How I Type REALLY Fast (156 Words per Minute)

hey friends welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is ali i'm a doctor based in the uk and in this video we're talking about a topic very close to my heart which is how to type faster now having a ridiculously fast typing speed is one of my super powers in life and i think anyone can become at least twice as productive if you just improve your typing speed and so in this video we're going to talk about the benefits of improving your typing speed and then i'm going to go over eight actionable practical tips on how you can personally improve your typing speed so that you can become a productivity grease monkey in case you're wondering i hit around 155 words per minute on a good day and if i'm feeling particularly sluggish i will be hovering around the 140 words per minute mark for context the average typing speeds around 45 words per minute and if you're watching this video you're probably a nerd like me so yours is probably significantly higher and according to google you need to be at around 80 words per minute to qualify as a professional typist whatever that means regardless of whether you want to be a professional typist or not i think there's some very good reasons to improve our typing speed to try and get it as high as possible the first and most important one is that it just really impresses people like when people see me typing at work you know i work as a doctor in case you didn't know the single biggest compliment i've ever gotten through my two years of being a doctor is that wow you type really fast maybe that's not the kind of compliment i want when i'm a doctor but still it's nice to hear and everyone is always so impressed like oh my god where did you learn to type i'm just like well you know i misspent youth and they always like oh hahaha very funny secondly everything in life is based on a computer these days if you can increase the speed at which you interact with a computer if you can get the computer to respond to you kind of as close to you thinking that thing as possible then you're just like so much more productive in front of a computer it's not just for typing heavy things like typing essays and whatever you do for work it's also just in general in terms of interacting with the web browser and going on websites and sending messages to friends all of that stuff becomes quicker and therefore we become more productive when we can type faster and thirdly to be honest for me the closer my typing speed gets to my thinking speed the more creative i think i become because when you're writing something like whether it's a first draft for a blog post or a project or an essay or even a script for a video when you're writing something the first draft should always be just kind of a brain dump without really stopping to think about it too much and so when i'm planning videos or writing blog posts or email newsletters link below if you want to subscribe to my weekly email newsletter when i'm typing out the first draft i can almost type at the rate that i think and therefore i just get stuff onto a page so much quicker and you know a lot of people ask that you know ali how do you have time to do all of these things youtube channel blog newsletter podcast how do you have time to do all this stuff while you're working as a doctor and my answer is well i'm taking a break from medicine right now and apart from all the general productivity advice that i've given out on this channel in the past i think just being able to type super fast makes such a big difference to everything because it just makes life so much better so that's why we should be improving on typing speed i've actively worked to improve mine and it's had a big knock-on effect on my life and hopefully one day it will um help me attract a mate let's now go over eight ways eight practical actionable ways that you can improve your typing speed alright so step one involves learning some keyboard shortcuts for fixing mistakes and if you don't know these already these are an absolute game changer so i'm gonna type some stuff and i'll show you how i fix a mistake okay i've typed in somewhere over the rainbow while up so i want to write way up now the old school way of fixing this mistake is going back back back back y space you know it's like using backspace multiple times but a general tip for improving your typing is that whenever you find yourself using backspace more than twice there's probably a better way of doing it and so if i take that typo back what i'm going to do is i'm going to use option and backspace and what that does is that that deletes an entire word option backspace to delete an entire word and i will show you on a more legit keyboard what that looks like so if i type the type again war up i'm sure this is aligned i'm hitting option and backspace to delete the entire word and this is absolutely absolutely revolutionary if instead you're one of those heathens that uses windows then don't worry you can also do this on windows you press ctrl and backspace and on windows that works and that deletes a whole word so that just changes the game completely because now you're not pressing backspace multiple times to delete mistakes you're doing option backspace or control backspace and then you're more efficiently fixing mistakes as you go along the other really useful keyboard shortcut which is on mac but not on windows is command backspace to delete an entire line this is helpful in fewer circumstances than being able to do to delete individual words but that's also an important one to know all right tip number two for improving your typing speed is by discovering a website called ten fastfingers.com and semi-regularly doing typing tests on here i discovered this website when i was i think 13 years old i'm 26 now so look basically half a lifetime ago i discovered this website and i think at the time my speed when i was in like the eighth grade was