After deciding to learn Colemak to improve my touch-typing speed in the beginning of the month, I decided to give you an update on my progress:

After maybe one week I already knew the layout, but the speed was very slow, maybe 10wpm. This made it impossible to use it daily and therefore I kept using the qwerty layout.

Practice and more practice and even more practice brought the speed up to 27-30wpm. That’s not bad, but not enough, but recently I noticed that my writing speed in the qwerty layout was dropping. Because of this I’m considering going “Cold Turkey” and not looking back anymore. My initial plan was to do this only when I could do 40wpm consistently, but maybe if I switch a bit early the improvements will be faster.

Learning the new Colemak layout is a process that brings diminishing returns (approximately the speed grows logarithmic with time) and therefore it makes perfect sense to switch early as it will bring the most improvements and a sense of fulfillment as you see the speed going up.

I’ll keep “typing” about this, but I’d love to know about your experiences in switching to Colemak.