Dvorak
In the beginning of March, I set about to convert my typing habits to the Dvorak* layout. It’s been quite an experience so far, but I’m not looking back even considering that I could touch-type on QWERTY at over 110 words per minute and I’m only back up to about half that (with a much higher error frequency).
I’d been considering the switch for about a year, but with no real motivation to do so. Then, into the winter, my left pinky finger began to feel prickly, and even sometimes go a bit numb. It didn’t take much to correlate this with the massive amount of typing I do, and so I decided the time was rife to pick up a different keyboarding layout – not for speed (it’s still not certain that Dvorak is faster, although the evidence points that way) but for the sake of my hands. Just starting out my career, I can’t be subject to repetitive strain injury already.
The layout is certainly a lot different than QWERTY (although the a- and m- keys are in the same location)
It took only a few hours to memorize most of the key positions. I didn’t purchase a Dvorak keyboard (a waste of time and money, IMHO), I just changed the key bindings in my operating system.
While memorizing the layout, I kept a special browser window open to an image not unlike the one above. Learning on a standard QWERTY keyboard forced me to learn touch-typing from the word “go,” and the friction of switching to my special browser window led to a fairly quick memorization of the configuration.
All of that was easy-sauce. Far more difficult, of course, was retraining my muscle memory. As I said, it wasn’t easy. To go from 110+ WPM to a three second recall pause between every keystroke was agonizing at first – when I forgot that most things worth doing are worth doing because they aren’t easy (a mindset that Seth Godin explains elegantly in his book The Dip).
The most testing aspect of the transition, however, was the temptation to change back to QWERTY “real quick – I need to get this email out” or “just to send this hurried IM” or “because this paper is due tomorrow.”
The self-control to resist those temptations was the #1 reason (I feel) that I’ve been able to adapt so quickly, and I would warn anyone considering the switch about that particular challenge – stick it out, and it’ll come. Not fast. Not easy. But it’s worth it. I haven’t experienced any discomfort or loss of feeling in my hands for the better part of two months now.
The transition also brought one very unexpected albeit welcomed side effect. I’m much more apt to think before I type now because I’ve yet to regain full speed. This translates to more concise emails, more coherent papers, and vastly cleaner code.
NB: If you can’t touch type, and want to learn, I’d urge you to earnestly consider the merits and demerits of different (read: non-QWERTY) layouts before you proceed. If you can touch type on some other layout, but want to switch to Dvorak, I’d advise you to have a good reason for doing it – at times, that reason will be the only thing to keep you in touch with your sanity.
*I use the term “Dvorak” throughout to describe the Simplified Dvorak Layout, as opposed to the Original Dvorak configuration.