What Your Typing Speed Actually Tells You About Your Productivity

The average typing speed is about 40 words per minute. Professional typists hit 65-75 WPM. The fastest typists exceed 150 WPM. And for programmers, the numbers are almost completely irrelevant to actual productivity. I type at around 90 WPM. A colleague types at 60 WPM. We produce code at roughly the same rate because typing speed is not the bottleneck. Thinking is. But there is a threshold below which typing speed genuinely slows you down, and most people are below it. Why speed matters below the threshold If you type at 30 WPM, composing a 500-word email takes about 17 minutes of pure typing time. At 60 WPM, it takes 8 minutes. At 90 WPM, about 6 minutes. The gap between 30 and 60 WPM is 9 minutes per email. If you write 10 emails a day, that is 90 minutes -- an hour and a half -- lost to typing speed alone. For programmers, the impact is different. You write less text per day (most estimates put it at 50-100 lines of code for productive days), but you also type in chat, documentatio