about 70 words per minute maybe 18 it was between 70 and 80 words per minute because i was still a nerd at that point but you know just a few times a month i'll just hop onto 10 fast fingers and do some practice do one of these typing speed tests and just over time my typing speed has just improved exponentially or exponentially has improved linearly based on just practicing the tests so let's do one now and i'll show you in real time then we'll speed up the rest of it so you don't have to sit through all of it okay clearly i'm not gonna get above 145 in this session i feel like it's because i'm quite hot right now but anyway this is how 10 fast fingers works but yeah a few months ago a friend of mine angus was on about 65 words per minute and then just for you know once a week for about 10 minutes he's just been practicing on test on 10 fast fingers and his typing speed now is up to round about 95. so that's about a 50 increase by practicing 10 minutes here and there for the last few months so it's very doable to get quite quick at typing when you're doing these tests somewhat regularly tip number three is another website called pbr which is like a typing lesson type website i don't spend a lot of time on this personally i mostly prefer to use 10 fast fingers but this is quite nice it sort of trains your typing speed based on what your own weaknesses are so let's switch keyboards back what it's doing if we look over here it says lessons key set and it selects a few keys and current key is e and so i will i'll just do a little bit of it first and i'll show you how it works so over there my speed was 104.2 in one error this is my score whatever but the point is is that it's it's worked out essentially it was just testing me on e-n-i-t-r-l now it's going to test me on s and a few other keys um and we'll see how i do on that so so you saw over here that my speed was 75 gain was -26 and so what it's doing is it is that as i'm typing it's figuring out which specific letters on the keyboard i'm struggling with and then it's going to train me on those more often and so this is a little bit frustrating because a lot of the words that it's making you type out aren't actually real words and that's why i prefer 10 fast fingers for just general practice and also testing myself because it's actual words and i think 10 fast fingers is based on like the 300 most common words in the english language or something like that so more like a real world test and practice of typing speed but this website kbr.com is good for getting those little bits that are a little bit more pesky so i occasionally have a little dabble with this tip four is that if we want to improve our typing speed and general digital productivity productivity in front of computer we want to move away from using the mouse to using the keyboard for absolutely everything so on mac the app that i like to use for this is alfred which is sort of a replacement to spotlight and so i don't even i don't even show my dock i like never ever look at my dock to open up apps instead if i want to open an app i'll use alfred command spacebar and i'll just type in the app uh so if i want a safari if i want spotify i'll just go command spacebar spot enter spotify comes up come on spacebar bear you know and so on so i like i will never ever use this this screen to select apps i will almost never use the mouse to drag over to the dock to click it and a that just makes me so much more productive when i'm on a computer because now i can think of doing something and then it immediately happens with the app uh alfred i can also search for files and spotlight does some of this if i want to do a google search or an amazon search i'll just type it in so let's see um what's the so if i type in average typing speed the nice thing about alfred which spotlight doesn't do crucially is that whatever you type in if it's not an app or a search term for like a file or something it will automatically search google for it and so you can google things very quickly if i want to search for something on amazon i will type in ama and then type in i don't know wheel of the time and it will automatic it'll it'll recognize i'm trying to search amazon and so these day-to-day things that i'm doing i'm doing a lot quicker because of alfred but alongside my own typing speed is improving because now i'm sort of interacting with the keyboard for everything i'm doing on a computer rather than using a mouse to click and so even if i'm using any kind of new app anytime i find myself having to use the mouse i think in my head okay this is suboptimal and i will google what the keyboard shortcuts are for that particular app so that i can kind of learn the keyboard shortcuts as i go and i think switching to this keyboard first mentality which i did in around about 2012 2013 um that's really helped improve my typing speed because now we're just kind of keyboard warrior a lot more than being a mouse warrior tip five is as you're improving your typing speed you basically never ever want to look at the keyboard you know the whole point of touch typing is that you are able to type whatever you want without looking at the keyboard and i think it's very tempting to look at the keyboard initially but like even if you're really slow i think the way to train the muscle is by going slower but not looking at the keyboard unless for example you make a mistake and you really have to because what we're training is when we're not really training our ability to see where the keys are and hit them we're training our ability to not see where the keys are and hit them and so like in the past when my typing speed was slower i used to give myself the ability to look at the keyboard when i needed to but now i kind of force myself now i'm not allowed to look at the keyboard and i will always try and kind of correct mistakes even without looking at the keyboard because correcting mistakes is an important part of improving