Jonathan Blum
Fellow business owners, it's time to learn to type. Not hunt, peck, scramble, cheat or slouch. No slamming. No pounding. No stealing looks at the keyboard. I'm talking honest to goodness, 10 fingers, back straight, arms at your side typing.
Why? Because typing is among the simplest and most effective means of boosting the efficiency of your work life, says Kip Gregory, a Washington. D.C.- based business consultant and author of Winning Clients in a Wired World. If you can't type, Gregory says, learn. If you can type, learn to type faster and more accurately. Take me, a poster child for bad typing. I type about 25 words per minute net of errors. Disgraceful, but true. I figure I type about four hours a day, or 20 hours per week. If I could double that to 50 words per minute -- which is absolutely possible given modern keyboards and techniques -- I could get my work done in about two hours less per day, or about half the time. That gets my attention. The news here is that -- along with other small business functions like word processing, project management and customer relationship management -- the process of learning to type has moved onto the Web. Online learn-to-type options not only are prevalent, powerful and easy to use, but many of them are free. And some -- yes, I know this sounds borderline nuts -- are actually sort of fun. I have been testing several options over the past few months, and have found them to be a relatively easy way to improve my workplace typing with just a few minutes of practice a few times a week.
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