Emails, meeting notes and invoices without looking at the keys

The office runs on typing

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, secretaries and administrative assistants held about 3.5 million jobs in the US in 2025, and general office clerks held about 2.6 million more. Across all office and administrative support occupations, the BLS projects about 1.7 million job openings each year, on average, over the next decade, mostly to replace people who retire or change careers.

The BLS describes the daily work in plain terms. Administrative assistants prepare memos, invoices and reports, edit documents, schedule appointments and use software to create spreadsheets, manage databases and prepare presentations. Office clerks type and format routine memos, collect information and do data entry, and prepare and process bills.

Your title might be office manager, receptionist, bookkeeper, executive assistant, customer service rep or something else entirely. Whatever it says on your badge, your main tool is probably the same: the keyboard.

If you type all day, it pays to type without hunting for keys.

Email, chat and tickets

In 2023, Microsoft looked at usage data from its own office apps and found that the average employee spent 57% of their time communicating: in meetings, email and chat. The remaining 43% went to documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

The heaviest email users, the top 25%, spent 8.8 hours a week in email according to the same data. These are a software company's numbers from its own apps, not a government statistic. Still, they show how much of office work happens in writing.

Templates and canned responses save a lot of typing, but you adjust them every time: the greeting, the account or contract number, the date, the amount and the specific request. Those small pieces are the most sensitive to typos. If you don't look at the keys, you can catch a typo the moment it happens, not after it is already in someone's inbox.

Touchtypely also helps with the parts of an email that aren't letters: capitals, punctuation, the @ sign in addresses and the digits in dates and phone numbers. Practice texts come in genres such as business, and each one ends with a short comprehension question, so your mind stays on the meaning while your fingers do the work.

A template saves typing. The name, the number and the amount are still up to you.

Transcription and meeting minutes

Few office jobs avoid copying text: details from paper forms, text from a scanned document, notes from a meeting or something your manager dictates. When you copy from paper, your eyes move between the source, the screen and the keyboard.

In research at Aalto University, touch typists looked at the keyboard about a fifth of the time, while self-taught typists looked at it 41% of the time. If you don't look at the keys, your eyes only travel between the source document and the screen. One less place to look means one less place to lose your spot.

Meeting minutes are a different skill. You don't write word for word. You listen, pick out what matters and put it into sentences. In a 1999 study by Karat and colleagues, people averaged 33 words per minute when copying text, but only 19 when composing their own. In minutes, it helps when your fingers don't need your attention, so it can stay on what is being said.

During a meeting, focus on the things that have to be written down exactly:

• names and job titles,
• dates and deadlines,
• dollar amounts and document numbers,
• action items and who owns them.

Forms, systems and the cost of a typo

A large part of office work is data entry: requests into a records system, purchase orders into accounting software, contracts into a database, issues into a ticketing tool. A typo here isn't just cosmetic. A number that looks right travels on into the invoice, the payment and the monthly report.

Invoices show this well. An invoice carries an invoice number, dates, the customer's details, quantities, unit prices, totals and often sales tax. If an invoice goes out with a mistake, you usually can't just quietly edit it. It takes a credit memo or a corrected invoice, plus an email explaining what happened. One typo turns into extra paperwork.

Everyone makes mistakes. In the large Aalto University study of 168,000 people, the text people submitted as finished still contained about 1.2% wrong characters on average, even though they made more than two corrections per sentence along the way. Checking by eye doesn't catch everything either. In a study at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, published in 2019, 412 students searched for errors that researchers had planted in data sheets. Double entry, where data is entered twice and compared, was clearly more accurate than visual checking or reading aloud.

To be honest: touch typing alone won't make your errors go away. In a smaller Aalto University study, touch typists did not make fewer uncorrected errors than self-taught typists. What helps is that you can spot a mistake right away when your eyes aren't on the keys, and that Touchtypely shows you after every exercise which keys you mix up. Important numbers still deserve a check against the original.

A data entry error doesn't look like a typo. It looks like a correct number.

Amounts, account numbers and the numeric keypad

The office is full of numbers: invoice and purchase order numbers, account numbers, phone numbers, ZIP codes, dollar amounts and dates. Some of them have a built-in safety net. Credit card and bank routing numbers include a check digit, so software can catch many typos. A dollar amount has no such safety net, and neither does an invoice number: 1,250 and 1,520 are both perfectly valid.

For amounts and spreadsheets, the numeric keypad is your friend. Touchtypely gives it a lesson of its own in Module 6: your right index finger rests on 4, your middle finger on 5 with the small bump, your ring finger on 6, your thumb takes 0 and your pinky takes Enter. If you work on a laptop without a keypad, you skip that lesson and still learn the digits in the top row.

