I was talking to a client who – like most of us – needed more hours in the day, and he complained that part of the problem was that he was required to generate long reports, and it took him hours and hours just to type them in. So I asked him, how does he type? Turns out he uses two fingers to peck at the keyboard. I asked him, why not ten? Why doesn’t he touch type?
Of course he couldn’t touch type, nor was he planning to learn to; and neither do almost all the knowledge workers I know. Which is amazing, if you stop to consider it, because if your job involves primarily one machine, and you can operate that machine faster or slower, why not learn to do it faster?
Touch typing allows you to bang out some 60 words per minute (wpm). Hunt and Peck – the common use of two fingers – gives maybe 30 wpm. So it stands to reason that any large organization would benefit by mandating touch typing classes for all employees who use computers on a daily basis. The payback would be huge, for the company and for the individual. It takes a few weeks, and then – from that day to the end of one’s career – one can be so much faster on the job, saving precious lifetime for either more output or more leisure. Why don’t they do so?
Part of the problem may be that typing is no longer a profession. In days past, there were typists: people – mostly women – adept in the use of a typewriter. They were trained and hired to type fast and accurately; in fact, some were stenographers, trained in the art of shorthand, both with pencil and with a specialized steno machine. The extreme speeds achieved by stenography were especially sought in real-time transcription as used in a court of law, allowing as they did to capture over 120 wpm. By contrast, today a lot of typing is done by people with other job names – managers, engineers, technicians… people who are judged on other skills, to the neglect of keyboard wizardry. We’d moved much of the task of typing from the secretaries to the managers and engineers, but forgot to train the latter in the basic skills of the former.
Now, stenography is almost extinct these days, and requires some pretty specialized equipment and training; I’m not suggesting you master it. But there are countless schools and software programs that teach you touch typing, and it uses the same keyboard you already have; nor do you need anyone’s permission to learn it.
Think about it…
Hi, Nathan,
For less than $150 you can buy a speech-to-text program and dictate instead of typing. I’m thinking of Dragon Naturally Speaking (Nuance). It requires some “training” for the program to recognize the speaker’s voice and accent, but it’s very easy to use, and then you only have to hunt and peck your corrections. Probably cheaper than a typing course, and certainly faster to implement. The problem is that once users discover they can dictate e-mails, too, longer e-mails may result. (And it might not be an ideal solution for cubicle farms.)
For what it’s worth, some offices still use typists and transcriptionists. I often see job announcements requiring typing speed of at least 70 wpm. And court stenographers are still key-stroking, and court transcriptionists are still transcribing.
I think that one consequence of the PC revolution is that we have let the medium and the message mingle to the extent that it’s hard anymore to write something in plain text — we want to see documents laid out in templates and frames and slides before we even start writing, and hesitate to let go of that kind of control over the look of our documents. (I do, anyway.)
Regards, PG