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Thinking and information skills

Skills that belong to no single subject but make any work with information faster and more accurate — reading, typing without looking, calculating variations in chess. Each comes with a plan, a way to measure progress and an honest look at its limits.

What these skills have in common#

Each of them is trained with an exercise that has a measurable result. Typing speed is counted in words or characters per minute and an error rate, reading in how much of the text you can retell, chess in your rating and the share of combinations you solve. That is convenient: progress is visible in numbers rather than feelings, and you can notice the moment when practice stops producing growth.

Where the limits are#

Every one of these skills has a ceiling set not by exercises but by how perception and memory work. Eyes and attention do not speed up forever, fingers do not type faster than you can put a thought into words, and in chess growth slows down after the first few hundred games. In these articles we separate what training really gives you from course promises that research does not support.

  • Thinking and information skills How to learn touch typing

    Touch typing means every finger has its own keys and your eyes stay on the screen, not the keyboard. Anyone can learn it on their own: you need 15–30 minutes a day and the patience to get through a couple of weeks when you type slower than before. Below is how to place your hands, how to structure practice and what to do about the urge to look down.

  • Thinking and information skills How to learn chess from scratch

    You can learn the rules of chess in an evening, but playing with a plan takes months. An adult beginner does not need to memorise opening lines: early progress comes from tactics — seeing that a piece is hanging and spotting forks. Below is the order of study, how to combine games with puzzles and how to review your own games.

  • Thinking and information skills How to speed read

    Speed reading courses promise thousands of words a minute with full comprehension. Reading research does not back this up: speed is limited not by the eyes but by how fast the brain understands language. You can still read faster — by cutting unnecessary backtracking, choosing a reading mode for the task, and growing your vocabulary and background knowledge. Here is what can be trained and how to check the result.