I am not trying to get faster at typing. I want to find out whether I already am.
So this is a baseline. The numbers on the panel are what I type today, and they are here so that there is something later to compare them against. What I expect to find, if I look again in a few months, is that they went up on their own.
I have never practised this deliberately and I do not intend to start. What I do instead is notice things.
The one I noticed most recently is that my hands are not really on the home row. My index fingers are: they sit on J and F, they go wherever the letter needs, and they come back. The rest of my fingers stay wherever they like, which is not on the home row, and sometimes means not touching the keyboard at all. That is just how I have always typed.
The other one is mistakes. I make plenty of them, and they are not random: there are patterns in them, and knowing the patterns has been enough to cut some of them back, without any of it counting as practice.
None of it is scheduled. It happens when I happen to notice.
What I found when I went looking
Two things, both of them from reading about other people’s numbers rather than from testing anything myself. Both come from one paper, Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes by Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, which is the largest thing I found: 168,000 volunteers, 136 million keystrokes.
The first is that I should not expect much. Typists who train deliberately and typists who do not are barely distinguishable in it: about 5 wpm between the two groups, which is small next to the 20 wpm or so that people inside either group vary. So if this does improve on its own, it will be by a few words a minute at most, and quite possibly not at all.
The second is that speed is not the number worth watching. I leave several times more errors uncorrected than the average typist in that sample, where the average uncorrected error rate is a bit over 1%. That is the figure I expect to move, not the words per minute.