Type Racer

One advantage of being a workaholic is that many times you are forced to reinvent yourself. To be frank I'm quite a lazy person but I have a bad habit of committing to a lot of work and I try to keep my commitments. So one of these days when I was coding furiously I realized that my eyes were very tired. I took a break and it was kind of normal again. But then it started happening more and more often. Was I getting old? I thought more about it and realized the problem. I was simply moving my eyes a lot and that was because I am a "see typer", I look at the keyboard while typing. The constant movement of eyes from screen to keyboard and back was putting a lot of stress on my eyes. Some other day I might have thought about it, planned, then went on as usual. But the fact that I was having to type simply a lot left me no choice. My eyes simply didn't allow me to go on as usual. That's when I decided to try to type without looking at the keyboard.

At first I simply tried to type without looking at the keyboard. I found it impossible. I was literally looking for the keys through my fingers every character I typed. It was clear that this wouldn't work. I looked on the web found a lot of material on touch typing. I downloaded a free typing tutor software and got started.

I progressed through the lessons learning key at a time. My speed was abysmal. I had made a rule for myself that I wouldn't jump to the next lesson until I achieved a speed of at least 15 wpm in the current lesson. After a lot of painstaking effort I was able to finish all the alphabet keys. That's when I heard about TypeRacer.

It's a simple online typing game. I crossed the first hurdle of fear of losing and boy I lost all of my initial games. Soon though my speed started improving. Currently I can type at 40 wpm which is not stellar but it isn't bad either. The fact that I don't have to look at the keyboard means that my eyes are free to concentrate on the content and my mind is also less agitated while typing. Also the simple act of typing has become sort of a challenge and hence enjoyable.

Deepak, my colleague at Adobe, is the one who gave me the tip about type racer and I want to dedicated this blog entry to him :).