I dug in to my novel and wrote 4500 words yesterday. That is as many as I wrote in the 18 days I was working on Colemak. Stopping with my use of Colemak for everything was the right decision.

I can still use both layouts. I'm typing this in Colemak. I obviously have still got my Qwerty skills (such as they are) despite not touching the layout more than a handful of times in that time.

There's not any such thing as 20 days free of writing when you are a writer. As for patience, I have that. What I do not have is the willingness to trade all of my productivity away for an indeterminate period of time.

I simply cannot afford it.

My Colemak is as good as it has been, but it had not improved in days when I switched back. Nobody can say definitively how long the switch to Colemak will take for a specific individual.

For comparison I have not done a test in Qwerty in 15 or so years. I am much better when I am typing my own words. That said, I just now (after no Qwerty today, and in the middle of this Colemak post) scored 47 on a two minute hi-games test. I am functionally (when I am working) *much* faster than that. In Colemak I can do 13, and that really is close to my limit. I might manage 18 on a roll. (Just to prove the point my second Qwerty run was a 57.)

There are major obstacles to Colemak adoption. I will point out that when people are eager to tell you how fast you should be, and when you are allowed to stop it does nothing to encourage you to bother.

40WPM is a normal speed for anyone who has tried to learn to type. To break that takes something more than just normal effort and skill.

As I see it I would be lucky to attain 40 in months. That's due in large part to my non-touch background. I am much slower than usual because my hands are unaccustomed to the patterns of touch typing.

Pure math, even if I figure 20/30/40/50/60 (which I have no faith in actually happening) in 5 months I will type so many fewer words I am crippling myself.

If I assume a base of 1200 words in an hour (is not too far off what writing is like the way I do it) at 60, that is 400/600/800/1000/1200. At 3 hours a day we see 648,000 words over 5 months. (A novel is 50,000 words as a base. My genres are longer, but even then, that's at least two huge books.)

Now with Colemak we get 360,000 words.

I think it is clear why I'm done banging my head against a wall trying to learn something that will take a very long time indeed to finally pay off in terms of any speed gains.

Yes, I would benefit in terms of stress on my hands, but that is the only (and at this point supposed) benefit I am sacrificing.

I appreciate the assistance and encouragement people have been giving me. I can do without the criticism that's come with it on a few occasions. I'm not you, you're not me, we are all different, and there's absolutely no shame in my decision to put my job first.

Generally telling someone they've not had the patience required and the just needed 2 more days is at best callous.

At worst? Utterly ignorant of the realities being faced by the other individual.

First it's 10 days. (Shai says) Then it's 20. (Tony says.) MOST of you have had the good sense to leave arbitrary BS like speeds that should be attain or accuracy levels out of it, but go read every post Tony has left in this thread. If more people switching to Colemak have to listen to him explain how fast they should be typing, or what their accuracy should be, or how many days they need to devote, or blah, blah, blah . . . well, it won't shock me if more people don't get fed up with it.

Pretty sure if I'd stuck the two days and pissed around at 15 WPM someone (ahem, Tony, ahem) would come up with the brilliant notion that all I needed was 30 days.

The end of it is the fact that *writers need to write*. We can't do that if we're hamstrung trying to get a layout to stick. My job is more important than the two extra days. This may work for people with lame office jobs who barely need to respond to an email of fill out a support ticket. But for those of use who rely on getting a lot of words down (I'm only talking about actual words on my novel, I tack on thousands a day in blogs, emails, tweets, etc.) two days of glacial pace is just too much after managing so little over the week and a half prior.

In those two days I've got over 6500 words written. I'd have been immensely lucky to get 2k with Colemak, and I would have been utterly exhausted at the end. Not worth it. And not worth being told I just need to do this, that or the other thing and that's why I failed.

I *chose* to stop. I can still type Colemak, but for this reply, I'm not bothering. Because I have better things to do with my time than stumble around like a two year old.

(For the record, I have used Colemak both of those two days. Not a lot, but hey, amazingly, no incredible leaps and bounds of HOLY CRAP I CAN TYPE . . .)

As for the "fun" factor? Words are fun. What makes them come out onto the screen is a tool. If I could type with my cheek faster than with my fingers, I'd do that.

Programmers obviously don't have lame office jobs. They type for a living. I would not suggest any programmer switch cold turkey. Unless they're the kind of programmers who really only do minor changes all day long and are more heavily invested in the "why did that go wrong" than the "I need to write a whole new function from scratch before lunch" . . .

People who send emails saying "sry, cn't mk mtng, reschd" as the highlight of their typing day are the ones I am talking about more than anything.

And obviously, if you're going to quit you are much more likely to do it sooner than later. That has NOTHING to do with if it's a good idea or not. It's just the way it is. I think I was pretty clear about what results I was getting (15WPM maybe, and immense stress typing) after two and a half weeks. I think my numbers were more than obvious in what they showed in terms of my productivity. The point is, there's not a damned shred of truth to anyone telling anyone else "this is how fast you should be on day x, and by day y you will be happy typing" . . . so, my two cents? Don't even bother saying it.

But again, if you work in an office where someone pays you to do something, and it takes you x amount of time to do it, and if that x amount of time allows you to use Colemak, I'd say go for it. It's not a problem I have with the layout or the concept. It simply is not profitable for me. I won't call it a waste of time, because I like to take all my life experiences and learn from them.

