If you type for 6 hours a day, with 95{f5ea2038a4b880f335334dfff88b50aec469abded8ad52b137b4eb824479fac2} accuracy, you lose around 15 days in a year, correcting your typos. That’s why you should invest your time in reading this — as it certainly can help you weed out 14 out of those 15 days, like it has in my case.
It’s been a while since my last post, which gives tips on typing over 10k words per day. But since then, I realized that there are quite a few things that can help us type much more — easily and efficiently. By doing this, I have been able to type 20,000 words per day.
Accuracy: The Perennial Foe of Typing Quickly
There are quite a few things that make us recede our typing speed, one of the most notorious things is — accuracy. Suppose, you type the word believe incorrectly as “believe”, in such cases, you would have to type in three additional keystrokes (Four times arrows keys to shift and a backspace)— until you reach and correct it. But, you always don’t type five additional keystrokes, so let’s take a modest estimate of three keystrokes.
It means every time you make a mistake, you press three keystrokes to correct it. Now assuming your typing accuracy is 95{f5ea2038a4b880f335334dfff88b50aec469abded8ad52b137b4eb824479fac2}, you spend 15{f5ea2038a4b880f335334dfff88b50aec469abded8ad52b137b4eb824479fac2} of your time in correcting mistakes — which is huge, by any yardstick. If you type for 6 hours a day, you would end up losing 1 hour every day on correcting a mistake, which translates spending a little over 15 days on correcting your typos. Now, that isn’t all, I have observed that one tends to lose focus and momentum the minute we try to alter our typing position. Therefore, it consumes additional mental resources to correct things.
Many software tools have autocorrected, why should I bother to build my own?
That is a good question, but do you always type in those environments like MS word etc? Well, this isn’t all, try typing in “better ” (With space) on MS word, let’s see if it corrects it, mine wouldn’t! These software care to a wide range of audience, so they lack the sort of personalization that we, individuals, need.
So, how to build your own autocorrect?
Here’s how you can go about doing it — (step by step on Windows Machine)
1. Download the auto hotkey from https://autohotkey.com/
2. Once you are done, install it.
3. Then, go to any folder (or Desktop), and right click, select new, and then you would see an option called AutoHotkey Script.
4. Now, select that file and click edit, once you do that, it would open in a notepad.
5. Put all the word mistakes that you make, along with the corrected form. Make sure that you use two colons (::) to separate the words, mistakes on the left-hand side, and corrected words on the right-hand side. Here’s how it should look like. You can add thousands of mistakes as such.
6. Once you are done entering it, you can save and close it (You edit it whenever you want).
7. Now, click on the file again, and it would ask you if you want to run the script, click yes!
Now, you are covered. Be very careful when you write this script and include common words. Notice the second last word in the picture, “very Good”. Now, good is a valid word and I don’t want my spell check to correct it to good everytime I type it, because I may want to thank god! Even if you only cover your vague mistakes, you would be able to achieve over 99{f5ea2038a4b880f335334dfff88b50aec469abded8ad52b137b4eb824479fac2} accuracy, which would save you months of time in the long run. Similarly, you can build such checks for special characters of other languages like French or Spanish.