Touch typing (week 1 overview)

As an effort to track my progress with touch typing I decided to post on a weekly basis how well it is going and what I learn along the way. I just finished all default lessons in Stamina which covered all keystrokes. The lessons were grouped by typing situations - letters, numbers. smilies and so on. This has took me five hours of practice so far. I have done also three hours research, so that's a total of 8 hours. Now, I can focus solely on the Phrases mode, which is much closer to real world typing. After all, as the author of Stamina points out in the program's SOS (that's how he calls the Help) - "increase of speed is achieved by working with text... or isn't achieved." :)

I am not feeling quite confident with the positions of all keys yet, but I guess it is a matter of practice and my mind getting used to it. Definitely, I have made some progress, but I want to incorporate these skills more in my day-to-day work (as I type this post I look at the keyboard only on a force majoure :) ).

I have to mention that meanwhile I have researched and tried a lot of software programs assistants to make sure I am not missing something fundamental. Turned out I did :) E.g. the position of my hands was not the one recommended. I rested my wrists on the keyboard and that definitely leads to typing slooow. Nevertheless, for now, I am going to stick to Stamina. It is such a funny piece of software (though I already turned on the censorship mode i.e. no fart, no burp). I guess there are products out there based on more serious scientific research, but I will leave them for next year.

Merry Christmas!