I like this.

Share your proudest speed record. Fast is fashionable again!

Some miscellaneous ones, not in order of proudness, but I'm just curious how many examples I can produce.

1. I type at around 140-150 wpm and have for most of my life. I got up to 160 wpm on typeracer, which would have been enough to get on the leaderboard except that I didn't create an account. typeracer is somewhat easier than other similar typing tests I've done in the past because you can read the short segment you're about to type in advance. 10 seconds is a long time.
2. I credit my typing speed to a combination of playing piano, spending a lot of time on MSN Messenger as a kid, and playing (edit: keyboard, 4-finger) Stepmania, where my all-time speed record is being able to AA a song that was mostly 16ths played at 260 bpm (so 1280 notes per minute). Stepmania's an amazing game for practicing sheer speed because you can speed up and slow down any song by multiples of 10%, so you can always play at your speed edge, or slow down as much as necessary to aim for perfection.
3. I once read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 7 times in a single day. I don't remember why I did this.
4. I watched the videos for Andrew Ng's Coursera course on machine learning at speeds of between 2.5x and 3.5x (thanks to the godsend that is Video Speed Controller).
5. Arithmetic Game scores: 27, 28, 33 (Edit: more scores: 27, 42, 41, 30, 41, 35). I'm quite confident I could get much faster now and that I would have been much faster in middle school. My performance is mostly being slowed down by a combination of old mental arithmetic TAPs firing slowly and some TAPs around double checking my work firing and getting in the way. I noticed several tricks specific to this format, taking advantage of the fact that correct answers are automatically submitted while incorrect answers are ignored and only penalized by the wasted time: sometimes it's more time-efficient to guess the correct answer via various estimation and mod-10 tricks than to compute it (e.g. estimating the first digit and trying out a few candidates for the second digit), and I did that a few times, especially on division problems. (Edit: Mental arithmetic TAPs are speeding up, mostly I'm getting slowed down by tricky divisions.)
6. The last final I took in college was for differential equations. I already knew all of the material and never went to class; I just needed it to graduate. I was given 3 hours to finish, and I finished in about 40 minutes. Also I showed up in a suit and tie, and with champagne, because I was told that this was traditional for graduating seniors, but I was finishing a semester early and also taking a class that most seniors would have taken already, so I was the only person in a suit and tie in a gym full of hundreds of people. I popped the champagne at about 45 minutes in and the entire gym heard it because everyone else was completely silent. Then I quietly drank a glass, and left.

I've sometimes found it helpful to subvocalize the word "go" as often as possible.

I feel like I don't fit in really well into existing comments with personal records on speed, since my numbers in these categories are not impressive at all.

I've practiced touch typing, and fairly happy with ~60-70 wpm, though further practice with special symbols would work wonders. I've started using vim (emacs evil mode) several months ago and now know $^@! and numbers much better.

If I am to dig around for something that could be impressive and somewhat related to speed - I've done a *lot* of regular meditation practice over the years and I can see that nowadays I notice distractions much more quickly, often during first second, before the mind had the chance to run away with them from my predetermined point of attention.

Interestingly enough, five minutes wasn't enough for me to get any improvement in typeracer or the arithmetic game. I started at 80 WPM and got results both above and below that on my subsequent tries. Similarly I got 20 on my first attempt at the arithmetic game, 23 on the second attempt, and 17 on the third. I don't think that makes speed impossible to train, it just suggests that it'll take longer than 5 minutes!

Here are some of my proudest speed records: 

• Performance on exams when time is tight. For example, I had an undergraduate materials science exam where the professor had grossly underestimated the required time, making it a pure game of speed. I got a 93 when the average was in the low 60s.
• Finishing an anomaly investigation at work. I was assigned to lead the investigation and resolution efforts to a significant issue found in one of our systems. I found the root cause, came up with a corrective action, and got agreement from our customer and independent reviewers in less than 1/2 the time it had taken on an earlier similar issue that been assigned to another engineer. 
• Cooking breakfast! I'm a master at all-out speed maximization on making breakfast burritos, avocado toast, eggs etc. I've gotten really good at prepping absolutely no more than is needed before I start the longest-cooking item going, then using the time when things are toasting and cooking to get everything together in just a few minutes.

• Ran a mile in 5:05
• Typed the alphabet in 1.8 seconds
• Wrote this in 15 seconds

I'm pretty bad at doing things quickly, but I think my roadblocks are less mechanical skill and more anxiety, executive function, and most of all perfectionism. I know you mention perfectionism as useful for increasing speed, and I think for mechanical skills that's true, but in a lot of tasks I am hugely slowed down at decision points (which are many) by a felt need to make the best possible decision every time, even when the decisions are fairly trivial and/or multiple paths forward are valid and/or perfection is not actually helpful. In this sense I most need to cut down on perfectionism for increasing speed.

Timers are indeed a useful tool for this, though. If I decide beforehand that it's more important to do the task quickly than to do it perfectly, having a timer helps me satisfice more readily (usually a good thing for me, given my baseline) because I'm more aware of how much time I'm spending.

Then, of course, I just need to decide wisely when speed is more important than making good decisions and when it isn't...

My scores on the challenges here:

Typeracer: 113, 108, 111, 101

(I'd done this before - not for training, just for fun. I expect my speed is pretty good largely because of piano. I do wonder how fast it might get if I trained for speed on purpose - though I am not sure it would actually matter very much to my life?)

Arithmetic game: 12, 7, 16, 5

(this depends primarily on how many division problems there are especially how many times I need to divide by 7. I realized I don't actually remember any actual methods for division, so all I can do is decompose the dividend into more easily divisible numbers somehow. I guess it would plausibly be useful for me to relearn how to actually do division, though it doesn't actually come up often.)

I don't think there are any things that I'm very fast at, so nothing to share for the daily challenge.

It's been a long time since I thought along those lines, but it makes a lot of sense, thanks for writing this.

(If I really want to be my usual grudging self, I must add I think you probably gain very little from fast typing - thinking is by far the bottleneck and you can think as you type.)