How to Gain 27 Days A Year

Typing is now commonplace and not confined to the typing pool of yesteryear so doesn’t it make sense that you should be able to type at the speed of thought?

Eben Upton (Inventor of Raspberry Pi), said that taking a typing course is the “most practically useful thing he ever did”. We’d argue that touch typing isn’t just practical, it’s productive. If you spend around 3 hours a day typing and increase your typing speed by 30%, you’ll gain an extra 27 days a year – and that’s an awful lot of time.

Learning to touch type isn’t rocket science. First find a good online learning platform. Typeonline.co.uk has five basic lessons and each lesson comes with ten exercises. Allow one uninterrupted hour a day to work through the lessons and don’t cheat by looking at the keyboard – be patient – it took you ages to become an expert at the “hunt and peck” technique.

Once you know all the finger positions (remember there is a raised dot on the F and J key so that you know where your index fingers should be), be bold and make the break! It may well be frustrating at first and it’s likely that you’ll be slower, but very quickly you’ll be whizzing along.

And if speed typing isn’t exhilarating enough, treat yourself by learning the Ctrl functions on your keyboard. These will keep your fingers on the keyboard and speed you up even more. There are hundreds of hotkeys and we’ve listed our favourites below.

Microsoft Hot Keys

Ctrl + A(ll)Highlights All text in a document