Why it matters where you look is shown by a small experiment from Swansea University and University College London in the UK. Twenty-two people entered numbers on an on-screen keypad modeled on a medical infusion pump. On average they spent about 271 seconds looking at the keypad and only about 26 seconds looking at the display with the result. With an interface that forced them to watch the display instead, undetected errors dropped by more than half.

That study wasn't about touch typing, but it shows what happens when your eyes belong to the keys and not to the result. In Touchtypely you can drill digits and symbols on purpose, and after every exercise you'll see your slowest keys and your most frequent mix-ups.

A card number has a check digit. The dollar amount is checked only by you.

Phone at your ear, hands on the keyboard

At the front desk, on a support line or in an executive office, you often type during a call: a name, an account number, a request, a new appointment time. If you look at the keys while you do it, your attention is split between the caller, the screen and the keyboard.

In the Aalto University research, self-taught typists looked at the keyboard about twice as long as touch typists. The authors added that self-taught typists may be at a disadvantage in exactly the tasks where you need to watch the screen. On a call, you are listening on top of that.

Touch typing won't make the phone ring less. But when your hands know where the letters are, you have more attention left for the person on the other end of the line.

Typical moments where you'll notice it:

• logging a request while the caller is still explaining it,
• a name, address or number that someone spells out for you,
• looking up an account in the system during the call,
• adding a note to the ticket right after you hang up, while it is still fresh.

Eyes on the screen, attention on the caller.

Posture, breaks and your workstation

If you spend most of the day at a computer, how you sit and where you look matters. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) publishes a Computer Workstations eTool with guidance on neutral working postures. For the head, it says the head should be level, forward facing and balanced, generally in line with the torso.

Every time you tilt your head down to find a key, you leave that position for a moment. Over a long workday, those moments add up. A typing course is not a cure for back or neck pain, and we won't promise you one. But typing with your eyes on the screen makes it easier to keep your head where OSHA recommends.

Your workstation plays a part, too. A keyboard you can reach without stretching, room to rest your wrists and forearms, and a monitor placed so you can see it without craning your neck all make it easier to keep a good posture while you type.

Breaks matter as much as posture. Get up, look away from the screen and move a little during the day. A few things to check at your own desk:

• your head is level and in line with your torso, not tilted down toward the keys,
• the keyboard is at a height where your shoulders can relax,
• your monitor is straight in front of you, not off to one side,
• papers you copy from sit close to the screen, so your eyes don't have to travel far.

Practice in Touchtypely is screen time, too. Don't use it instead of a break. Try it at the start of the day.

How much time you'll save: an honest estimate

Typing speed is measured in words per minute, where a word counts as five characters. In the large Aalto University study of more than 168,000 people copying sentences, the average was about 52 words per minute. The slowest tenth typed below about 26 and the fastest tenth above about 78.

Here is an example. If you type 1,500 words a day, at 30 words per minute the typing alone takes 50 minutes. At 40 words per minute it takes 37.5 minutes. A difference of 12.5 minutes a day adds up to more than four hours in a month of 20 workdays.

Two honest notes come with that example. When you write your own text, you are thinking, so faster fingers show up most in copying and data entry. And a course alone isn't enough: in the large Aalto study, people who said they had taken a typing course typed on average only about 5 words per minute faster than those who hadn't. Regular practice and habits make the difference.

You don't have to trust estimates. A typing test before you start shows where you are, and repeating it every few weeks shows whether the improvement is sticking. Expect typing to feel slower for the first weeks while your hands get used to new positions.

The most accurate estimate is your own typing test, before and after.

A course that fits around work, with a certificate at the end

The course has 26 lessons in six modules, ending with numbers and symbols, plus a final exam. A lesson takes 5 to 8 minutes, so the whole course takes roughly 2 to 3.5 hours. After the course, daily training continues for 5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes, built from your weak keys, keys that are starting to slip and a practice text from a genre you pick.

Short, regular practice is backed by research. In a classic 1978 study, British postal workers learned to type codes for sorting mail, and the group that trained one hour a day learned more efficiently than the group that trained in two-hour sessions twice a day. The study didn't test five-minute lessons. Short lessons are our choice, based on the same principle: shorter and more often.

When you pass the final exam, you get a certificate with a public verification link. It is not an official credential, but you can share the link with an employer or add it to your LinkedIn profile, which can help if you are applying for office jobs.

If you'd rather your coworkers didn't find you on the public leaderboard, you can turn it off anytime in settings. Even if you leave it on, it shows only your first name or a nickname and, if you choose, your city or state.

Five to eight minutes a day in your browser, nothing to install, and a certificate at the end.