Two important productivity skills

If you’re still early in your career (or have not yet begun it), skills that help you be more productive are guaranteed to be useful. Such skills increase the amount of value one can create per unit time, and thus is positively correlated with income generation.

In this post, I’m going to discuss what I believe to be the two most useful skills that anyone can learn. I’ve been surprised to find that many people I know have neglected these skills. If that could be you, read on.

Touch typing

The average typing speed is 44 words per minute. I think that this is somewhat misleading, because what I’ve found is that people who know how to touch type (ie. type without looking at the keyboard) can type much faster than 44 words per minute, while those who do not know how to touch type are typically much slower than this average rate.

I am particularly sensitive to this because typing speed directly impacts my students’ performance on standardized exams such as the TOEFL or the GRE, which have timed writing sections.

In my experience, I’d say that the biggest reason for a low writing score has nothing to do with writing ability. Instead, it's related to typing speed. I’ve had many students complete typing tests and score lower than 30 words per minute or even 25 words per minute. This is a major problem in timed writing scenarios. I'll explain why through some straightforward math.

The TOEFL/GRE both have writing sections that have 30-minute time limits. Generally speaking, to achieve a top score, we need to write 500 words or more. Imagine that we are a novice typer who averages 25 words per minute. It would take us 20 minutes to just type 500 words, leaving us just 10 minutes to think and make edits. Meanwhile, I type at about 80 words per minute, so it would take me slightly over 6 minutes to type 500 words. I don’t have to be smarter than the slow typer to get a better writing score; my typing speed gives me over twice as much time to think and edit, which is essentially an insurmountable advantage in my favor.

Typing faster doesn’t just make us more productive for written exams. Many jobs involve a lot of report writing or communications with clients via messaging or emails (mine, for example).

Touch typing also isn’t difficult to learn. I took one typing class back in the 9th grade, and never learned it systematically afterwards. Higher typing speeds came with continual usage once we've learned the most efficient typing method.

Reading faster than average

The average adult reads approximately 250 words per minute, which works out to about two minutes per page. If typing faster is a specific skill that may increase productivity for a few occupations, then reading faster will help you be more productive in almost any office job. Again, we can do some simple math to quantify this.

The average worker spends about two hours a day reading documents, which is 25% of a typical work day. Let’s assume for simplicity’s sake that the annual salary plus benefits and associated costs of this worker is $80,000. Then a hypothetical company pays the average worker $20,000 just to read things. This is quite a big cost that should motivate additional training, but few people actively learn to read more effectively. It seems that most people just don’t like to read - the average American college graduate reads a total of five books after graduating from college.

Perhaps even more so than typing, your reading speed (or more generally, your speed of processing information) can determine whether you have what it takes to excel in certain jobs. One common example is consulting. I’m not saying that consulting is an ideal job for most people - I simply want to point out that getting into consulting is very competitive, and one filter that the top consulting firms use is a written test that assesses how quickly you can process information. The (in)famous McKinsey Problem Solving Test (PST) is given for this exact purpose. Many other professional services firms have similar online tests. Even the GMAT, a standardized exam, introduced its own version a few years ago - the “Integrated Reasoning” section.

When standardized exams and job recruitment processes test a particular skill and yet almost no one practices it, you have an opportunity to gain an edge. Learn to read and type faster. In the worst case scenario, you’ll become more productive for the rest of your career.