our own typing speed all right tip number six is that we always want to be returning our fingers to the resting position of asdf jkl semicolon and this is very easy to do because on most key basically all keyboards the f and the j keys are going to have these little bits on them and so your index fingers of the left and right hand can always return to this position and i think this is just a this generally it's kind of like when you're playing a piano you want to return to the rest position like this is the rest position and it's it's it's easy enough to get here by feeling for these little indentations on the f and the j key from wherever you are on the keyboard tip number seven is a little bit weird and that is try to make noise so i'm not sure how legit this is advice is in terms of like a professional typist but to be honest i've always found that when i'm typing loudly i tend to type faster and if it's like a quiet room or a lecture or something and i'm trying not to make noise then i end up typing a lot slower and i don't know if this has something to do with the noise but i think just the mentality of you know i'm typing as as loudly as i can in a way i don't know at least for me it helps me get into the mindset of sort of like typing typing harder it's it ends up being a lot louder on a mechanical keyboard like this but even on a on a sort of less loud keyboard i tend to hit the keys with quite a lot of force possibly i'm being a bit inefficient because in theory any excess force is wasted for us but i find that yeah when i'm trying to be loud i just my typing speed just gets better so maybe that's another tip that you guys can experiment with and finally we always want to be treating improving our typing speed kind of like a game and we always want to be improving like for me i know the next stage of my improvement as a typist because i'm trying to hit 200 i think 200 words per minute would be a good a good thing to aim for i think the next stage for me is to use my uh left pinky more often because with the asdf method what you're supposed to do is you're supposed to use your pinky to hit the a key the q key the one two and shift but really the only thing i use my pinky for is to hit the shift key and i will use my left ring finger for hitting you know q a z one two um so yeah and basically i reserve my pinky just for shift and that's probably some optimal like people say you should use a pinky more often so i'm you know even even though my typing speed is quite high sort of 130s to 140s in this session 150s on a good day i'm still trying to improve and i kind of treat it as a bit of a game and i think that's one of the most important things like it's a skill that can be improved and my life has you know significantly improved since i developed the ability to type fast and so yeah i would just encourage you to trick it like a game treat it like a constant thingy of improvement and then youtube will type like a productivity grease monkey and finally tip number nine a little bonus tip for you guys is that well why are we trying to type faster usually because well i mean apart from trying to attract a spouse we're typing faster because we want to be more productive but as i said at the start of the video being more productive isn't just about how fast you can kind of like bash the keys on a keyboard it's also about a load of other things um the productivity equation as i like to call it is productivity equals useful output divided by time multiplied by the fun factor and if you want to learn more about my own tips for productivity you should definitely check out my productivity skillshare class which is all about the fundamentals of productivity and in that we talk about the equation we talk about a mental model of the pilot the plane and the engineer which is how i like to think about productivity and we talk about the three myths the three powers and the three laws of productivity i think so far about 10 000 people have taken that class and it's got like amazing reviews if you want to check out that class for free you should hit the link below to get a free two-month trial of skillshare who are kindly sponsoring this video um to be honest i plug skillshare even when they don't sponsor my videos because i have four classes on skillshare right now we've got a productivity class a study for exams class a class on how to use anki which is an amazing flashcard app and a class on how to edit videos exactly like this one so by signing up to a two month free trial of skillshare you can watch hours and hours and hours of the rest of my content if that's what you want and you should definitely check out my productivity class my mate thomasfrank has another productivity class which is really good because ultimately you know improving and typing is more about trying to make ourselves more productive than just you know the mechanical task of improving our typing on top of that skillshare has thousands and thousands of classes on all sorts of topics from creativity to business to entrepreneurship like literally so much stuff and it's all available for less than ten dollars a month for the annual premium subscription even though they sponsor my videos even though i'm a skillshare teacher i still pay the ten dollars a month every every month for skillshare and it's one of the most worthwhile things that i spend any amount of money on and so definitely hit the link in the video description to get a two-month free trial of skillshare and thanks skillshare for sponsoring this video if you like this video and you want to be more productive then here is a very short playlist of some of my best productivity themed videos thank you so much for watching and i'll see in the next one bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 4,512,500

Rating: 4.913918 out of 5

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal

Id: 1ArVtCQqQRE

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020