A couple months ago Rachel was out of town and I needed something to do, so I decided to switch from the standard QWERTY keyboard layout to Dvorak. The appeal of shorter keystrokes led me to begin teaching myself this new keyboard layout. Learning Dvorak was much harder than I expected. Remembering where the keys were wasn’t very hard to pick up, but my brain kept wanting to type the key where it was on the QWERTY layout.

For the first week or so, my head actually hurt at the end of each day because I was concentrating so hard on just typing. The other unfortunate side affect of switching is that it is very hard to type on a QWERTY keyboard. I haven’t tried to really switch back, but whenever I have to type on Rachel’s computer, I resort to the hunt and peck method. Surprisingly though, on the iphone, I am just as fast typing with my thumbs as I was before the switch. My brain is able to quickly switch back when on the phone.

After about two months of using Dvorak everyday, I am now to the point where I want to be in terms of speed and mistakes. I definitely want to improve and know I will on both accounts, but am at least to an equal point to where I was with the QWERTY layout before I switched.

I haven’t done too much analysis of my typing, but I have noticed that most words seem to be comprised of letters mostly from the home row. The better I get at typing, the more I notice this too.