After all, I know a lot of people who could type 10WPM and still do their jobs because the actual time they have allotted to do the typing they need to do far outstrips the amount of time they'd really need to do it in. A great example is a CS rep who only has to manage to a) contribute to keeping the queue down (in a big center, one person slow on typing for a few months makes no odds) and b) handle a minimum of something like 2 calls an hour with a basic record of the transaction. There are LOADS of jobs like that. Those people should absolutely feel free to switch at any time, because they won't have their work disrupted by it.

I am my boss. Nobody else is going to write for me. Every word I don't write is a word not written. Nobody to pick up my slack.

So if fighting for weeks to get up to 15WPM and not seeing any improvement for a few days wasn't going to make me quit, I guess I didn't WANT to be a writer very badly in that event, did I? I wasn't going to get 15 more WPM overnight, so your contention that that's a fluent experience is, well, completely and utterly irrelevant to where I was at. Yay for 30WPM being nifty. I was only halfway there. It was simply a case of the layout switch and change to touch typing (again, I think people keep ignoring that part of my issue, I generally knew where keys were . . . my fingers refused to move correctly to hit them) being too much of a burden to my job.

My motivation was always health. But if you ask someone why they do a dangerous job, they'll tell you they love it. I love writing. If I eventually do myself harm then that's one of the hazards of the job. I'd rather do the job than not be able to because I'm crippled with a layout I can't manage. So yeah, maybe the way I type is not very ergo. I'll live with it for now. At least I'll actually get some work done.

Tony, I don't think I've read a single experience (and I have read a lot of them) from someone who was self-employed in a heavy typing capacity. (Writer, journalist, coder, etc.)

The experiences I have read have all been people in normal office jobs, or who were working on teams where they had backup, or who were doing schoolwork and the like. Many used Colemak only at night, while I switched completely. (Something that was reputed to speed up the process . . . that did not prove to be the case for me, as I think we can all agree that 15WPM is pretty slow on average for two and a half weeks.)

I have no issue typing in the two layouts because my styles are 100% different. My Qwerty style is with hands freely flowing, and not confined to a specific side of the keyboard, two main fingers aided by thumbs and pinkies, with the occasional middle finger or ring finger thrown in. My Colemak style is traditional home row positioning with the standard linear fingerings. I have no issue typing fluently after a few moments remembering the layout.

But my fingers do not work in home row positions. They flounder. They miskey. They search randomly for a key that actually is in the last place they look. That's something I have to deal with.

I honestly believe you shouldn't try and put any kind of expectations on people. Those of you trying to help others should take a look at this thread and add it to your arsenal. You now know that cold turkey may not actually speed things up for someone, and you know that 10 days may really not be close to enough to see any comfort develop, and that nearing 20 won't always prove to be a turning point either.

Just try and take every person as an individual, and not set arbitrary lines in the sand. Because there are way too many variables in life to say: "10 days is hard, but you'll start to feel better after than, and at 20 you'll be fine and able to type for the most part."

I suspect, at the rate at which I was (completely not) progressing, it would have been amazing had I reached 30WPM (which is, relatively speaking, seen as good enough to use without going insane) within six weeks. I'm older than some people who have made the switch, I had no touch skills, and apparently I'm just not that skilled a typist using that style.

So I know you're TRYING to help, but just maybe try to encourage without the metrics. Because I absolutely didn't get anything out of being told how my accuracy should be x, my WPM should be y, and I should meet z goal by day 20. :)

[To sum up my point: learning from failed experiences is valuable. It's not always just about what does work. Sometimes it is invaluable to see what didn't. I am keeping my resources for Colemak linked on my site, and continuing to engage here because I think the more detailed people are when recounting their experiences, the better off people who are adopting the layout are going to be. And again, in theory, I think it is a fantastic thing. It just does not work for me in the way I have approached it. But I've lost no Qwerty skills and I have all my Colemak skills as well. That may in the end make it possible for me to switch. Just not now.]

I'm not planning on giving up forever. I do hope to get time to continue working on it. Just not right this second. ;)

Let me know what you think of The Rite, and be sure to check out the sample of Knave that's up as well.

Ah, I see. Indeed, the WPM proselytizing should've been tempered with a large and fairly blunt implement...  ;)

The problem isn't that people report a whole slew of different progress schemes, but that an outsider might get the wrong impressions. The right impressions, of course, being that a) as you've noticed yourself, your basic typing skills are probably the most important factor, b) beyond that, individual speed improvements results vary A LOT! and c) so do the rest of the experience with regard to comfort, frustration etc etc.

I took my sweet time, in a period when work pressure was low. That's the nice way of course. Playing The Typing Of The Dead to forget about Dvorak and slowly learn Colemak was fun! :)

@Harper

I've been writing a Sci-Fi novel first time in my life for few months. I did not expect creative writing is this hard.  Typing speed honestly irrelevant to me because I hardly control writing. To make a substory or scene is painstaking. It's constant challenge. Even I have a clear image of specific scene, it takes few hours to make words out of it.
At this point I don't know it it me or the characters of the story.

A friend of mine who is a writer told me it would take at least one year when I showed the storyline. At that time I thought "Three months! plus one month editing."

I feel good whenever I write 5 to 6 pages a day. Now I understand why so many writers are poor until their works recognized by public.

I limit typing practice less than 20 minutes per day. I didn't find any benefit or purpose just typing endless words few hours a day for faster/accuracy typing.  I do typing exercise for fun, motivation.

@pinkyache
F22 Raptor has symbiotic technology built in for the pilot. It interacts with the pilots brain waves.  One level ahead of mimicking human body motion.

When the scientists finish analyze how each word in our mind matches specific brain wave - electrical signals detected by external sensors - they will come up with device we have seen in Sci-Fi novels, movies:  Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson, The Ghost In The Shell (1995), The Matrix (1998?).