I Counted Every Key on a Saturday. I Stopped Trusting WPM.

A words-per-minute score is a one-minute test. A workday is shortcuts, pauses, and keys that never become words.

Obsidian users already live this way. A vault is a folder of Markdown. This report is the same kind of file: plain text, one day, no account required to read it. Drop it in a vault, or leave it next to the notes. An editor opens it. So does whatever AI you already point at those files.

A score for a test, not for a day

Words per minute is a clean number. Sit still, copy a sentence you have never seen, and after sixty seconds a site tells you who you are as a typist.

I liked that number for years. It is easy to say. It is easy to chase. It is also measuring the wrong hour of my life.

Almost none of my day is a one-minute copy test. I write a sentence, then I stop and think. I jump between apps. I hit the same shortcut forty times. I delete a paragraph I should not have started. A password field does not count as writing, and it should not. The minute the test cares about is the minute that least resembles the work.

So I stopped asking how fast I type. I put a counter in the menu bar and let it count keys.

What the bar actually counts

The number is small on purpose. It sits in the menu bar and it is only a count: how many keys this hour, how many today, which minute was the busiest.

It does not know the words. It does not keep the order. A password field is a place it steps back from. That was the condition. If the counter had to read what I typed, I would not have left it running.

One day is already a different shape

A typing test is a flat line. You type the whole minute. A workday is not.

Open today. The count is already past 6,300, and it is not spread like a test. The keys sit in the morning, from about 7:00 to 11:00. Six active hours, about 1,050 keys in a typical hour, and the busiest minute was 241. That minute is not “I was inspired.” It is a minute where my hands did not stop. Under those same hours the mouse has its own bars: about 2,750 clicks, and it moved about 730 metres. Seventy percent of the day was the keyboard. The dashed line, a usual day, rises later. This Saturday did not. WPM has no column for any of that.

The seven-day view is the same picture, pulled back, and it is not a week. Practice says 1 of 7. That is already enough. A finished week will not make a one-minute speed score true.

The report is a text file

The same day can be opened as a plain-text report. Org, or Markdown. Hours, counts, shortcuts, the mouse. No sentences, because there were never any sentences stored.

The board is not a sentence either. Today it is an Advantage360 Pro, Dvorak. Most pressed: Space 14 percent, Command 7, E 7, N 6. Command sitting with the letters is the part a typing test throws away. The test wants words. The day is also the key that runs the computer.

The hands say the same thing without a keyboard picture. Left 38 percent, right 62. The right thumb alone is 27. Home row is 40 percent of the presses, thumbs 33, and the fingers travelled about 97 metres, each one out from its home key and back. A words-per-minute score never had a place to put a thumb.

That is the part I actually wanted. A text file I can hand to any editor, or to an AI I already trust, and ask a boring question: which hour was the heavy one, and was it keys or the mouse?

WPM cannot answer that. It never saw the hour.

What I stopped doing

I did not replace one score with a holier score. Key count is not a virtue. A huge day can be a bad day. Backspace is a key. So is the shortcut that opens the wrong app.

The useful part is the mismatch. If a test says I type at one speed, and the day says my hands spent the afternoon on shortcuts and the mouse, then the test is a hobby. It is fine as a hobby. The trainer I keep is offline, five minutes, and it treats 35 words per minute as a door for the next letters, not as a grade for the day.

I don’t need the grade. I need the day, counted, and readable later as text.

The counter is called Sunclax. It lives in the menu bar, on a Mac. If you want the day as a file, it is free to download https://maxclax.com/sunclax/

Thanks for reading. Follow on X: https://x.com/maxclaxOS