I'm taking a brief break from my fairly intense work to update my blog which I haven't done in a while. On a personal note, I've been away for a few weeks in China; a beautiful country with a thriving population, although it reminds me of a supercar or pet Lion - fun for a while but in the long run you wouldn't want the running costs or the inevitable mess.
I currently work for a small company teaching computer programming vicariously to children. I say vicariously because of the somewhat unique business model which I can't go into too much detail about for obvious reasons, but in short I'm required to write out lessons. I'm contractually employed to produce a certain amount of work in a certain time frame and how I choose to fit that work in around other things is up to me.
The thing about this job is that I'm given an unfair advantage over most, or rather I'm able to employ my skills in typing to my own advantage. The thing about typing is that people have a certain expectation that an average typist working a full day could type maybe a few thousand words at best. Obviously we need to take into consideration that the thoughts to produce words to be typed will vary hugely but on average I would expect someone doing this sort of work to manage maybe 3,000 words over the course of an 8 - 6 day (long gone are the days of 9 - 5, from what I've seen of the working world). If this is broken down to 9 hours typing it's a mere 5.5 words per minute.
5.5 words per minute? If you've seen my previous blog posts you'll know that I pride myself on my ability to maintain a solid speed of over 100wpm, even over long periods of time. Obviously I'm not suggesting that I can type non-stop for 9 hours at 100wpm, that would be ridiculous although a mammoth 54,000 words could be produced - that's around the equivalent to 2/3 of my work for next year (part time).
But still, 5.5 words per minute is still a fairly low figure. If we take into account something I like to do which is to take some fairly regular 15 minute breaks per hour, we can knock 2.25 hours off and if we consider that sometimes you just want to read a bit of reddit or idle on facebook we can knock another 2.75 hours off for a nice round figure of 5 hours not working with 4 hours working. Those of you who have reached this point and think it's shocking that, over a 9 hour working day, I might only produce 4 hours of work, I understand it might sound shocking. But the fact of the matter is that when it comes to skilled work which requires a lot of thought and mental strain, 4 hours of solid typing is a good output.
If we look back at our original figure of 5.5 words per minute, for 4 hours that would yield just 1.65k words per day. That's half the expected figure of 3k words per day that I would expect from an average worker doing this sort of work with no particular penchant for fast typing. To re-iterate my earlier point both here and in previous blog entries, I do in fact have quite a penchant for fast typing and hence the title of this post.
In light of this thought process, I recently decided to set myself a daily target of 10,000 words. Based on 9 hours, that works out at a mere 18wpm throughout the day which is nothing. On the other hand, I admitted to working a solid 4 hours of those 9 - that's actual head-down, bottoming-out keys, powering through pages of documents. With that in mind, my new target speed is still only 41wpm. For 4 solid hours, that isn't really a lot after all.
The final consideration is that my job is to teach programming. As anyone within the programming industry will know, there is no measure of writing code and no way to work out time taken especially when it comes to building hundreds of small problems and solutions for teaching purposes. I would say that this could easily knock off another 2 hours which would be included in those 4 solid hours. Of course to those following the incredibly difficult maths here, we're up to 82wpm for about 2 solid hours throughout the day.
Is this such an impossible goal? Obviously there are a lot of contingencies to plan for; unexpected interruptions, unexpected delays in writing, fatigue, hangovers... all in all, however, 2 hours over the course of 9 of solidly typing at 82wpm is a fairly attainable target to reach 10,000 words per day.
I will report back results in a few weeks. If I can stick to this target, my summer work will be done in 2 weeks instead of 8. My work for next year will be done in a further 3 weeks and I'll be able to earn additional contract work throughout the year on top of it.
Many people argue that money is a big motivator and it is, others argue there are plenty of other things which motivate workers. I'm potentially first person ever to be motivated by my own typing speed goals.
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