Recently I have been practicing my typing speed and accuracy. When you do a lot of typing on a daily basis it can be a good idea to ramp up your typing speed. It is said that the average typing speed is about 40 words per minute (WPM). For this measure a ”word” is standardized as five letters och key strokes.
When you first start out practicing typing you learn where the keys are on the keyboard and how to type while looking at the screen instead of the keys, I assume most professional office workers know how to ”touch type” like this.
The next thing to improve is accuracy. Correcting mistakes will slow you down a lot when trying to type fast. So before attempting to improve your speed you need to practice accuracy. A good goal is to consistently reach above 97% accuracy when practicing typing. A few sites that help you with this is http://www.typingclub.com and https://www.keybr.com.
Once you can type at about 50 – 60 WPM with > 97% accuracy you can switch over to other web sites. There are three main sites I recommend, they all serve different purposes. First off, speed. To build speed you can use https://www.nitrotype.com where you can race other players with your race car. To finish first you need to type correctly and fast.
Next is accuracy. Here you want to practice typing normal texts, with capital letters, punctuation, numbers, and such. For this you can use https://www.typeracer.com. As with Nitrotype you race other players on this site. Typeracer forces you to go back and correct mistakes, which encourages you to not make any in the first place.
The third site is https://www.monkeytype.com which helps you measure and track your speed over time. Here you do not type any longer texts, instead you are presented with a list of words to type as accurate and fast as possible. Do a couple of these each day to get a good indication of your progress.
Some final words, it is easy to go all like, like I have, and practice a lot for a couple of days and then just stop practicing. As with every skill, the key to great progress is continuous practice. So try to schedule some time, like 20-30 minutes each day to visit the different sites I have listed in this post.
Being able to type fast and accurate will save you a lot of time if you are an office worker that spends lot of your time in front of the keyboard.