There’s a quiet problem with most team-building activities: they take a whole afternoon, require a planning committee, and the only thing anyone remembers a week later is the awkward icebreaker. The good ones are rare. The cheap ones feel cheap. And for remote teams, “team building” usually means a Zoom call where eight people stare at each other waiting for someone to unmute.
So here’s a pitch for something different. Something that takes five minutes, costs nothing, works perfectly across time zones, and leaves people genuinely wanting to play again: a private typing race.
Why typing races actually work
A good team activity has three things going for it. It’s quick. It’s competitive without being cruel. And it gives people something real to talk about afterwards.
Typing races check all three. A race lasts about a minute. Everyone gets a score, but nobody gets humiliated — the slowest typist on the team is still typing, still finishing, still part of the result. And there’s always a story: the comeback in the last sentence, the typo that cost someone first place, the colleague who turns out to type 110 WPM and nobody knew.
It’s also one of the only competitive activities where people improve by playing. Every race you run is a few minutes of practice on a skill you use every single working day. You don’t get that from trust falls.
Make a team. Race privately. Have fun.
On TyprX.com any group can spin up its own team in a couple of clicks and run private races that only members can join. That’s the part that makes this work for real organizations:
- Companies can set up a team for the whole engineering org, or per-squad, and run a five-minute race at the start of standup once a week. Friday afternoon races are a thing too.
- Schools and classes can use private races as a typing-practice exercise that students actually want to do — the leaderboard does most of the motivating for you.
- Clubs, gaming groups, Discord communities, study groups — anywhere a few people share a chat already, a private race fits in the same flow.
Your team gets its own leaderboard, its own race history, and its own small ongoing rivalry. That last part matters more than people expect.
Especially good for remote workers
Remote work is great at most things and terrible at one specific thing: the small, low-stakes interactions that turn coworkers into people you actually know. There’s no kitchen, no walking-to-the-meeting chat, no “how was your weekend” by the printer.
Private typing races slot neatly into that gap. They’re short enough to not feel like an obligation, social enough that people show up, and competitive enough that someone always wants a rematch. Two minutes before a meeting, a quick race. Slow Friday afternoon, a quick race. Someone shipped something big, a quick race.
It’s a tiny ritual. Tiny rituals are what remote teams are missing.
And yes — you’ll get faster
The side effect of all this is that everyone on the team gets measurably better at typing. Not because they’re grinding drills, but because they’re racing their friends a couple of times a week. WPM goes up. Accuracy goes up. The amount of time people spend fighting their keyboard during the workday goes down.
For anyone who genuinely wants to improve their typing speed, racing other humans is the most effective form of practice there is. Drills are boring. Lessons feel like homework. A race is just a race — and you can run dozens of them in the time a “typing course” would have you do warm-ups.
A note on the platform
TyprX.com is the same platform that ran the Ultimate Typing Championship, which I organized — so the racing engine, the scoring, and the anti-cheat have all been stress-tested by serious typists going hard for real prize money. The same engine that handled the championship is what your team will be racing on. It works.
How to start
- Go to TyprX.com and create an account.
- Create a team. Invite your coworkers, classmates, or friends.
- Start a private race. Share the link in your team chat.
- Race. Talk trash. Run it back.
Five minutes from now, your team can be in its first race. Try it once this week — at the start of a meeting, or instead of an icebreaker, or just because it’s Friday. See what happens.
The best team-building activity is the one people actually want to do again. This one tends to be that.