Beyond the Keyboard: How the Right Tool Enabled My New Skills
Beyond the Keyboard: How the Right Tool Enabled My New Skills
For most of my life, I’ve been skeptical of gear—especially expensive gear that required time and effort to master. Sure, I’d indulged in some better equipment in the past, like high-quality keyboards and even a fantastic curved monitor, but I always stuck to things that felt intuitive, easy to use, and justified their cost without much effort on my part. Anything beyond that—anything requiring a steep learning curve—got dismissed as just another overpriced toy.
I’d tell myself, “It’s not the tools; it’s how you use them,” and for the most part, I believed it. That mindset worked for a long time, pushing me to focus on skill over equipment. But recently, an ortho-linear keyboard forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth: I wasn’t dismissing these tools because they were unnecessary. I had already spent hours practicing touch typing on traditional layouts, crashing repeatedly against the unnatural feel and confusing skew of those designs. It wasn’t about a lack of effort—it was about needing the right tool to make progress. But I wouldn’t realise this until many years later.
At this point, I just accepted my slow 34 - 40 WPM pace and further developed other coping mechanisms enabling me to quickly jot large ideas in a testable fashion. In the beginning, I used whiteboards, large sheets of paper drawing diagrams, mind maps, and graphs, then mapped everything in my #1 tool, Miro Boards. Combined with vivid and animated imagination, which allowed me to run the code step-by-step in my head, this proved to be a fantastic combo against the slow input methods.
Pivotal Moment
During an intense code crunch, I was writing between 12 and 16 hours a day, producing over 20k lines of code in three weeks. For the first time, I felt the limits of my typing skills holding me back. It wasn’t just the speed—it was the way my slow input repeatedly knocked me out of the flow state. The frustration was immense, but it came with a silver lining: I wasn’t held back by a lack of ideas or skills, but by a physical limitation that I could, in theory, overcome.
Busy with other tasks, projects, and life in general, I kept returning to that pivotal moment of frustration and questioning whether my typing skills were truly the bottleneck. Between YouTube reviews of keyboards and casual conversations about typing with non-techies, the idea kept resurfacing. Eventually, I decided it was time to commit. I purchased the Glove 80 with loud, clicky switches—a bold step that combined my love for tactile feedback with a genuine need for change.
Once it arrived, I made it a habit to practice touch typing both morning and evening, fitting in quick sessions whenever possible, even using Slack messages as training opportunities. Over two months, I completed 1,539 MonkeyType tests, investing a total of 62 hours into improving my skills. The results were transformative: I went from struggling to touch type to consistently hitting 65 WPM, with records of 78 WPM over 15 seconds and 91 WPM over shorter 10 word bursts. These milestones marked not just progress but a shift in what felt possible—a glimpse of what could become my new standard.
Benefits beyond speed
Staying in the zone
There were always three things that pulled me out of focus: the relentless blinking of the cursor, the pressure of maintaining eye contact, and, of course, the ever-present distraction of TV. Learning touch typing changed everything. It allowed me to break free from the screen’s grip, letting my thoughts flow uninterrupted and keeping my focus on a single idea for much longer stretches of time.
Writing notes on call/ video call
Multitasking is something I’m very much known for to have an almost absolute lack of, but touch typing has made it more manageable. Taking notes during calls or video meetings has become far more efficient than my attempts at handwritten notes, which were always a bit of a struggle.
Unlocking the world of shortcuts
Discovering touch typing unlocked an entirely new dimension of efficiency. Every single key became an opportunity to bypass the mouse, especially when paired with tools like Shortcat or Vimium—apps that integrate seamlessly with any Chromium-based browser, even Arc. For someone already familiar with daily shortcuts in their IDE or other tools, it was like expanding a familiar language, opening up space for more exotic combinations and workflows I hadn’t even considered before.
And finally…
What I didn’t realize at the time was how much this experience would reshape my relationship with tools and gear. It taught me to stop seeing them as shortcuts or luxuries and start appreciating them as enablers—access points to greater productivity, creativity, and comfort. It’s not that my skepticism about “toys” has vanished entirely—that knee-jerk reaction is still there. But now, I’m more open to the idea that the right tool, even one that requires effort to master, can be worth every bit of the investment.