How to type without looking at the keyboard

Most people can learn to type without looking in a few weeks of short daily practice, with a dip in speed along the way.

Start the touch typing lessons

In 2016, researchers at Aalto University in Finland put reflective markers on the finger joints of 30 typists, filmed them with twelve high-speed cameras and gave them eye-tracking glasses to wear. The people who had never taken a typing course turned out to be about as fast and accurate, on average, as the people who had, while using only six fingers. But the self-taught group spent about twice as much time looking at their hands.

That last finding is the subject of this guide. Looking down costs you a little on every line, all day, and it is one of the few typing habits you can break completely in a few weeks. Here is why you look, what the research says about touch typing and hunt and peck, a plan for switching, a realistic timeline, and how to stop the old habit creeping back.

Why you look at the keys

Nobody looks at the keyboard for fun. You look because your fingers don't reliably know where the keys are, and there are usually two reasons for that.

The first is that the same key gets pressed by different fingers at different times. If E is sometimes your middle finger and sometimes your index, neither finger ever learns where E lives, so your eyes have to find it. The Aalto team called the opposite "unambiguous mapping" (each letter always pressed by the same finger) and found it was one of the strongest predictors of speed.

The second is that your hands have no fixed starting point. If they drift around the keyboard, every key is a different distance away depending on where your hand happens to be, and the only way to aim is to look. The fast typists in the same study kept their hands in one position and moved only their fingers.

Touch typing builds both habits on purpose. Each finger owns a column of keys, and every movement starts and ends in the same place. Once that is true, your eyes have nothing left to do on the keyboard.

Looking costs more than the glance itself. When you copy from a page, you lose your place every time your eyes drop. You notice mistakes late, because you were watching your hands when you made them. And your head bobs up and down all day long.

Touch typing vs hunt and peck: what the research says

Hunt and peck is the method most of us start with: find the key, press it, look for the next one, often with two fingers. Touch typing is the other end of the scale: ten fingers, each with its own keys, and eyes on the screen. Most adults sit somewhere in between. Among their 30 typists, the Aalto researchers found four different ways of using the left hand and six for the right, from mainly one or two fingers per hand to a modified version of touch typing.

Their headline result surprised a lot of people: the number of fingers did not decide speed. Within every style there were slow typists and fast ones. What separated them were three habits: using the same finger for the same key every time, getting the next keystroke ready while finishing the current one, and keeping the hands still.

That does not make touch typing pointless, and the researchers say so. They describe it as still the best-known way to reach very high speeds, note that typing world records have been set with it, and advise anyone who wants to type sentences at over 100 words per minute to learn it. Touch typing simply installs those three habits from the start, instead of hoping they turn up by accident.

So should you switch? A practical rule of thumb:

• If you look at the keys for most letters, or you type below about 40 WPM, learn touch typing. You have the most to gain and little speed to lose.
• If you already type 60 WPM or more and rarely look down, relearning every key is a big investment for an uncertain return. Work on consistency instead: one finger per key, hands still, eyes up. How to type faster covers that route.
• If most of your keyboard time is gaming or shortcuts with one hand on the mouse, touch typing helps less. As the Aalto team points out, the system was designed for typing sentences on typewriters.

Everyone in between should look at how much they type. The section on whether it is worth it has the numbers.

Before you start: the home row and the bumps

Touch typing begins on the home row. Your left fingers rest on A S D F, your right fingers on J K L ;, and your thumbs hover over the space bar. Feel for the small bumps on F and J: they let your index fingers find home without looking, and the other fingers fall into place beside them. Every key you press is a short reach from one of those eight resting keys, and after each press the finger comes back.

The finger chart shows which finger owns each column. Home row keys explains the home row in more depth, with practice words you can type on those keys alone.

A plan for switching

This order works for most people. Give it 10 to 15 minutes a day; longer sessions mostly practise tired mistakes.

1. Learn the home row by feel. Rest your hands on it, close your eyes and type each home key a few times, then check the screen. The touch typing lessons start here, two keys at a time: F and J, then D and K, S and L, A and ;, and finally G and H.
2. Add one row at a time. The top row comes next, then the bottom row, each starting with the strongest fingers. Only move on when the keys you already have are accurate. The lessons here won't pass you below 94% accuracy, which is a sensible bar to hold yourself to anywhere.
3. Hide your hands. It sounds silly and it works. Drape a tea towel over your hands and the keyboard, or cut one side off a shoebox and put it over the keys. If you can't see the keys, you can't cheat, and after a few days you stop wanting to.
4. Look up, not down. When you forget where a key is, look at a keyboard on the screen instead of the one under your hands. The lessons show an on-screen keyboard with every key coloured by the finger that presses it, two hands drawn over it and the next key highlighted.
5. Go slowly. The lessons start with a target of 8 WPM for a reason. Slow and right builds an accurate map in your fingers. Fast and wrong builds a map with the mistakes baked in.
6. Fix mistakes without looking, too. Backspace belongs to your right little finger, a reach up and to the right. Finding it by feel is part of the training, not a distraction from it.

Switch all at once, or only in practice?

