Until a few years ago, I was a point-and-peck typist. It wasn't too bad, I thought. Sure, I made a lot of mistakes. And I had to stare at the keyboard when I typed. But with years of practice, I could putter along at a decent speed. Maybe 30-40 words per minute?

We were taught touch typing in school, but I didn't pay attention during those lessons.

Later on, coworkers would tease me good-naturedly about it: 3-finger point-and-peck is not a graceful maneuver. Though in some ways, it was a point of pride. One coworker exclaimed: "how do you even do that so quickly?" It's fun to be different.

But many of the things I love require typing: notably, writing and programming. Both of those also require a lot of thought, which was the trouble.

Point-and-peck takes a fair bit of attention. Attention I could be giving to my writing or programming. I forget the exact breaking point, but eventually I got fed up, frustrated that I kept losing my train of thought.

I wasn't sure how much better touch typing would be, but it was worth a try.

The principle behind touch typing is obvious: smaller motions can be done faster. Taken further, this feeds into some pretty cool ideas, like Dvorak keyboard layouts and Vim-style interfaces. But I just wanted to learn touch typing for now.

No problem. I glanced over some finger charts and typed out some sentences. I immediately found that my typing was...much, much slower.

I was convinced touch typing could let me go faster, but first I needed some practice.

Problem was, touch typing was way too slow for writing or programming. So I looked for some way to practice that didn't involve "composing" the text.

Typing tests were perfect for this, but it's boring to type the same passage over and over. So I found Key Hero, which uses a random quote as the target passage. Once I found Key Hero, it was just practice, practice, practice. I spent about 20-30 minutes a day doing the tests.

Admittedly, this is an effective strategy if you want to feel like a giant nerd. But it also had an incredible effect on my touch typing. My WPM (words per minute) shot up, and I found myself "slipping into" touch typing, even when programming.

After a month of this, touch typing felt faster and easier than point-and-peck. My WPM was 50-60, faster than it had ever been. And it's only gotten better since. Now, I exclusively touch type.

Cool, stats. But, unless you're a competitive typist, what's the point? Simply put: I'm a better writer and a better programmer because I learned to touch type.

Sure, those things are hard to quantify. But let me explain.

The most obvious reason is that it shortens the time between my thoughts and the page. And in addition to being quicker, touch typing requires less active thought than point-and-peck, so it's easier to focus on...whatever I'm thinking about.

As a result, I've written more and been happier with my writing. It's also far less frustrating, since I don't need to circle back on a train of thought I've lost (as often). I'm writing a novel now, and I can't even imagine how hard that would be with my old style of typing. All of those benefits apply to programming, too.

I'm not the first person on the Internet to make these observations. But seeing the effects in action has been mind-boggling.

And there are other perks. My meeting notes can be as detailed as I want, and I can stay more engaged with the meeting while I take them. Not the raddest claim I've ever made ("oh cool, meeting notes!"), but I do think it's made me more effective at my job.

And finally, when I'm typing I can look wherever I want. I've spent much of the time during this post looking out the window, since it's bright and sunny today in San Francisco. I think a sunny day is a nicer thing to look at than a laptop keyboard.

Your mileage may vary. But typing is the lowest-level, most fundamental way you will interact with text. Everything else builds off of it. And given how much text I create, touch-typing is one of the best skills I've ever picked up. Worthwhile and more.