More than twenty years ago, (now I feel old!) I taught myself a skill that has given me a major competitive advantage throughout my career. Trying to use it felt, at first, awkward, clumsy and, well, painfully slow. It would have been so much easier, and quicker, to revert to using two fingers. But I persevered.
The skill I’m referring to is the ability to touch type. I’ve just tested my skills online and apparently I can type over 60 words per minute with 95% accuracy, which is, officially, pretty fast.
It’s a skill that can apparently save me four hours a week compared to the average person, who can type 36 words per minute (based on 15,000 taking the test). Or, put another way, that’s a whole afternoon every week I could be sitting in my garden, rather than at my desk. That’s not something I’d have wanted to do in recent months, but you get the point! When computers had, by the mid nineties, become an integral part of our working lives, when we were sending emails instead of letters and typing our own letters and reports, I was quite simply able to get through more work than most of my contemporaries – and still leave on time.
The thing is, nobody, I mean nobody, and particularly nobody of the male species, was learning to touch type when I decided to do it. Those were, after all, the days when we still used Dictaphones, and our letters and reports were typed by a pool of all-powerful secretaries - who were almost universally women.
But, as we spent our evenings typing bits of code into our Sinclair Spectrums, and the first VDUs began to appear at work (remember those horrible green screens?) the signs were there that in the future we’d all be using a keyboard. I started work in 1985; by 1993, I was working almost exclusively on a personal computer.
There’s two lessons here I think about learning. The first is about spotting opportunities and not necessarily sticking rigidly to an established learning route or career path. Look for ways in which you can give yourself a skill that others, including your bosses, don’t have and don’t yet realise they’ll need.
The second is that in order to continuously develop, we have to learn to go backwards. When we learn a new skill, we’ll invariably experience the frustration of being slower, more awkward, less ‘good’ than we were when using our old established skills. That dip in performance though is a small price to pay for the long-term rewards. In the last twenty years, if the figures above are to be believed, I may well have saved myself 4,160 hours or (if I exclude the eight hours a day I like to sleep) 260 days! That’s quite some return on the investment I made in my training!
By the way, am I the only person to think that it’s incredible and a little bit insane that in an age where we live on our keyboards, schools do not as a matter of course teach all children touch-typing skills? Or that most organisations don’t bother teaching employees to type either? Imagine the increase in productivity if this were a universal skill.
Want to know how you would fare in the typing test? Take the challenge by following
this link.