(I might write a post on this at some point.) EDIT: I did
There’s a meditation technique that I have used to improve my typing speed, but that seems pretty generalizable: Open up a typing test[1] and try to predict my mistakes in advance of them happening. This could look like my finger slipping, or running into a faulty muscle memory for a certain word, or just having a cache miss and stumbling for a second. Then, I use this awareness to not make those mistakes, ideally stopping them before they happen even once.
I’ve learned to type from scratch several times, going from hunt and peck to touch typing with qwerty, to touch typing colemak, to learning to use the Kinesis Advantage 2, to learning the CharaChorder 2 and its custom layout, which is now my daily driver. I only started doing this meditation about half way through learning colemak, and it noticeably boosted my accuracy in a relatively lasting way. However, it’s relatively straining to meditate while also trying to type as fast as you can, especially on the CharaChorder because it has an entirely new type of cognitive load that I’m learning.
I would probably generalize this if I was trying to get really good at another DEX-reliant skill, but for now I’m not. It feels related to the part of me that more generally notices when I’m Predictably Wrong, but in practice it felt like a meaningfully different thing to train.
(I might write a post on this at some point.) EDIT: I did
There’s a meditation technique that I have used to improve my typing speed, but that seems pretty generalizable: Open up a typing test[1] and try to predict my mistakes in advance of them happening. This could look like my finger slipping, or running into a faulty muscle memory for a certain word, or just having a cache miss and stumbling for a second. Then, I use this awareness to not make those mistakes, ideally stopping them before they happen even once.
I’ve learned to type from scratch several times, going from hunt and peck to touch typing with qwerty, to touch typing colemak, to learning to use the Kinesis Advantage 2, to learning the CharaChorder 2 and its custom layout, which is now my daily driver. I only started doing this meditation about half way through learning colemak, and it noticeably boosted my accuracy in a relatively lasting way. However, it’s relatively straining to meditate while also trying to type as fast as you can, especially on the CharaChorder because it has an entirely new type of cognitive load that I’m learning.
I would probably generalize this if I was trying to get really good at another DEX-reliant skill, but for now I’m not. It feels related to the part of me that more generally notices when I’m Predictably Wrong, but in practice it felt like a meaningfully different thing to train.
This works even better with adversarial typing tests like keybr.com