It's Friday, and I know your concentration is probably waning. So, I have a suggestion for having fun while increasing your productivity: play a typing game!
If you type anything, ever, then you probably waste a fair amount of time, pausing to look at the keys or hitting that backspace button to correct a typing error.
Imagine how much time you could save by being a faster typist.
Plus, you can justify playing some awesomely addictive games in the process.
Games.sense-lang.org has several fun typing games that use excerpts from real sources, like The Washington Post and encyclopedic entries on humpback whales. You can also link a race up with other people and on Facebook! So, you can include your friends in your productive time-waster.
Would you rather be more “serious” about your typing skills?
Go over to TypingTest.com. There, you can do a baseline typing test to see your words per minute, and they have some free “training crash courses.” For you data fiends, you can even analyze your typing patterns to see what keystrokes hinder your typing the most.
Here's the results of my first baseline typing test. (I was tempted to count this one as my warm-up and do it again, so I could impress you all, but we have things to do today, right?)
Plus, they tell you how much time you “save,” compared to the average typing speed. Since I'm very into tracking my time these days (see last week's productivity post on tracking your 168 hours), I got a little bit of an ego boost when I saw that I save 4.5 hours, compared to someone typing at 36 words per minute. Now, if I could just bump up my speed, I'd save even more time!
Just imagine how much more quickly you could churn our those papers and chapters if you doubled your typing speed!