning how to touch type. The website guides you slowly through the correct positioning of your fingers for touch typing.
2. Monkeytype.com: This is a gradual step-up from Keybr.com, and I found it a great place to type freely without the pressure of time.
3. 10fastfingers.com: This is a great place for testing your typing speed, with the option to find out your word count per minute.

I found that all three websites have a place in assisting the development of your typing speed, so it’s finding the balance that works best for you.

💯The Results

At the start of the two days, I took a 60-second typing test and managed to score 69 words per minute (WPM).

The average typing speed is 40 WPM, moving to 80 WPM for “excellent” standard, and finally 120+ WPM for the professional category.

After three hours of practice across the three sites mentioned, I was able to increase my score to 88 WPM. This took me into the excellent category and represented a 27.5% increase in just two days.

💭Closing Thoughts

These two days have shown me that you can increase your typing speed in a short window of time. I would encourage everyone to add typing practice to their weekly routines.

I would add that my touch typing skills are far from perfect. To achieve my score of 88 WPM, at times my technique was very poor, and I relied heavily on looking down. I believe the increase came mainly from having more comfort moving my fingers across the keyboard at speed, and knowing where to find letters.

It is because of this that I will be continuing to practice my typing, and hope to return to this topic at another stage in the future.

You can check out the video of this full experience on my YouTube channel below:

If you’re passionate about self-improvement, reading or want to discuss the subject of touch typing, I’d love to hear from you. So please drop me a message.

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