You should learn to touch type. I recommend you use proper technique because it's easier on your hands and there's a higher ceiling on speed, but it doesn't particularly matter as long as you can touch type at a functional speed.
The point of touch typing is focus, not speed.
If you're constantly running a background process to find the keys and press them, you have less energy left for thinking.
That's it.
There's no downside to having more speed and most people would benefit from working on their typing speed for a day, but the benefits will plateau relatively quickly compared to other skills.
I can think my writing faster than I can type it, but I'm better off trying to think more clearly and concisely instead of trying to catch up my typing speed. The only time I regularly find myself wishing I could type faster is near stream-of-consciousness messaging with friends, which isn't particularly urgent.
Really, the ideal is to have less which needs typing.
I'm past the point where I can get easy wins like touch typing to increase my base speed. Becoming a quicker editor, such as by building muscle memory for vim motions, would be more helpful.
The only serious use case for exceptional typing speed is live transcription, which is a technologically solved problem that you shouldn't be working on.
If you're in a conversation, have the conversation.
If you're listening to something worth noting down near verbatim, your brain is likely better spent on thinking about the content.
Even if you aren't looking at the keys, focus spent typing is focus removed.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
Another day, anther rephrasing of when slower is faster.
Somehow I keep stumbling into random topics the day of writing instead of pulling from the massive backlog. One day I'll feel like philosophizing about calendars, but apparently not today.
I haven't been so aware of my typing speed as when writing this one, and I've primarily learned that I need to stop spamming Backspace when I make a one character typo. It's slowing me down by an order of magnitude more than typing speed.
Maybe I'll spend an hour on a typing program today for fun though, it's been a while.
- Rew