Two weeks ago I made the proclamation that I’m going to try Dvorak again. Re-training the fingers didn’t take much time and I was doing well the first couple of days. I found myself being more thoughtful about what I was typing and overall I think I had less hand muscle fatigue. Everything seemed honky-dory and I was just waiting for a words per minute increase with more use. Then my coworkers came back from vacation.

My effective speed was really low and when I’d get frustrated my brain would flip back into QWERTY. My error rate was high and I realized after my coworkers came back online from the holidays that this caused my thought processes to stall. Even at 100wpm with QWERTY I was always behind my brain – being super slow made my thoughts come to a halt to wait for the fingers to catch up.

I know that given more time I’d be able to adapt to Dvorak better. Being remote and super dependent on Slack/live chat conversations I need to be able to dump out ideas quickly and move onto the next task. I might give Dvorak more time on my personal computer where I’m usually requiring less throughput.

I don’t count this as a failure – it’s simply providing more insight into how I think and interact with computers.