May Challenge: Touch-type Faster!

We learned touch-typing in high-school. I think we did it for two or three years. Nevertheless, I suck at touch-typing, and as a programmer it may be considered embarrassing.

I can type without looking at the keyboard, so technically, I touch-type all day long. What I don't do is type as I was taught was "correct". I think that as a consequence I am starting to get some wrist pain.

Anyway, in the constant battlefield of self-improvement, I thought I would take the month of May as an opportunity to improve my touch typing and hopeful start typing "correctly" from the end of May onward in day-to-day computer interaction.

The May Challenge is to perform one lesson in touch-typing each day and to measure a standard typing word count each day. Hopefully this word count and/or accuracy will improve by the end of the month and my confidence in correctly touch typing will also improve.

At this stage, I believe I will use the free online service www.typingweb.com because it provides lessons and ad word speed tests, and of course it's free. I just took a test using the "correct" home-row based method and scored: 18 WPM average, 23 WPM gross, and 96% accuracy. It would be interesting to see what my score would be with my unorthodox method - a bad idea, I suspect it may reinforce the bad method.

Again, as with April, I will adopt a penalty-based approach to the challenge. For each day that I miss, I will have to donate $20 to an open source project of choice (not a .NET project as with last month). This is less relaxed (I support opensource, generally), because I am concerned that commitment required may mean that I miss a day or two here and here. We'll see. $20 a day is still a decent disincentive.

I'll be sure to summarize progress at the end of the month.

Image copyright Wouter Verhelst.