I suck at typing

As I awkwardly touch type this and force myself to not look at the keys I wonder why I didn't knuckle down and learn this sooner.

I started out using hunt and peck. AOL chat and the early days of IRC quickly showed me that hunt and peck was unacceptable so I developed a hybrid method. My method was to using three fingers while looking at the keyboard. I would bounce around depending on which keys were needed and periodically glance at the screen to make sure I hadn't typoed. Not super efficient but it has served me well for years.

Why learn touch typing now?

I have less time. I need to be more effective. So I am forcing myself to learn to properly touch type. Being that my hybrid method has given me some muscle memory for where keys are I am not starting from scratch. (Type Racer)[http://play.typeracer.com/] says I am doing 20ish wpm and 90ish % accuracy.

If you are going to learn a new skill I recomend not cheaping out on the equipment but you shouldn't buy the best of the best until you know what will serve you best. To that end I bought a beater mechanical keyboard with blue (clicky) switches.

I also bought some blank key caps to make looking at the keyboard irrelivent. This is super effective but a bit draconian. I found that I needed to keep some of the labled keys like numbers symbols and F keys. I started out replacing only the letter keys but have slowly been redacting my keyboard by swapping out more and more keys.

The most difficult part of having blank keycaps is typing in passwords. You cant see what you typed on the screen or the keyboard. Still it seems to be worth the sacrifice.

I have been using various touch typing learning programs and have had some success improving my accuracy and my words per minute. We will see how this pans out and if the blank caps and clicky switches accelerate my learning.