It was while reading Josh Kaufman's book, The First 20 Hours, that I first learned what a "Colemak" keyboard was.
(He also has a marvelous book called The Personal MBA, which will teach you all you'll ever need to know about business and is much more useful, as well as affordable, than an actual degree.)
The Colemak keyboard is apparently more efficient than the ubiquitous Qwerty keyboard, which was evidently invented because the prior setup made typewriters prone to errors (slow typing rate, ribbons jamming).
Since today's keyboards are digitally devoid of physical malfunctions, it made sense to try out this different layout (being the time management junkie that I am).
I started practicing with the Colemak interface in 2022. Fast forward 2 years, it's still a part of my routine.
But the initial motivation changed completely once I realized a surprising, unexpected benefit that came from this now everyday habit.
The site I practice on is www.colemak.academy.com. Shout out to the inventor who created it for free, if you find yourself on this site I highly recommend you donate (via buymeacoffee).
At the first stage you're presented with just 4 letters, but trust me when I tell you this is enough to make it feel like you're using chopsticks with your non-dominant hand.
It took me nearly 2 months just to make it to the 2nd level (6 letters), the biggest reason being that I practiced for the shortest amount of time possible (only once per day). The secondary reason being that just 2 extra letters made it seemingly 5 times more difficult.
(Obviously if you bothered to put in more time and effort you'd surely have gotten to the next stages faster than I did.)
The kicker is that I extended minimal effort on purpose. I actually wanted it to feel like a grind, as slow and painful as possible, once I discovered this activity was analogous to the process itself.
When you reach a prerequisite level of fluency at each level, you'll be tempted to stay there because of how comfortable it feels. In fact, you don't even want to consider moving onto the next stage because it feels like starting over.
It's an absolute mirror to what happens with learning. In my own profession I've unfortunately seen many a student give up on piano, quitting because they want it to stop being hard.
But that's what it means to be a lifelong learner. To become a novice again and again, which makes the phrase the beginner's mind more than an apt cliche.
I finally made it to the final phase sometime in the fall of last year. But unlike Kaufman, I have no intention of permanently switching my keyboard to the Colemak. I've been content to keep it as a standard day-to-day activity.
Then again, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be keeping this up. It's just not as hard as it used to be ...
