It's an extreme minority opinion among programmers that typing speed matters, but I started writing again recently and I feel like the argument in https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/ is still obviously true.
wc has the source for my last post at 20k words. At a hypothetical 100wpm, that's 3h20m of typing time. I often do two passes and totally re-write it, so it's really 7h40m.
If I were to type at 50wpm, that would add a huge amount of writing time, both in absolute and %-age terms.
One could argue that I should optimize my process and only do a single pass, but this two-pass process is done instead of the various standard techniques people suggest, like outlining or w/e.
When I've compared notes to people who do standard stuff, my process is much faster, so I don't know of standard advice that would help.
I think just doing a single pass without using some kind of organizational technique wouldn't work unless my working memory was like 100x larger, so that's also out.
I do often write the shorter stuff that goes on Patreon that's "only" a few thousand words in a single pass, but the set of things I need to hold in my head to write the way do I do is highly super-linear and I don't think any amount of trying harder, practice, etc., could make this work for me with a 10k word post, let alone a 20k word post.
It really starts falling apart around 5k words or so and I haven't (yet?) found anything that's more efficient than just doing an entire second pass.
@danluu I don't disagree that typing speed is a reasonable factor to optimise, but have you considered the reverse, that your essays are longer than many others because you have the typing speed that makes the length feasible?
Which depending on how you look at it might be good or bad (depth vs. conciseness)
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