All of the evidence I have seen suggests that touchtyping is worth learning.
Links? :)
(Or, if this evidence is anecdotal or otherwise not easily linkable — please do elaborate!)
do I spend most of that typing? I do not.
To what extent is that because you're a slow typist? (Do you know your wpm?)
I don't know my wpm, but your question baffles me. How would my typing speed affect the fact that at some given moment I need to read several pages of documentation, sketch out a UI layout, look through code, think, etc.?
Your yourself say in your very next paragraph that "typing speed for most applications is limited by thinking speed" (and I think that's only an upper bound on the practical limitation).
I don't know what an "effort model" is, but I take from your comment that if I am not concerned about RSIs, Dvorak etc. should not interest me. Confirm/deny? Also, even assuming I am concerned about RSIs, do I understand correctly that the RSI prevention/management advantages of the alternate layouts you mention are for touch typists specifically, not just anyone typing in any way?
(Or, if this evidence is anecdotal or otherwise not easily linkable — please do elaborate!)
Most of it is anecdotal. The way I learned to touchtype was participating in chatrooms when I was younger; if you took too long to write sentences, the conversation would pass you by. So I quickly learned to type more quickly than I could talk. A more efficient way to learn is a blank keyboard. Here is an expensive one, or you can buy stickers for your current keyboard for $2 on Amazon, which also lets you learn letters one by one.
...How would my typing speed affec
Thus spake Eliezer:
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.