But I have recently come to realize there is one task for which typing fast is very important. That task is real-time text chat.
Among my friends in our chat server, and among co-workers on Slack, some people are much more chatty than others. They write more messages. They write longer messages. They have more involved conversations. They have the greatest amount of participation.
Others do not chat as much. I’m sure they have their own reasons, and that’s fine. It’s not right or wrong to participate more or less.
But I realized one day there was a very strong correlation. The people who participate the most are all people who are sitting at computers with keyboards (mostly mechanical ones) and are very proficient at typing. They can all type at least as fast as they can think.
People who use their phones more often, or are slower typists, can’t keep up in a text conversation. If they try to write a long complex thought the conversation will pass them by. They can only get out a shorter sentence in time, and that really puts a damper on their communication. It’s like someone with a quiet voice trying to get a word in a very loud conversation.
This really clicked for me recently when a co-worker admitted to being a very slow hunt and peck typist. They are an excellent engineer, so it’s not a problem there. However, this person is also the person who loves to do Slack huddles all the time. It all made sense. I was absolutely overwhelming this person in text chat with an entire paragraph of ideas before they could peck out a sentence. Of course a huddle is easier for them.
I would like to make a suggestion to slow typists out there who have to use real time text chat. Either learn to type fast and/or start using speech to text features.
And yep, I'm a prolific text chatter amongst similarly fast-typing friends and colleagues. It's still my preferred mode of communication. When all parties can keep up it's a really enjoyable medium.
I was quite proud of the fact that i could easily out-type my 1200 baud modem. Tech improved and so did my typing.
Late-night C64 BBS's when the sysop jumped in and started talking to you in real-time was the biggest pressure cooker to learn to type, to learn to type fast, and to watch the screen while you type.
The came IRC, and well; in busy channels it was tricky. Today Slack feels slow with all the animated crap.
I totally noticed that the most active persons in a conversation are those who type the fastest, and conversely. Seems totally logical.
I don't touch type, but I do type quickly and I never spend any processing cycles looking for a key, at least on a keyboard with a layout I'm used to.
Like I don't care where people put their fingers, or even if they use them all, but for me its not touch typing if you need to use your eyes.
People always like to say "thinking, not typing, is the bottleneck". This is a totally wrong way to think about it, because for the most part you don't think while you type. You think, then you type. They happen at different times! The more time you spend typing, the longer it is before you can start thinking again.
I think that isn’t true if you’re a good enough typist. Once typing is automated enough, you can (somewhat) multitask.
It is similar to driving a car. If you just learned driving, you can’t do anything else while driving, but if you gain experience, you learn to detect when the road needs you full attention and when it doesn’t, and can talk or think about other things while driving.
I think being able to think of what to write next while typing may be even more important for a fluent conversation than typing faster. It will be difficult to test whether that’s true, though, because automating the act of typing also makes you type faster.
As an analogy, when you're having an in-person conversation, how often do you pause and think before responding, versus forming your thought and speaking it in real-time? There's definitely times to stop and think for a moment before replying, but there's also times where I'm speaking my thoughts as it's formed.
Likewise, if you're comfortable and quick and "at home" with typing, then I'd argue there's no reason you can't type as you're forming your thought just like you speak as you're forming your thought.
(Admittedly I'm typing this on my phone, so not at the speed of my thoughts right now, but I know for sure I've done it over Slack with my coworkers and group chats on Telegram, especially when shooting short quick questions and answers back and forth)
That's not my experience at all. Typing happens without conscious effort, and I'm certainly thinking about what I'm doing while I'm typing.
Knowing your tools and underlying tech is also a must and the better you know it the better your intuition will be.
Really? I can certainly type while thinking cause I did so while writing this very sentence, and I have assumed that they are pipelined and improving one without another is meaningless up to some threshold. I should note that I don't think in English, but I can pull English words incrementally from my mind so I don't think that matters much anyway.
In orienteering, people are taught to stop before making important decisions.
I've been orienteering and the only time I'd stop is when the terrain didn't allow safely reading the map while in a jog. Or when I encounter an unexpected landmark, indicating I lost my orientation. Otherwise everything is planned while moving towards and scanning for the next waypoint in the queue.
I can't really read the article as it went down for me so the article may have already mentioned this, but I think touch typing is a bit more important than the raw typing speed, which heavily depends on the exact text and personal conditions.
I type reasonably fast (about 120 WPM on a good day, 100 WPM on a normal day, according to Monkeytype), but I've said for quite awhile that you get around 95% of the benefit of fast typing by simply getting to 50 WPM.
I do think that there's value in being able to touch-type, but I think the benefits after that tail-off pretty quickly.
Getting faster at typing is fun, and it won't "hurt" you or anything, but like many things, I think a lot of the benefits are overhyped.
Couple of instances where I want to be able to type _very_ quickly is when I'm (a) taking notes while someone is talking or (b) writing out a lengthy code block I don't need to think that hard about. Other than that, typing at a modest speed is good enough.
I never cared that I was slow, I’m fast enough. I do wish I was more accurate though.
In the earliest days of the Internet, every Cisco router installation included a community of dedicated monks who painstakingly cleared the EVIL bit and copied each packet to each outbound interface in a hex editor.
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt
Fast typists have been in demand ever since the studios ceased broadcasting cartoons live. It was these heroic figures who transferred lightning-quick creativity from inkpot and paintbrush, to keyboard and mouse.
I find it very useful that I can quickly have my ideas flow from my mind into the screen.
typing without looking at the keyboard is.
Typing fast(er) for me went hand-in-hand with the fun of experimenting with mechanical keyboards. Once you hit a certain stride, there is a satisfying audible and haptic feedback that settles into a gratifying rhythm as you compose your thoughts on screen. Do yourself a favor and invest in a keyboard that pleases you if you have to clack (or thock) into the void for more than a couple hours per day.
Combine it with 10 gig fibre browsing and working
It's the same as with driving. You can either drive very deliberately and consciously, where your whole focus is the road, or you can 'switch to automatic' where you're actually thinking about something else entirely.
For driving, maybe focus-mode is best. But typing should be automatic.