Number typing practice
Reach up from the home row and come straight back. Keep your wrist still - if your whole hand moves to reach a digit, slow down until it does not.
Just start typing.Tabrestarts
Why fast typists still hunt for numbers
Ordinary prose contains almost no digits. A typist can accumulate hundreds of hours of practice, reach 80 words per minute, and still glance down to type a phone number - because they have genuinely never practised it.
The number row is also the furthest reach on the board, which means it is the least forgiving of a drifting hand.
Learn them in finger groups, not in order
Practising 1 through 0 in sequence teaches a sequence, not the keys. Group them by finger instead, because that is how your hand will actually have to find them.
- 4, 5, 6 and 7 - the index fingers, the easiest reaches
- 3, 8 and 2, 9 - middle and ring fingers
- 1 and 0 - the little fingers, the hardest and most error-prone
Then practise the real formats
Isolated digits are not what you type at work. You type dates with slashes, prices with dollar signs and decimal points, percentages, phone numbers with parentheses and hyphens, and reference codes mixing letters and digits.
Each of those combines the number row with a symbol, which is a different movement from either alone. That is why the drills here progress from digits to formats rather than stopping at the row.
Common questions
Should I use the numeric keypad instead?
For long runs of pure numbers, absolutely - it is faster for data entry. But the number row is what you use inside sentences, code and forms, and many laptops have no keypad at all.