The importance of Touch Typing and why you should start practicing it Today.

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Everything in this modern world runs on computers and no matter which field you choose to work in, it’s given that you’re going to interact with computers regularly. Engineers, Doctors, Scientists and every other major and minor sector are depending on computers these days to increase the rate at which their employees work. We’re in the digital age, I suppose you’ve already listened to or read this line thousands of times during your lifetime by this point, every business is digitizing and using the internet to improve and expand, and guess where the internet exists?

Mostly on the computers, and here’s another question, How are you going to interact with the computer?

You’re definitely not gonna speak to it and expect it to reply back with the desired results like it’s one of our fellow humans. Of Course you’ll interact with it through a Keyboard, and if you’re still using your pointy fingers to type on the keyboard, you’re just wasting the most valuable resource in this universe, and what is that you may ask. It’s TIME. 

As we’ve talked earlier, we’re in the digital age, every field of work involves computers, so the professions that require or expect you to be a fast typer are increasing by day.

Touch Typing is important especially if you’re an Coder, as all your work is done before the computer screen and your fingers always lay on the keyboard, You’re supposed to be among the fastest persons behind the keyboard in the world. The work that you choose demands that.

It’s about time you improve your ability to type fast so that you don’t spend several minutes moving your eyes between the screen and the keyboard(like you’re watching an foreign movie with subtitles) just to make a google search.

The ability to type without seeing the keyboard not only helps increase your productivity but also make you look cool in front of your friends and colleagues(and I’m not kidding). And to multiply that coolness in front of your friends, you need to increase the pace at which you type.

• <30 wpm      - Slow

• 50 - 80 wpm - Average

• >90 wpm      - Fast

These are the different typing speeds, And if you want to be good at typing, you should at least get to 60 wpm. Which you can do in no more than a month with enough practice.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Some of the benefits of Touch Typing

1. Saves your time, as this is the correct and fastest way to type, you can easily improve your typing speeds using this method

2. It will reduce your mental fatigue from focusing on both your screen and keyboard as you type

3. It is will reduce eyestrain from searching the small letters on the keyboard

4. You can better focus on the material or the code that you are writing rather than dividing your focus between the keys on the keyboard and the material on the screen

Now that you know the importance of touch typing, let’s talk about how you can learn to type without looking at the keyboard. 

You’re certainly not required to complete an online course for this, What you need is a website called “10fastfingers.com.”

10fastfingers.com is a website that let’s the users practice on random words, this website is indeed popular among the Typing community.   

10fastfingers.com will let practice on the 100 most used words in English, Practicing on frequently used words will help you when you put your practiced skill into use in the real world scenarios, you can also try using the advanced level which will generate text based on the one thousand(1000) most used words in English.

This level contains longer words which will be a little harder to practice at the beginning but I recommend that you hop into this level once in a while to improve your typing skill quickly. And if you want to add your own text to practice on, you can do that too. 

Adding your own text and practicing on that is especially useful If you’re an upcoming coder, Because coders need to type special characters along with normal text, so adding your own text that contains special characters that are essential to code will be useful.

Adding your own text and practicing on it is one of the unique features on10fastfingers.com. 

Know matter which type of keyboard you use, whether it is Qwerty, Dvorak, Colemak, Workman, This website is useful.

I started practicing on 10fastfingers.com when I'm only used to typing with my two pointy fingers, my speed tops at 12-16 wpm, but after practicing for just two weeks, I managed to reach 45 wpm.

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

10fastfingers.com is the most popular and effective website to learn touch typing, Let me give you a task, Go to YouTube and search “How to get better at Typing” and any Youtuber that appeared in the results will talk about how 10fastfingers.com helped them reach impressive typing speeds and will also recommend you to use the website to get better at Touch Typing.

Here are some tips to remember while you work on your Touch Typing skills,

• Try not to look at the Keyboard while you find it difficult to type fast.

• Focus on accuracy when you are just starting, I know it we’ll be curious to quickly improve your speed but know that the errors will decrease the WPM count, And you will find using Backspace(which is hard to reach in the first place) more than actually typing the given text.

• Use Shortcuts. Most importantly ctrl + backspace which will delete the whole word instead of a letter. Other shortcuts for common tasks like Copy, Paste, etc. Will help save your time and also reduce the usage of Mouse.

• Spend more time during the early days of learning the Touch Typing, once your muscle memory gets hold of all the keys on the keyboard, you can limit the time to 30 min per day.

10fastfingers.com is free to use, you don’t need a premium plan or membership to use the website, there are other typing enthusiasts on the website which you can see at the leaderboard, you can also slowly climb up the ladder while you keep getting better at your speeds.

You can participate in games created by other users where hundreds of other players participate or you can let others join in the game that you’ve created. This will make the learning process entertaining and competitive, and do you  know that being in a learning community will make the process of learning any skill quicker.

Visit 10fastfingers.com now and start the process of both looking cool and getting things done on the computers.