pragmatist comments on Identification of Force Multipliers for Success - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Nick5a1 21 June 2014 05:15AM

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Comment author: pragmatist 26 June 2014 05:48:04AM 0 points [-]

Touch typing. This should go without saying, but I've worked with people who hunt and peck and it's painful to watch. But you don't have to type really fast to get most of the benefit, since other bottlenecks will start to dominate. In my experience a pokey 50 WPM is more than sufficient.

I don't touch type, and my typing speed is about 65 wpm. Do you think learning how to touch type will result in a significant increase in speed, enough to be worth the effort?

I'm an academic, so typing speed is probably not as important for me as it is for a software designer, but I do a lot of writing, so it is a potentially significant productivity boost.

Comment author: pushcx 26 June 2014 03:45:07PM 2 points [-]

Yes. Speeds of 100wpm are not particularly hard to reach with deliberate practice. The benefit is not the time savings of typing less, it's the cognitive savings of spending your attention on your topic rather than the mechanics of entering text and correcting errors.

Comment author: Antisuji 27 June 2014 06:37:21AM *  0 points [-]

As pushcx said it's not about speed as much as not having to pay attention to what your fingers are doing (and crucially, being able to look elsewhere while you type). The bottleneck isn't bandwidth but the size of your L1 cache.

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