If you ask me, if I love documentation, I would join the majority club, a big NO. But something I am fascinated to do is typing real fast. I would say that I have significantly gained time because of it. If you ask me how, my answer would be the fraction of second I save over a period of time that has made a difference. Maybe hard to realize but I value it. Typing is less of a pain for me for tasks like sending mails, writing a post on the blog, coding when I know what I am doing and the list can go on. I am a keyboard man rather than a mouse man. I love working on my laptop, using my keyboard most of the time (after some thinking I realized I use mouse when I only need some action dependent on a right click). That’s another reason I love to work on a shell prompt or DOS prompt as much rather than on a GUI environment.

I am thankful to my mom, for without her I would not have learnt typewriting. After I finished my schooling my mom wanted me to learn typewriting. I asked her why. She told me that she wanted to do it when she was young but couldn’t do it, and so she wanted me to do it. When I completed the senior grade typing I never thought it would help me until recently when I started observing people more closely, particularly people involved in Software industry.

Those who do not know typewriting, key in looking at the keyboard rather than looking at the monitor. Because they are not used to the keyboard layout and hand-eye coordination is needed to press each and every letter. This definitely causes considerable time lag. The next disadvantage is if one looks at the keyboard and types one has to go back and forth looking into the monitor and keyboard to see if there were any mistakes and correct them. An addendum to this problem is sometimes people don’t realize that due to some reason the focus would have gone to another application which is not expecting an input from the user through keyboard. And the person doesn’t realize until he/she looks into the monitor. You might ask how does it matter but the saying “Small drops of water make an ocean” is what I could think of. The fraction of time I save makes an overall difference. For example typing mails is the quickest thing that I could finish off, provided I know what I have to write.

If you want to leverage speed of typing and learn typewriting, you could do it online. Just Google and you will get lot of sites that teach typewriting online. The first basic rule when learning is to never look at the keyboard and type. It is OK you will make mistakes initially but slowly your hands know where the keys are and you will realize how easy it is to see the monitor and keep typing. By the way if you want to test your typing speed click this link “See how fast you can type“.

Happy Weekend!