This is where most attempts fail, and there is research on why. In a study by researchers at the Technion in Israel, published in 2003, 22 students who normally looked at the keys took a touch typing course. They typed in Hebrew and, as a group, were slow typists to begin with. Before the course they typed about 18 WPM while looking, and about 8 WPM when asked not to look. By the end of the course, three to four weeks later, they averaged about 21 WPM without looking: already past their old speed.

Even so, the researchers point out in their introduction that many people who learn touch typing quietly go back to looking afterwards, and they include themselves among them. Their explanation is a tendency psychologists call melioration: at any given moment, you pick whatever works best right now. On a Tuesday afternoon with a deadline, looking at the keys feels faster, so you look, and every look makes the new skill a little weaker. An older study they cite found that trainees who stopped using their new skill lost about 30% of their speed within a month.

So here is the recommendation: learn the letters in practice sessions, then switch completely.

• For the first week or so, while you only know some of the keys, touch type only during practice. Typing real work with half a keyboard is miserable and teaches your fingers to guess.
• Once you know every letter, switch everything: emails, chat, documents, search boxes. No exceptions for "just this one". If you can, start in a quieter fortnight, and warn anyone who expects instant replies.
• Allow one exception for a while: rare symbols such as braces or the tilde. Check where they are on the finger chart rather than hunting across the keyboard. Looking something up is fine; staring at your hands is what rebuilds the old habit.

How long it takes

A realistic timeline for someone practising 10 to 15 minutes a day looks like this. It varies with how much you type, how old the habit is and how patient you are, so read it as typical rather than as a promise.

The dip is the hard part. For a week or two you will be slower than before, and every email will feel like wading through mud. That is normal and it passes: the Technion students were past their old speed by the end of their course. If your old speed was high, say 40 WPM or more while looking, the catch-up takes longer, simply because there is more ground to make up.

Getting properly fast is a longer project. The Aalto researchers estimate that reaching the level of the fast typists in their study with touch typing takes several hundred hours of deliberate practice. You don't need anything like that to stop looking at the keys; you need it to reach 70 or 80 WPM and beyond. How to type 100 WPM covers that stage.

The keys everyone gets stuck on

The letters come surprisingly quickly. These take longer, and it helps to know they are coming.

The number row

Numbers sit two rows above home, the longest reach on the keyboard, and plenty of otherwise good typists never learn them by touch. Use the finger that types the letters below each number: 1 with the left little finger, 2 with the ring, 3 with the middle, 4 and 5 with the left index; 6 and 7 with the right index, 8 with the middle, 9 with the ring and 0 with the little finger. Keep the other fingers anchored while one reaches up. Lessons 19 to 21 cover the numbers.

B and Y

Both are long diagonal stretches for an index finger. In the standard system B belongs to the left index and Y to the right, but many people who taught themselves use the other hand for one of them. Either works, provided it is always the same finger.

The little-finger keys

Your little fingers are the weakest and look after the most keys. On the left: Q, A, Z, Tab, Caps Lock and the left Shift. On the right: P, ;, ', /, Enter, Backspace and the right Shift, plus the brackets and the end of the number row. They need slow, deliberate repetition. If you only drill one thing, drill these.

Shift with the other hand

For a capital letter typed by the left hand, hold the right Shift; for one typed by the right hand, the left Shift. Pressing Shift with the same hand twists the hand and pulls it off the home row. It feels clumsy for about a week and then it doesn't. Lessons 17 and 18 practise it.

Symbols and punctuation

The full stop and comma come fast because you use them constantly. Brackets, the at sign and their friends come last, and that is fine. Learn them in the order you need them; lessons 22 to 25 work through the lot.

Is it worth it?

For anyone who types for more than an hour or so a day, almost certainly. Some numbers make the case better than encouragement does.

Say you type 2,000 words on an ordinary working day, across email, messages and documents. At 30 WPM that is about 67 minutes of pure typing. At 50 WPM it is 40 minutes. The difference is 27 minutes a day, or around 100 hours over a working year of 230 days. A single 10,000-word report takes 5 hours 33 minutes of typing at 30 WPM and 3 hours 20 minutes at 50. The typing time calculator runs the same sum for any document and speed.

Against that, the cost is roughly 15 minutes a day for a month, plus a few weeks of feeling slow. For a heavy typist it pays for itself within a few months, and then keeps paying.

Time is not the only gain. With your eyes on the screen you catch mistakes as you make them, instead of a line later, which is one of the quickest ways to raise your accuracy (see how to improve typing accuracy). You can copy from a page without losing your place. And your head stays up, which makes it much easier to sit well.

Where to start

Take a one-minute typing test the way you type now, looking and all, so you have a number to beat. Then open lesson 1 and spend ten minutes on F and J with your hands covered. Tomorrow, lesson 2. Set a daily goal so the streak gives you a nudge, and retake the one-minute test once a week, without looking, to watch the gap close.

Sources

• Feit, Weir and Oulasvirta, “How We Type: Movement Strategies and Performance in Everyday Typing”, CHI 2016. Project page and FAQ: userinterfaces.aalto.fi/how-we-type.
• Aalto University, “Ten fingers not needed for fast typing”, press release, 9 February 2016.
• Yechiam, Erev, Yehene and Gopher, “Melioration and the Transition from Touch-Typing Training to Everyday Use”, Human Factors 45(4), 2003.