The standard advice is to learn touch typing. A study of 168,000 modern typists found that trained typists averaged about 5 WPM more than untrained ones. Here is where the rest of the typing time goes.
That is a self-selected online sample rather than a controlled comparison, so treat 5 WPM as an observed gap and not as what training would buy any individual. It is still the right order of magnitude to plan around, and it points at the obvious question: if finger technique is worth a few percent, where is the rest of the time going?
It is going into text you have typed before
Speed is measured in words per minute, while total time also depends on the number of words typed. Repeated text increases that second term.
Take your email address — call it 25 characters, which is five words by the standard measure of five characters each. At 51.6 WPM that is about six seconds. Type it twenty times a day and it is two minutes a day, and over 250 working days, about eight hours a year. For one 25-character string. Now add your phone number, your address, your sign-off, the three sentences you send whenever someone asks for a quote, and the file path you paste into everything.
Getting 10% faster at typing saves 10% of that time. Replacing the repeated text with an expansion removes those keystrokes without requiring typing practice.
Find your own repeated text
You already know most of it. For one day, notice every time you think “I have typed this before” and write the phrase down. Sort the phrases into the same five groups:
- Identity — email, second email, phone, postal address, website, account numbers.
- Sign-offs — the full signature, and the two short ones you use with people you know.
- Standard replies — acknowledgements, follow-ups, scheduling, polite refusals, out-of-office.
- Dates and times — anything where you stop to check what today is.
- Awkward characters — accented letters, the em dash, the degree sign, currency symbols, emoji.
Four ways to remove keystrokes, in order of what they cost you
| What it removes | What it costs | |
|---|---|---|
| Keyboard shortcuts | Reaching for the mouse | Nothing — they are already there |
| Clipboard history (Win + V) | Re-copying something you copied an hour ago | One setting, then remembering it exists |
| Text expansion | Typing anything you have typed before | A minute to define each snippet |
| Word and phrase prediction | Finishing sentences you are writing for the first time | Learning to glance at a suggestion |
The third row is the one that pays immediately, because it works on text you have already identified. The fourth helps with writing that is new each time, which the first three cannot touch — how prediction actually changes typing speed covers that side of it.
What text expansion looks like in practice
You pick a short trigger and the full text appears when you press Space, Enter or Tab. The trigger starts with a character you never type by accident, so nothing expands when you did not mean it to.
| You type | You get |
|---|---|
;em | your.name@company.com |
;ph | +1 (555) 000-1234 |
;sig | Best regards, and the rest of your sign-off |
;ty | Thank you, I’ll get back to you shortly. |
;date | today’s date, filled in each time |
:tada: | 🎉 — any of about 1,900 emoji by name |
Windows has nothing like this built in, which is why people reach for AutoHotkey scripts or paste from a scratch document. Text Replacements does it without either: define the trigger once, and it expands in any application — browser, Outlook, Slack, Word, a terminal — because it works at the level of the keyboard rather than inside one program. Snippets stay on your PC, import and export as JSON or CSV, and password fields are blocked automatically. It is a one-time purchase, not a subscription.
Start with five, not fifty
The failure mode is building a catalogue of two hundred snippets and remembering none of the triggers. A snippet you have to look up is slower than typing the sentence.
- 1. Pick the five strings you type most. Email address and signature are almost always two of them.
- 2. Use one prefix character for all of them, so the shape is always the same.
- 3. Use them for a week without adding anything.
- 4. Add the next five only once the first five are automatic.
When practice really is the answer
If you hunt and peck at 20 WPM and mostly write new sentences rather than repeated ones, a typing tutor will help more. The study above also found that keypress duration barely differs between fast and slow typists; the gains occur in the gaps between keys, which practice trains. Practice improves new typing, while text expansion removes repeated typing.
Sources
Frequently asked questions
What is the average typing speed?
Is it worth learning touch typing?
What is the fastest way to type my email address?
;em in a text expander and it expands wherever the cursor is. At an average typing speed a 25-character address costs about six seconds each time, which adds up to hours over a year.