Are You A Knowledge Worker? Establish This Habit To Become More Productive

TL;DR: Establish a typing practice.

Let’s say you type for about a quarter of your working time (conservative guess, assuming office jobs). That can be writing a document, coding, but also things like searching the web, filling out forms, and of course, prompting ChatGPT.
So, for a full workday, that means about 2 hours of typing per day. Combine that with the average typing 40 words per minute (wpm), and you get a big potential avenue for more productivity.

Let’s say you’re able to raise you typing speed by training to 20 wpm (pretty reasonable). That would reduce your daily typing time to 80 minutes (40 wpm * 120 min = 60 wpm * 80 minutes).

So improving your typing speed is probably a smart thing to do in general. But how long does it take to improve your speed by/to that level?
The typing practice website keybr has anecdotal evidence that if you type at 40 wpm, a speed improvement to 70 wpm in under ten hours of practice is realistic.

What would that look like?

We’d rather practice every day than a long time per day, so let’s go with 10 minutes per day.

That makes 50 minutes of practice pre week (5 working days * 10 minutes), and with that 12 weeks until we reach our ten hours (12 weeks * 50 minutes).

If you were to do that on your own, that’s not insanely long, but a relatively long time still.
But luckily, that’s not the easiest way. You could just integrate your typing practice into your workday, and start your day 10 minutes earlier.

Then, on day two, you will have made some (small) improvement on your typing speed, and can start a little later. Same on every following day.

With this, the question becomes: When will you break even?

To break even, you need a typing speed of ~44wpm (40wpm * 120 min = x wpm * 110 min).
So, how long does it take to reach 44wpm?

If we assume linear progress, you get faster by 0.5wpm per day (30wpm total speed improvement / 60 days), so you get there by day eight.

And from then on, you can start every day later by a longer and longer amount while maintaining the habit.