How do you stop looking at the keyboard when you type?

Stop looking by training your fingers to find each key from its home position, then practicing until the keys come without a glance. Touch typing is the method built for this: each key belongs to one finger, and each finger returns to its home key after every press. The steps below follow the method in our guide to touch typing, along with the research on why the habit matters.

Start by finding the home row by feel

Your index fingers do most of the work of finding position. Put them on F and J, which have small raised markers, so you can locate the home row without looking ¹. Then rest the other fingers on the keys beside them: A, S, D and F for the left hand, and J, K, L and semicolon for the right. Each home row key is a fixed starting point, and a finger that moves away should come back to it.

Practice with the keys out of sight

Looking is the habit to remove, so take the keys out of sight while you learn them. Ratatype, a typing tutor company, gives the same instruction in its learning tips: "Don't look at the keys when you type. Just slide your fingers around until they find the home row marking." ² In practice:

1. Cover the keys. Lay a cloth or a sheet of paper over the keyboard, or move it out of view.
2. Keep the text in front of you. Put the words you are copying at eye level, and type what you read rather than what you see on the keys.
3. Return each finger. After every press, send the finger back to its own home key, so your hands stay in one place.
4. Get accurate before you get fast. Type each sentence without a glance and without errors before you try for speed. The typing accuracy you keep is the number to watch first.

Typists without training spend more of their time looking down

In a 2016 study of copying text, typists without training spent about 40 percent of their time looking at the keyboard, while touch typists spent about 20 percent ^{3 4}. A 2018 benchmark of gaze during typing found the same split in where the eyes go. Touch typists keep their gaze on the line of text, while non-touch typists look straight down just before each press ⁵.

Each glance down moves attention from the words to the keys, and that is why the habit matters even though a single glance is short. The gaze studies measure where the eyes go. They do not measure how much speed one glance costs, so treat the time share as a sign of the habit, not a precise penalty.

The habit can return after training, so expect relapses

Practice does not remove the habit at once. A 2003 study calls it melioration, an intuitive tendency to pick strategies that give better immediate performance than touch typing does ⁶. The same study notes that earlier research found that success in training does not guarantee the habit lasts into everyday use ⁷. Looking at the keys can feel like one of those strategies while your fingers are still learning. We read that as a reason to plan for relapses, not as a finding about looking itself.

Watching your hands does not help either

Attending to your hands is a different habit from looking at the keys. A 2009 experiment found that cueing skilled typists to attend to the letters of one hand slowed their typing and raised their error rate ⁸. Trust the finger map and check the screen rather than your hands.

It depends on what you already know

If you hunt and peck, you may already know where the keys are. Many hunt-and-peck typists have the layout memorized and can type while keeping their eyes on the screen ⁹. For them the task is to stop looking down, not to learn new keys. If you are still learning the layout, work through the home row first, then the keys around it, as the touch typing guide describes. Our question on touch typing versus hunt and peck explains the difference between the two methods.

How long this takes depends on how often you practice. We did not find a study that times how long it takes to stop looking, so treat any week count as an estimate. Our question on how long it takes to learn touch typing covers what the evidence does and does not support. For the keys themselves, see our questions on finger placement, the number row and the space bar thumb.

For the full method, read our overview of touch typing and the typing speed guide.